Sustainability, foresight and contested futures: exploring visions and pathways in the transition to a hydrogen economy

This paper reports an innovative foresighting study which constructed a set of hydrogen futures and pathways to them, in order to inform the transition to a sustainable hydrogen economy. Combining backcasting and multi-criteria appraisal the authors developed a participatory expert stakeholder-led methodology to build and appraise a set of visions, which sought to acknowledge the diversity of possible hydrogen futures and contested claims as to their sustainability. A set of transition scenarios were then developed exploring the dynamics and governance of the large-scale socio-technical changes that would be required for the emergence of the different visions. While aspects of this project have been reported elsewhere, this paper seeks to: (1) locate the work with respect to broader developments in the fields of foresight, expectations and socio-technical transitions to sustainability; (2) provide a description of the UKSHEC sustainable futures methodology; and (3) reflect on key insights for research and practice.