THE ANTICIPATORY GOVERNANCE OF SUSTAINABLE FUTURES KARLIJN MUIDERMAN
THE ANTICIPATORY GOVERNANCE OF SUSTAINABLE FUTURES Karlijn Muiderman
ISBN: 978-94-6458-420-2 DOI: https://doi.org/10.33540/1444 Cover & layout: Marilou Maes, persoonlijkproefschrift.nl Printing: Ridderprint, www.ridderprint.nl Language editing: Andy Brown © 2022, Karlijn Muiderman. All right reserved. No part of this thesis may be reproduced in any form without prior permission of the author.
THE ANTICIPATORY GOVERNANCE OF SUSTAINABLE FUTURES De anticiperende governance van duurzame toekomsten (met een samenvatting in het Nederlands) Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit Utrecht op gezag van de rector magnificus, prof.dr. H.R.B.M. Kummeling, ingevolge het besluit van het college voor promoties in het openbaar te verdedigen op vrijdag 2 december 2022 des ochtends te 10.15 uur door Karlijn Bernadette Muiderman geboren op 10 januari 1986 te Apeldoorn
Promotors Prof. dr. P.P.J. Driessen Prof. dr. A. Gupta Copromotor Dr. J.M. Vervoort Members of the doctoral committee Prof. dr. M.A. Hajer Prof. dr. F.R. Avelino Dr. G. Feola Prof. dr. P. Macnaghten Prof. dr. E. Boyd This thesis was accomplished with financial support from the BNP Paribas Foundation.
Voor Anaïs en het oneindige.
TABLE OF CONTENT Chapter 1 Introduction 11 1.1. Anticipating change 12 1.2. Problem statement: the future as an object of governance 13 1.3. Research questions and structure 14 1.4. Theoretical contributions to main bodies of literature 16 1.4.1. Unpacking diverse understandings of anticipatory governance 16 1.4.2. Futures studies and anticipation 17 1.4.3. Governing sustainability transformations 19 1.4.4. The politics of anticipation 20 1.5. Research design and methodology 21 1.6. Thesis roadmap 23 Chapter 2 Four approaches to anticipatory governance 33 2.1. Introduction 34 2.2. Methodology 35 2.2.1. Identifying and selecting literature 36 2.2.2. Process and method of review 36 2.3. Anticipating and seeking to govern the future: a brief overview 37 2.3.1. Explicit engagement with the concept of anticipatory governance 38 2.3.2. Implicit engagement with the concept of anticipatory governance 39 2.4. Four approaches to anticipatory governance: diverse conceptions of the future, actions in the present and ultimate aims 41 2.4.1. Approach 1: Probable futures, strategic planning and risk reduction 42 2.4.2. Approach 2: Plausible futures, enhanced preparedness and navigating uncertainty 43 2.4.3. Approach 3: Pluralistic futures, societal mobilization and co-creating alternatives 45 2.4.4. Approach 4: Performative futures, critical interrogation, and political implications 46 2.5. Methods and tools of anticipation: overlapping use and varying ends 48 2.5.1. Anticipatory tools and methods to assess probable and improbable futures (Approach 1) 49 2.5.2. Anticipatory tools and methods to explore plausible futures (Approach 2) 49 2.5.3. Anticipatory tools and methods to imagine pluralistic futures (Approach 3) 51 2.5.4. Assessing how imagined futures are performative (Approach 4) 51 2.6. Conclusion 53 Chapter 3 Approaches to anticipatory governance in West Africa 67 3.1. Introduction 68 3.2. Four approaches to anticipatory climate governance 69 3.3. Methodology 71 3.3.1. Case study region: West Africa 71
3.3.2. Data collection 73 3.3.3. Data analysis 75 3.4. Approaches to anticipatory climate governance in West Africa 76 3.4.1. Anticipation processes and decision-making 76 3.4.2. Three processes: conceptions of the future, implications for actions in the present and ultimate aims 78 3.5. Discussion and conclusions 82 3.5.1. Conflicting assumptions within hybrids of approaches 1 and 2 83 3.5.2. Placing politics central in anticipatory governance 84 3.5.3. Consequences for anticipatory climate governance in West Africa 85 3.5.4. Reflections on the framework 87 Chapter 4 Anticipatory governance of sustainability transformations 97 4.1. Introduction 98 4.2. Anticipation for food system transformations 100 4.3. Methodology 103 4.3.1. Case study: The Foresight4Food Initiative 103 4.3.2. Data collection methods 107 4.3.3. Approach to the data analysis 108 4.4. Results: Anticipatory governance of food systems in practice 109 4.4.1. Diverse conceptions of the future 109 4.4.2. Ultimate aims 112 4.4.3. Implications for policy action in the present 113 4.5. Discussion and conclusions 116 4.5.1. Hybrid approaches and dominant perspectives: privileging prediction and uncertainty over pluralistic transformation and fundamental critique 117 4.5.2. Different approaches to anticipation connect to different conceptions of transformation 118 4.5.3. Consequences for anticipatory governance for food systems transformations 120 4.5.4. Ways forward for anticipation in support of sustainability transformations 121 Chapter 5 Opening up or closing down anticipatory governance 129 5.1. Introduction 130 5.2. Opening up or closing down anticipatory governance: frames of the future and possibilities for action? 131 5.2.1. Anticipation and anticipatory governance 131 5.2.2. Opening up or closing down governance 133 5.3. Methodology 135 5.3.1. Data collection 135 5.3.2. Comparative Analysis 137 5.4. Approaches to anticipatory climate governance in four regions 139 5.4.1. Anticipatory governance processes in West Africa 139
