Futures methods for environmental law research

Rapid environmental change and geopolitical upheaval mean that there are many possible futures for environmental laws and policies. Given the difficulty of reliably predicting the possible future contexts within which law will operate, and the challenges to which it will have to respond, environmental law researchers will require methods to anticipate various futures. This chapter explores a range of ‘futuring’ methods for non-doctrinal legal research. There are many possible qualitative and quantitative methods. Reflecting the aims of this book to provide access to experience-based advice from environmental law scholars about their methods, our focus is on methods we have used. We consider five examples of combinations of three types of methods to design laws and policies to cope with various futures: scenarios, Delphi surveys and imaginative storytelling. The examples provided show the use of combinations of these methods to tackle different types of law and governance issues.