Navigating towards safe, just and sustainable futures poses an overarching challenge for human societies. At the global scale, addressing this challenge has been conceptualized as reaching the 2030 Agenda within planetary boundaries. However, global definitions of related goals and pathways to reach them have been criticised as not being sensitive to context and thus not relatable to communities at sub-global scales. To avoid this, solutions discussed in international fora need to be contextualized and informed by locally prevalent worldviews, values and contexts.This paper introduces a stakeholder-based approach for visioning and exploring sustainable development pathways to meet the 2030 Agenda ambitions - the Three Horizons for the SDGs (3H4SDG). The approach combines the Three Horizons framework with multi-scale scenario and systems thinking approaches. 3H4SDG facilitates explorations of (a) alternative pathways to reach the SDGs in an integrated way; and (b) convergences and divergences between the pathways and across scales. The convergence analysis provides information on common premises and actions that are perceived to be the consensus of all pathways. The divergences may entail branching points of different future pathways, representing issues to be further deliberated at different levels.We illustrate 3H4SDG on the case study of the 2018 African Dialogue on The World In 2050, which discussed how transforming the food and agricultural systems in Africa could contribute to reaching the 2030 Agenda goals. We detail the premises and steps of the 3H4SDG approach. We also summarize the results of our pilot application. The results incorporate a set of convergences and divergences among the explored future pathways, including divergences in relation to urbanization, population growth, consumption changes and the future role of the agriculture sector in the African economy. We conclude that participatory approaches grounded in systems thinking represent a promising way to link local aspirations and values with global goals.