5.4.2. Anticipatory governance processes in South Asia 142 5.4.3. Anticipatory governance processes in Southeast Asia 144 5.4.4. Anticipatory governance processes in Central America 146 5.5. Discussion and conclusions: opening up or closing down anticipatory governance in the Global South 148 Chapter 6 Conclusions 159 6.1. Summary of findings 160 6.2. Answering the research questions across the chapters 162 6.2.1. Research question 1: How do different approaches to anticipatory governance in the literature relate to practice? 162 6.2.2. Research question 2: Which approaches to anticipatory governance dominate and why? 165 6.2.3. Research question 3: What are the implications of the prevalence of different approaches for realizing sustainability transformations? 166 6.2.4. Research question 4: How do different approaches to anticipatory governance open up or close down future possibilities? 167 6.3. Implications for the wider literature and future research agenda 169 6.3.1. Insights for anticipatory governance scholarship 169 6.3.2. Insights for futures studies and anticipation 171 6.3.3. Insights for the literature on governing sustainability transformations 172 6.3.4. Insights for scholarship on the politics of anticipation 173 6.4. Reflections on the research design 176 6.5. Looking ahead 177 Appendixes 187 Appendix 1.1 Overview of units of analysis, methods and data collected for each chapter of the thesis 188 Appendix 3.1 Document analysis of anticipation processes and their intended role in decision-making 189 Appendix 3.2. Document analysis of the employment of anticipation processes in policy development 193 Appendix 4.1 Data Generation Tool 198 Appendix 4.2. Survey questions 199 Appendix 5.1 Overview of documents, interviews, and focus groups for each region 204 Summary 219 The anticipatory governance of sustainable futures 220 Samenvatting 227 De anticiperende governance van duurzame toekomsten 228 Curriculum Vitae 235 Acknowledgements 239
LIST OF TABLES AND FIGURES Figure 2.1 Approaches to anticipatory governance: diverse conceptions of the future and actions in the present 48 Figure 2.2 Engaging with the future, acting in the present: diverse tools and methods of anticipation 52 Figure 3.1 Diverse tools and methods of anticipation 71 Table 3.1 Documents reviewed and three processes analyzed in-depth (in blue) 74 Table 4.1 Four approaches to anticipatory governance (Muiderman et al., 2020) 101 Figure 4.1 Analytical framework on transformations (Feola, 2015) 101 Table 4.2 Overview of projects and their anticipatory methods, according to participants 104 Figure 4.2 Examples of hybrid approaches to anticipatory governance in the Foresight4Food initiative. 116 Figure 4.3 The four approaches to anticipatory governance mapped onto Feola’s (2015) framework on concepts of transformations. 119 Figure 5.1 The opening up or closing down of anticipatory governance 134 Table 5.1 Twelve processes examined in detail 139 Figure 6.1 The analytical framework on anticipatory governance 163 Figure 6.2 Connecting the frameworks on anticipatory governance and transformations 166 Figure 6.3 The opening up or closing down of anticipatory governance 168
CHAPTER 1 Introduction
12 Chapter 1 1.1. Anticipating change In road cycling, during a demarrage, a cyclist takes a leap forward. This escape from the peloton marks a radical turn mentally from keeping speed, heart and cadence rates steady (aligning past-present-future states) to proactively transforming this state into a more desired future (victory). Multiple interdependent factors challenge prediction and plannability, such as the cyclist’s physical condition, the stamina of fellow cyclists to respond to the attack, road surface and weather conditions, and other unknowns such as accidents along the way. The demarrages in this thesis are anticipatory practices in science and policy to govern the future. Anticipation has become a growing focus in response to the often more reactive and incremental tendencies of governance interventions (Nuttall, 2010). Environmental governance scholarship has advanced thinking on steering the environmental and societal impacts of climate change, by shifting a focus on the nationstate to the global (Biermann, 2007) and urban levels (Bulkeley & Betsill, 2013) and from centralized, top-down governance to modes of governance that involve stakeholders in decision-making (Driessen et al., 2012). Others have focused on steering in transnational (Andonova et al., 2009) or polycentric arrangements (Morrison et al., 2017; Ostrom, 2010). In these literatures, there is a growing awareness of the need to imagine and anticipate climate change (Boyd et al., 2015), and the need to understand the steering effects of anticipation processes proliferating in diverse contexts across the globe at all scales of governance (Vervoort & Gupta, 2018). Many anticipation processes in the context of climate change are developed to guide decision-making towards meeting the goals set in treaties such as the Paris Agreement and mechanisms such as the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC) to reduce emissions (Jordan et al., 2018) in sectors including agriculture (FAO, 2017; MasonD’Croz