Exploring rural futures together

Abstract

The New Zealand pastoral industry has many simultaneous drivers, including market and policy compliance, that operate from the local to the global scale. The ability to adapt to these multiple drivers against a background of constrained natural resources and climate change is vital to the continued success of New Zealand's pastoral industry. Here we describe a case study based in the Horizons Region where we worked with pastoral sector stakeholders to apply a process in which an integrated systems perspective was used to identify and explore the impact of drivers on dairy and sheep/beef systems. Drawing from this process we have designed a generic framework, including tools and processes, to enable policy, farmers, and agribusiness to collectively explore the influence of multiple drivers on the future behaviour of farm systems and associated value chains. Keywords: Rural futures, collective learning, socioecological systems, strategic planning