Linking global to regional scenarios in foresight

Scenarios have proven useful tools for dealing with future uncertainty in an integrated and cohesive way. A key issue in scenario approaches, still under development, is the linking of scenarios at different spatial scales, in order to be better understood the interaction of processes across scales. The paper presents the AG2020 experience on linking EU-wide backcasring policy scenarios, exploring strategic policy directions for the EU agriculture in 2020 to regional policy scenarios in different EU rural contexts. This may lead to an in depth exploration of region-specific characteristics in different EU rural contexts that need to be effectively dealt within the European backcasting policy scenario framework; but also to a systematic assessment of the upcoming impacts of the EU-level scenarios to the local scale, i.e. down-scaling of the EU top-down scenarios and checking how they affect regions and rural localities in the EU. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.