et al., 2016), water management (Quay, 2015) and urban development (von Wirth et al., 2019). The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios are arguably the most influential form of anticipation (IPCC, 2019), followed by global environmental assessments that help governments prepare for future environmental, social, and economic developments (Pereira et al., 2019; van Vuuren et al., 2012). Other forms of anticipation, such as more innovative and experiential methods, e.g. sustainability games, are used to experience, embody, and experiment with diverse climate futures (van Beek et al., 2022; Vervoort et al., 2022). Or they can be more traditional planning methods like cost-benefit analyses, used to calculate future benefits and prioritize present-day investments (Atkinson, 2015). Thus, anticipation processes include a wide range of methods and tools, but share a common intentionality - they guide actions in the present based on a vision of the future, with the aim to steer the future in the present (Vervoort & Gupta, 2018). With the growing role of anticipation in various domains, futures studies has become a multidisciplinary field (Andersson, 2018). Or, in the words
13 Introduction 1 of Urry, ‘futures are now everywhere’ (2016, p. 1). With the expansion of anticipation processes, an explicit future-orientation in governance scholarship to examine the growing use of anticipation for climate action (Granjou et al., 2017; Pulver & VanDeveer, 2009; Vervoort & Gupta, 2018) is needed. 1.2. Problem statement: the future as an object of governance If futures are everywhere, it is increasingly important to analyze what futures are imagined and how these images steer actions in the present. Images of the future can call attention to future dangers and crises (Paprocki, 2019). Examples include ‘A Brave New World’ which warned of the impacts of technological progress on society (Huxley, 1932). Or Toffler’s 1970 book ‘Future Shock’ which argued that the accelerated rate of our changing society results in a crisis of adaptation (Toffler, 1970). ‘Limits to Growth’ (Meadows et al., 1972) drew attention to the limits of our planetary system. Contrarily, images of the future can also call attention to alternative (and more desired) futures, such as Thomas More’s Utopian society (1516), or modern Utopias believing in the salvation of science and technologies (Goode & Godhe, 2017). Grand narratives such as these affect how we think and act in the present (Groves, 2017). For example, Hartman (2014) noted that Malthusian theory shaped discourses on the impact of African population growth on environmental degradation and, consequently, paved the way for strategies to reduce fertility rates since the late 1960s. Therefore, scholars argue for understanding imagination as a social practice, by examining how future images shape social meaning (in the present) and create powerful imaginaries that are collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015). Recognizing this performativity requires scrutinizing anticipation processes, i.e., the methods and tools used to imagine and govern the future, as sites of politics where future threats and promises are being made sense of and negotiated in the present (Jansen & Gupta, 2009). Futures are thus an object of governance, i.e., steering collective action – images of the future steer governance choices in the present (Polak et al., 1973). Images of the future encompass the extent to which the future can be known and managed (Vervoort & Gupta, 2018). For example, the very act of developing scenarios such as the IPCC scenarios implies that exploring diverse future outcomes makes sense and allows for some form of management of the future in the present. In contrast, experiential futurists approach the future as something that can be experienced in the present for the opening up and creation of alternative futures (Candy & Potter, 2019). What do these insights mean for the way in which anticipatory governance processes are used to realize more sustainable futures in diverse contexts across the globe? There has been little science research of the many global, regional, and national anticipation processes that are used in sustainability governance scholarship (Burch et al., 2019). A
14 Chapter 1 knowledge gap exists regarding how different conceptions of the future, as embedded in processes of anticipation, steer actions in the present to realize sustainability transformations (Vervoort & Gupta, 2018). Therefore, this thesis aims to examine how conceptions of the future steer governance actions to be taken in the present, and their implications for realizing sustainability transformations. This is done by examining anticipation processes in various sustainability domains and in diverse global contexts through the lens of anticipatory governance. I comprehensively analyze approaches to anticipatory governance in the literature and in practice and critically examine their implications for steering sustainability transformations in diverse contexts across the globe. Empirically, this thesis focuses on four regions in the Global South, since most research on anticipatory governance has focused on the Global North (Biermann & Möller, 2019; Vervoort & Gupta, 2018), although many parts of the Global South are highly vulnerable to challenges such as climate change (Adger & Vincent, 2005; Okereke, 2018). Therefore, researchers have called for a better representation of the diverse ways in which futures and pasts are imagined in the many socially, culturally, and politically diverse contexts of the world (Appadurai, 2013; Escobar, 2020). Such critique of Global Northern-focused future images complements calls for more equity and justice in global environmental governance (Kashwan et al., 2020; Okereke, 2006) and better representation in norm-setting institutions such as the SDGs (Sénit & Biermann, 2021), which are also crucial elements in light of the need for more inclusive and democratic anticipatory governance. 