Post-Growth and the Lack of Diversity in the Scenario Framework
Rawad El Skaf
23 January 2025
Scenarios and pathways, as defined and used in the “SSP-RCP scenario framework”, are key in last decade’s climate change research and in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In this framework, Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) consist of a limited set of alternative socioeconomic futures, that are both represented in short qualitative narratives and with quantitative projections of key drivers. One important use of the computationally derived SSP-scenarios is to do mitigation analysis and present a “manageable” set of options to decision-makers. However, all SSPs and derivatively SSP-scenarios in this framework assume a globally growing economy into 2100. This, in practice, amounts to a value-laden restriction of the space of solutions to be presented to decision-makers, falling short of IPCC’s general mandate of being “policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive”. Yet, the Global Economic Growth Assumption (GEGA) could be challenged and in practice is challenged by post-growth scholars. However, for post-growth mitigation scenarios to be constructed, explored, and assessed more systematically, they need to be fully integrated into the scenario framework. This is not done yet. I argue, from a philosophy of value-laden science perspective, that this should be done and propose two ways. This integration follows from and satisfies a diversity criterion, which derivatively enhances the framework’s and the IPCC’s “objectivity” and thus policy-neutrality.
