A timeline exercise helped build a common understanding of important historical events, and four scenarios were created along two major axes of uncertainty: the effectiveness of government, and the vibrancy of the rural economy. Insights from this scenario planning process were captured in a report, and fed into a larger project on “Governance of ecosystem services under scenarios of change in southern and eastern Africa” funded by the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), and run by the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden, in collaboration with the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services group at the CSIR in South Africa and the Department of Organizational Sciences at the VU University in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.