1.3. Research questions and structure The central question in this thesis is ‘How do conceptions of the future steer anticipatory governance actions in the present, and with what implications for realizing sustainability transformations?’ I break this main question up into four research sub-questions. The first question I ask is: ‘How do different approaches to anticipatory governance in the literature relate to practice?’ In answering this question, I address a theoretical knowledge gap by giving insight into how different theoretical strands conceive the future in processes of anticipation and their implications for steering actions in the present, as well as an empirical knowledge gap by examining how these understandings relate to anticipatory governance in practice in diverse sustainability contexts across the globe, beyond the Global North. The second question is: ‘Which approaches to anticipatory governance dominate and why?’ This question is important to understand underlying factors that explain why certain
15 Introduction 1 approaches to anticipatory governance become dominant. The analysis sheds light on what is being prioritized and marginalized. The third question is: ‘What are the implications of the prevalence of different approaches to anticipatory governance for realizing sustainability transformations?’ In answering this question, I shed light on the political implications of dominant dynamics in anticipatory governance and what they mean for global efforts toward sustainability transformations. The fourth question is: ‘How do different approaches to anticipatory governance open up or close down future possibilities?’ Building on the previous, more general question, this final question is motivated by the need to better understand specifically what the dominant approaches mean for frames of the space of future possibilities and possible forms of actions in the present to realize those futures. Through this research, I scrutinize the first-order governance question concerning the ‘what, how and why’ of anticipatory governance. More specifically, chapter 2 unpacks the notion of anticipatory governance within a wide range of dispersed literatures across the social sciences and interdisciplinary sustainability sciences on three elements: a) the conceptions of the future embedded in anticipation processes, b) their implications for actions in the present, and c) the ultimate aims intended to be realized with anticipatory governance. The literature review creates a typology of diverse approaches to anticipatory governance which are applied in theory-based case studies to examine anticipatory governance in practice in sustainability contexts across the globe. A range of perspectives on futures, anticipation and anticipatory governance are included from various research fields and practices, most prominently futures studies and environmental governance, but also research on transformations, transitions, social-ecological systems, science and technology studies, policy and planning, and responsible research and innovation. The resulting framework is used to examine anticipation processes in many culturally, socially, and politically diverse contexts of the world to generate context-specific and comparative insights. In several theory-based case studies, the insights from the literature are used to examine and explain the dynamics of anticipatory governance processes. Chapter 3 picks up on questions 1 and 2 to examine approaches through which futures conceptions steer climate decision-making in West Africa. Chapter 4 answers questions 1, 2 and 3 in its examination of dominant approaches to anticipatory governance in a global community on food systems foresight and scrutinizes what this means for realizing sustainability transformations. Chapter 5 picks up on questions 1,
