• Home
• Site Map
• Foreword
  • Foreword
  • Contributors & Copyright
• Introduction
  • Introduction
  • Methods
  • Sites
    • Why Pando and East Kalimantan?
    • Municipal Governments and Decentralisation in Bolivia
    • Municipal Governments and Decentralisation in Indonesia
• Part I. Concepts
  • Wellbeing and Poverty
    • Poverty is More Than Low Income
    • Poverty is a Lack of Wellbeing
    • Poverty and Wellbeing Have Many Dimensions
    • Further Reading
  • Local Governments and Poverty
    • How can Local Governments Reduce Poverty?
    • Four Steps to Improve Local Governmental Action
    • Further Reading
  • Forests and Poverty
    • How do Forests Influence Poverty?
    • What is Poverty in Forest Communities?
    • Are Forests Safety Nets, Poverty Traps or Escape Routes?
    • Further Reading
• Part II. Tools
  • Monitoring
    • What is monitoring?
    • Types of Monitoring
    • Indicators
    • When to monitor?
    • Who conducts monitoring?
    • Linking monitoring to planning
  • Participatory Planning
    • What is participatory planning?
    • Why is participatory planning useful?
    • When and where is participatory planning done?
    • Who should participate?
  • Tool 1: Interactive Mapping
    • What is interactive mapping?
    • Interactive mapping step-by-step
    • Use interactive mapping for monitoring
  • Tool 2: Wellbeing Monitoring
    • What is a local wellbeing monitoring system?
    • Wellbeing monitoring step-by-step
    • Step 1: Define purpose, develop plan and budget
    • Step 2: Develop local poverty indicators and formulate survey questions
    • Step 3: Design the sampling strategy
    • Step 4: Train staff and perform the survey
    • Step 5: Analyse and present the data
    • Step 6: Present findings
  • Tool 3: Community Evaluation
    • Evaluating local government programmes through community focus groups
    • Steps 1-3
    • Steps 4-6
    • Steps 7-8
    • Community evaluation step-by-step
  • Tool 4: Scenario-based Planning
    • What is scenario-based planning?
    • Scenario-based planning step-by-step
    • Visioning
    • Pathways
• Final Remarks
• Acknowledgements
• Additional Resources
• PDF Version

Visioning is a technique to help participants imagine an ideal future for their community. It is primarily a goal-setting exercise. The method creates personal spaces for reflection where people feel free to express their hopes and share their dreams for the future. Community members then share their visions and arrive at agreement about priorities and goals for the community. These goals serve as the starting points for action plans for community development.

Visioning results in a shared image of the future in the form of a written document or graphic, such as a sketch drawing. Documentation not only helps group members analyse their diverse visions, but also produces records that provide accountability for participants.

Step 1. Organise

Facilitators who are not familiar with a community should plan on spending time in the community prior to the workshop. This provides them with opportunities to talk about the issues and concerns confronting families and to learn about people’s daily activities. Facilitators should try to engage as many people as possible—particularly those who seem to be more marginalised—in informal conversations or chats about their lives and the community.

Discussion questions include:

• What is your community like?
  
• What are the families like?
  
• What is the land and forest like?
  
• What do people do for a living?
  
• Why are some people better off or poor?
  

It might be helpful to provide a map or photographs of the community to encourage reflection. Spending time in the community prior to the activity also encourages participation by providing an opportunity to invite community members directly to attend the workshop.

Step 2. Develop the vision

The most important step in any visioning exercise is helping participants leave behind the worries of today, focus on the activity, and use their imaginations to think creatively about an ideal future. This may sound easy, but this step is surprisingly challenging. If not facilitated carefully, the visioning will not produce insightful or useful analysis later.

First, engage the participants and create a relaxed atmosphere where people are comfortable imagining possible future outcomes.

Next, choose a specific point in the future for people to imagine. This can vary depending on the needs of the facilitators, but it may be helpful to choose a point in the distant future that will allow participants to disengage from current problems or conditions that may constrain the options they consider. The facilitator should lead the process by balancing open-ended questions that will encourage the imagination with more specific guided questions to ensure that the key issues are considered by each participant.

Request that participants relax, close their eyes, and clear their minds. Start them on an imaginary trip into the future. Here is a possible script to start:

We are going to take a walk 20 years into the future, so first we will have to make time speed up. As I count to 20, you are growing older. Your children have grown, the community has changed, it has improved. Life is getting better, everyone is happier. Problems have been solved. When you open your eyes, you will be here, but 20 years in the future.

