Informal Seminars on Narratives, Scenarios and Models of Fair Ambition. Proceedings

An informal seminar series on “Scenarios, Narratives and Modelling of Fair Ambition” was held over the course of 2024-2025. The aim was to generate a more shared understanding of complex issues of equity and ambition among the participants, and to do so in an atmosphere that fostered trust and enabled frank and open conversations. The scope of discussions was intentionally broad, as is evident in the topics of seminar sessions. The approximately 35 participants came from a range of different perspectives, communities of practice and geographies. Explicitly, the seminars were not intended to generate agreement among participants but aimed instead at generating deeper understanding of divergent perspectives and at learning from each other. The overall framing included quantitative analysis, such as modeling, and qualitative analysis, drawing on philosophy, law and other disciplines. Seminars were held virtually and at a four-day in-person symposium. The Chatham House Rule was applied, to ensure that participants could facilitate open discussion. The Chatham House Rule stipulates that “… participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.” It is in the spirit of this rule and to facilitate such use of the information and views shared during the seminars that these proceedings have been prepared. And, therefore, no names of participants (including those who authored the discussion papers in the appendix) have been included in these proceedings.

These proceedings aim to distill intellectual output for a broader audience and for participants. They are not, and cannot be, comprehensive as the discussions were free-flowing and generative. They capture key insights, learning from creative tensions across different perspectives and – where they emerged – more shared understandings. One of the intentions of the overall seminar series is that participants will carry these learnings into back into their diverse communities of practice – these proceedings are intended to assist with that. Many problems and challenges were identified and debated, several unresolved, yet some specific ideas to address identified challenges and contribute to improved analysis of fair ambition. We as participants hope that these proceedings may be useful to others.

These proceedings have been prepared by the convenors of this seminar series – Harald Winkler and Andrew Marquard (both University of Cape Town) and Ceecee Holz (Climate Equity Reference Project) –, based on notes and session summaries that convenors and participants serving as note-takers and facilitators had prepared and whose contributions are gratefully acknowledged. The convenors issue these proceedings their own authority: in other words, even though participants agreed with the release of these proceedings and were given opportunities to review them, the responsibility for any remaining unintentional errors, omissions, and misrepresentations is solely that of the convenors. These proceedings intend to summarize the rich conversations of the seminar series. As stated above, it was not the purpose of the seminar series to generate agreement between participants and as such, these proceedings should not be understood as expressing views that are agreed to by the participants, rather, they are views that were expressed and discussed by participants in the course of the series. Some seminar sessions benefitted from discussion papers that were prepared by participants as inputs to the sessions; these are attached as appendices.