16 Chapter 1 2 and 4 in its analysis of dominant approaches to anticipatory governance in various sustainability contexts across the globe and interrogates how dominant approaches open up or close down what are seen as possible futures and viable governance commitments. These empirical studies provide important insights into anticipatory governance processes in various sustainability contexts, with a focus on climate change and its impacts on food systems, but the implications of the research findings go beyond these domains (section 6.4). The empirical insights are also used to refine the analytical framework and further conceptualize anticipatory governance. 1.4. Theoretical contributions to main bodies of literature The conceptual and empirical insights from this thesis primarily contribute to the further conceptualization of anticipatory governance (section 1.3.1). However, the connection between future studies and anticipation and environmental governance in this research also means that there is an able opportunity for both disciplines to learn from the theoretical and empirical insights generated (sections 1.3.2 and 1.3.3). Finally, the research provides important empirical insights into the dominant dynamics of anticipatory governance for scholarship on the politics of anticipation (section 1.3.4). The envisioned theoretical contributions to each of these bodies are explained below. 1.4.1. Unpacking diverse understandings of anticipatory governance This thesis foremost contributes to the further conceptualization of anticipatory governance, an emerging concept that has spread across a dispersed set of social science and interdisciplinary sustainability science literatures. Most broadly, anticipatory governance can be understood as “the evolution of steering mechanisms in the present to adapt to and/or shape uncertain climate futures” (Vervoort & Gupta, 2018, p. 104). However, the concept is differently understood across those literatures with different ontological and epistemological underpinnings (chapter 2). The term anticipatory governance is most closely linked to responsible research and innovation to understand how diverse societal actors ex-ante steer technological progress (Barben et al., 2008; Guston, 2014). Another domain where anticipatory governance scholarship is growing is that of sociotechnical change, to analyze the use of biotechnology (Gupta, 2013), nanotechnology (Anderson, 2007; Barben et al., 2008) and emerging calls for geoengineering (Flegal & Gupta, 2018; Talberg et al., 2018). Furthermore, public planning scholars have developed the anticipatory governance of national security risks (Fuerth, 2009). Environmental governance scholars advanced thinking on the anticipatory governance of socioecological systems to increase the resilience of coupled ecosystems and livelihoods under a changing climate (Boyd et al., 2015). This body of work connects to work on resilience (Folke et al., 2005) and complex systems (Rosen, 1985; Young, 2017). Anticipatory governance for climate mitigation and adaptation is
17 Introduction 1 concerned with anticipating climate change to advance adaptation (Hurlbert & Gupta, 2016; Quay, 2010) while others posit anticipatory governance as going beyond adaptation in a more proactive form of governance that pushes governance actors to overcome reactive, and antagonistic, tendencies (Nuttall, 2010; Vervoort & Gupta, 2018). In a similar vein, anticipatory governance is considered to be an intrinsic but more limited part of reflexive governance (Pickering, 2019), while others have built on the analytical framework in this thesis to further thinking on how to make reflexivity an intrinsic part of more futures-literate anticipatory governance processes (Mangnus et al., 2021). In answering the first research question, I comprehensively typologize those diverse understandings of anticipatory governance. First, I unpack the conception of the future embedded in notions of anticipatory governance, the implications for actions in the present, and the ultimate aims intended to be realized. Furthermore, the framework that results from this extensive review helps to examine anticipatory governance processes in diverse sustainability context across the globe and this empirical work helps to further conceptualize anticipatory governance. 1.4.2. Futures studies and anticipation Much anticipatory governance scholarship argues for employing methods and tools that have been brought forward by futures studies scholarship and practice (Bradfield et al., 2005; Inayatullah, 2013; Van Der Heijden, 2005). However, anticipation has not been analyzed through the lens of anticipatory governance to examine the steering effects of processes of anticipation. Therefore, I see my research primarily as an inquiry into the governance of anticipation. Thinking about and planning for the future is as old as humanity (Andersson, 2018), but most foresight – as a more strategic and systematic practice - originates in military planning strategies in World War II fromwhere it spread into various domains and disciplines, most importantly to the civil domain and the corporate world through the research and development (RAND) corporation (Van Der Heijden, 2005), and Cybernetics in the 1950s (Pickering, 2010). RAND developed key foresight tools that are still used today, such as the Delphi technique which elicits and synthesizes expert opinion about future decisions in a collective and structured way, systems analysis for simulation models, and its successor scenario technique (Bradfield et al., 2005). Kahn, a systems analyst at RAND coined the term scenarios inspired by the film industry. The language that Kahn developed still inspires much scenarios work today, describing scenarios as multiple, equally plausible futures that serve as test-bed for policies and plans (Van Der Heijden, 2005; see for a few interesting examples of plausibilistic scenario-guided policy advice Lord et al., 2016; Mason-D’Croz et al., 2016). The book ‘The Year 2000’ (Kahn & Wiener, 1967) put scenarios on the map as the most strategic tool to think about the future for policy planning in the corporate world. The first scenarios followed a traditional “predict-and-control” approach to planning but
