The STAP brief presents STAP thinking on the use of simple future narratives to design resilient and durable projects. It highlights the importance of considering all drivers of change, such as population, conflict, climate change, and migration, when designing projects. The brief shows that not considering how drivers of change could play out in the future can make project outcomes short-lived, less resilient, or even damaging to the environment and people. An understanding of the drivers and how they interact and unfold in the future can be converted into a small number of simple narratives. Doing this can help develop projects and interventions that are robust to future uncertainty.
The STAP Primer provides a synthesis of guidance on using simple narratives of the future in project and program design in a Global Environment Facility (GEF) context. It contributes to a growing suite of Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel (STAP) documents that support the design of interventions in meeting the GEF’s goal to apply leading practices to deliver transformational change. The use of scenarios, and simple narratives in particular, interacts with many other elements of project and program design, as outlined in STAP’s Enabling Elements of Good Project Design. The primer provides steps to developing the narratives and offers practical tips and approaches for implementing each step. In the GEF context, these steps are part of the baseline and system description components of the current PIF template and are the background to later developing a theory of change, so the processes can be tightly linked to avoid duplication.
