Dynamics in Agrifood System Scenario Development

This article presents how a cumulative adaptive scenario framework can ensure the continuous relevance of agrifood pathways by capturing both long-term, gradual developments and abrupt systemic disruptions. The article advances strategic foresight literature by pioneering a multi-project scenario framework that alters scenario planning from a static, one-off exercise into a dynamic lifecycle, demonstrating how exploratory pathways can be normatively adapted to real-world policy shifts and systematically operationalised through sequential stakeholder consensus. In three interconnected and successive European Erasmus+ projects, agrifood system trend and scenario studies were performed, elaborated upon and iteratively updated in the period from 2021 to 2026, focusing on changing social-economic trends and agrifood system unexpected external developments, i.e. “black swans” that greatly impacted the agrifood system: the Covid-19 pandemic, the Ukraine war, the energy crisis, and the recent geopolitical and world economic developments. The analysis shows that scenario adaptation involves not only updating trends within existing narratives, but also reassessing the dimensions that differentiate alternative futures. Across the three projects, sustainability and digitalisation progressively became transversal conditions, while geopolitical position, strategic dependencies and EU coordination gained importance as scenario differentiators. The findings suggest that cumulative scenario planning should, therefore, combine continuous trend monitoring with periodic reassessment of the scenario architecture itself.