18 Chapter 1 replaced the single line forecast by a probabilistic assessment of alternative futures to determine a “most likely” projection (Van Der Heijden, 2005). Soon, this probabilistic assessment was considered less advantageous and accurate over forecasting approaches and a more intuitive plausibility approach was developed relying on causality (Van Der Heijden, 2005) but this still incorporated a belief that planning must be based on at least some predictability, otherwise it would be a waste of time (Andersson, 2018). Pierre Wack, a planner at Shell, brought scenarios to the company (Bradfield et al., 2005; Van Der Heijden, 2005; Wack, 1985). These developments (most prominently but not exclusively) laid the foundation for futures studies, with scenarios, Delphi panels, and other foresight methods as tools for market making and management of the future in the present (Bradfield et al., 2005). Futures work stepped into the domain of environmental governance when a diverse group of academics and decision-makers came together in Rome in the late 1960s to discuss global future challenges and formed the Club of Rome. Their 1972 publication ‘Limits to Growth’ was an important milestone for thinking about environmental futures. It argued that pollution, population growth, industrialization, food production and resource depletion will reach the limits to growth on the planet (Meadows et al., 1972) and thus called for global action. The first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment was held the same year and also advocated global action to protect the environment and advocated global environmental assessments and management (United Nations, 1972); this constituted another major signpost of growing calls for more sustainable futures. The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created in 1988 to synthesize existing climate change science in its five/six yearly synthesis reports and special reports as important tools for the UN’s climate negations (IPCC, n.d.). Scenarios that have been created under the auspices of the IPCC (but not part of its publication cycles) include the Representative Concentration Pathways (van Vuuren et al., 2011) and the more recent Shared Socio-economic Pathways (Riahi et al., 2017). These scenarios explore how developments such as technological innovation and climate policy affect emission levels by combining narratives, climate models and integrated assessment models (IAMs) (Alcamo, 2008; Moss et al., 2010). Other major environmental assessments include UNEP’s Global Environmental Outlook and the Millennium Ecosystems Assessment (van Vuuren et al., 2012). Futures work and environmental science have increasingly cross-fertilized over the last decade to explore environmental futures in norm-setting global institutes and informed global and national decision-making. They can thus be considered to serve as spaces of connectivity through which ideas about pasts, presents and futures flow and materialize (Urry, 2016), but little research has been done into the ways in
19 Introduction 1 which anticipation processes shape our understanding of the future and implications for actions in the present (Pulver & VanDeveer, 2009; Vervoort & Gupta, 2018). This research makes an important contribution to understanding how the growing number of anticipation processes in different sustainability contexts embed diverse approaches to steering (research questions 1 and 2) and their implications for realizing sustainability transformations (research question 3) and for the opening up or closing down of future possibilities (research question 4). 1.4.3. Governing sustainability transformations Anticipatory governance in the environmental domain is primarily concerned with realizing sustainability transformations (Burch et al., 2019) and connects to a wide array of environmental governance scholarship. Governance research analyzes the ways in which society is or can be steered through people and institutions in new directions to solve societal challenges (Kooiman, 2003; Pierre & Peters, 2000), with environmental governance particularly focusing on environmental problems that require new forms of governing through collective action (Evans, 2012). Environmental governance is thus inherently future-oriented and transformative, in the sense that it focuses on deliberate interventions that help realize a more sustainable future (Driessen et al., 2012). However, anticipatory governance makes the future-orientation in environmental governance scholarship explicit by analyzing the growing role of anticipation in steering environmental futures (Vervoort & Gupta, 2018; Granjou et al., 2017). As such, it is closely linked to literatures on governance for transformations and governance of transformation (Burch et al., 2019; Patterson et al., 2017) and this thesis explains how different ideas of anticipation and transformation