Elaborate as much as possible to try to stimulate the participants’ creativity. However, be careful not to tell them what they see in the future—that is their job!

Here is an alternative script:

Imagine that you have left the community. After 20 years without contact, you return to find that things have turned out well. You are walking around and observing the community. Describe (silently in your mind) how you know things are better: What does the community look like? What are the houses like? What are people doing? Who do they see? What do you notice about the forest, land, streams and farms? What has changed? What has not changed?

Depending on the group, the facilitator may wish to modify the method. Some stakeholders may feel uncomfortable sitting quietly ‘day dreaming’, others may not be engaged by simply listening to the facilitator. One solution may be to lead the group on a walk around the community. Stop at specific points in and around the community, such as the stream, the well, roads, schools, agricultural areas and houses, and ask them to describe what they ‘see’ in the ideal future. Encourage the free flow of ideas, and try to make sure that everyone is participating.

During this step, participants think about and express their personal vision of the future. It is helpful to have participants write down or draw the things that stood out most in their vision. In the next step, participants will share their individual visions and compare them with others’ visions.

Step 3. Share visions

After developing their personal visions, it is time to have participants share their ideas. There will likely be many similarities, but people may also be surprised to hear how different other visions are.

Organise participants into smaller breakout groups of 4–8 people in each group. This allows everyone time to present his or her vision. Small groups also create an atmosphere where people feel more comfortable talking and sharing. Be aware of local dynamics to ensure that productive and open discussion takes place. Some individuals dominate discussions, others are shy. Some do not want to work together because of conflict. In these smaller groups, ask the participants to share their vision as drawn, written or remembered. Groups may wish to share a large poster board to combine their ideas so that everyone can participate at the same time, and so that those without reading skills can also contribute. Groups might choose to write out a list of ideas instead.

This step can also be done without guidance from the facilitator, allowing the participants to organise themselves and decide how they will complete the task. Designate a group leader and provide guidelines to ensure that group discussions are open and inclusive, everyone gets a turn to talk, all ideas are valued, etc.

Step 4. Compare visions and reach agreement

After the breakout groups have finished their visions, everyone returns to the workspace. Have each group present its work, posting all of the visions, whether they are drawings or lists, where they can be seen. Then ask the entire group to discuss and compare the visions.

Discussion questions include:

• What seems to be most important in each vision? 
  
• What do the visions have in common?
  
• What is different between them?
  
• What is most surprising to you?
  

The next goal of this step is to reach agreement about the group’s collective vision of the future. Individuals may not agree on everything, but there should be enough common ground that participants can agree that the common vision reflects their views. Discuss whether the vision is complete and representative of the community.

Discussion questions include:

• Are these the most important ideas for the community?
  
• What is missing?
  
• Is there anyone whose opinion is not included here?
  
• How can you use these ideas for planning?
  

As an optional step, the community may want to define priorities for their annual plan. If so, after the group discussion, ask the group to identify key points from the visions and post the list of ideas on the wall to vote on them. Each person receives several tokens to represent their preferences. The tokens are taped next to the ideas or placed in envelopes next to the ideas that are the most important to the voter. Count up the votes and rank the ideas from those with the most votes to those with the least. This activity requires that the participants share their ideas, understand the concerns and visions of the other participants, and prioritise them together to arrive at a consensus. It also gives an equal voice to all participants.
Collect the results and prepare them for distribution to community members.

Step 5. Communicate the results

It is important that the results of the activities are communicated to as many local people as possible, including community members, local government and local institutions.

• Create products that catch people’s attention. The products could be posters, maps, cartoons or illustrated stories. Include photographs of the exercise and participants. Consider using local art and culture to share the results. For example, develop a play or organise a storytelling hour where participants talk about the future.
  
• Distribute the results to participants and other community members. Post the results in a public place so that everyone can see and discuss them.
  
• Organise a community meeting to present the results. Ask the community to brainstorm on how they might use the results.
  
• Organise presentations where community members can share their results with local government and other communities. Invite external audiences such as regional government, environmental and development NGOs.
  
• Plan short workshops with local officials so that they understand the methods. Ask community members to help facilitate the workshops. Promote a discussion about how the methods can be used in the participatory planning process.
  
• Involve the local press. Provide them with written materials. Suggest that participants talk about the exercise on a radio programme.
  

Visioning can be repeated at a larger scale (e.g. at the regional level). In such a case, representatives of different communities or governmental sectors come together to share the visions produced earlier by their respective groups. Then, they work together to produce a region-wide vision. This can help with coordinating planning at a larger scale.

© 2007 Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)
Contributors and copyright information