connect (chapter 4). Adding a governance lens to anticipation opens up questions about what it means to stretch the time horizons of key governance interventions: the incentives, knowledge, institutions, decision-making and behavior underlying them (Lemos & Agrawal, 2006). Some scholars see anticipation as a strategic tool for decision-making about long-term future uncertainties by developing flexible mechanisms for changing conditions (Quay, 2010, 2015); others point to questions of power in informing decisions about the future (Sova et al., 2015). These debates connect anticipatory governance with environmental politics, particularly issues of the power in visions of the future that challenge the assumption of the neutrality of visions, e.g., future equity (Flegal & Gupta, 2018) and intergenerational justice (Okereke, 2018). Research has also pointed to the role of knowledge and language in constructing the object of governance (Hajer & Versteeg, 2005), such as authoritative assessments that de facto govern environmental futures (Gupta & Möller, 2018). However, the ways in which anticipation steers efforts to realize sustainability transformations have not been comprehensively analyzed. Through the
20 Chapter 1 connection of futures studies and environmental governance, this thesis provides novel and holistic insights into how approaches to anticipatory governance intend to realize sustainably transformations in diverse contexts across the globe (and research question 3 is dedicated to this inquiry). In general, the thesis is meant as foundational work for future research agendas that connect to the aforementioned important concerns. The empirical and conceptual insights could be useful to research on the role of transparency in guiding effective and legitimate anticipatory governance (Gupta et al., 2020). Or it can help examine who has agency to frame future problems and make authoritative decisions about the future (Stripple & Pattberg, 2014; van der Heijden et al., 2019), or what a long-term future-orientation would mean for rethinking institutional structures (Beunen & Patterson, 2019; Hoffman et al., 2021). 1.4.4. The politics of anticipation The focus on dominant approaches (research question 2) and their implication for action (research questions 3 and 4) means that the role of power is central to this thesis, and as such the research builds strongly on insights brought forward by Science and Technology Studies (often referred to as STS) and anthropology. Their constructivist perspectives on futures work have been pivotal to examine and explain dominant dynamics in anticipatory governance. Scholars have provided key insights into the construction of knowledge and its usage in decision-making about the future. Jasanoff (2004, p. 35) noted that “science is a form of organized work, a site of politics, a marketplace of ideas, an exercise in meaning-making, and an instrument of power.” In this line of thinking, it no longer suffices to believe that anticipation presents neutral, or valuefree responses and outcomes. Visions of the future shape discourses and practices of governance and thereby structure the life worlds of societies (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015). The work on imagined communities (Anderson, 2006), social imaginaries (Taylor, 2004), sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015) and fictional expectations (Beckert, 2016) help us think about the importance of the ways in which ideas about the future materialize and become collectively shared and how these frames, in turn, shape our understanding of what needs to happen. STS scholarship connects and informs environmental politics in studies on the contested role of science in understanding and shaping uncertain future socioecological and socioecological progress, in biotechnology (Gupta, 2013; Jansen & Gupta, 2009), nanotechnology (Anderson, 2007; Macnaghten, 2009) and climate engineering (Bellamy et al., 2012; Gupta & Möller, 2018; Low, 2021). It also informs debates on the de facto governance effects of vanguard visions that have not yet been institutionally stabilized (Flegal & Gupta, 2018). These studies point to the ways in which grand narratives of technological progress define the public good or delimit and control risk in projects aimed to develop technologies. Foresight processes are thus sites where science and policy are co-produced, and this thinking informed analytical
21 Introduction 1 approaches that position futures as performance, such as techniques of futuring as a lens through which to analyze anticipation in, amongst others, discourse analysis and dramaturgy (Hajer & Pelzer, 2018). Another example is multicriteria mapping which opens up a dialogue about frames of the future, competing visions and social concerns (Bellamy et al., 2013). Another set of scholarly works on dominant visions, mainly in anthropology and history, pointed to how futures are occupied by present-day interests projected into the future (Anderson, 2006; Escobar, 2020; Sardar, 1993). Their work has been important to understanding what dominates in a pluriform world and what pushes other worldviews out. Andersson (2018) noted that Kahn’s scenarios intended to engage with the plurality of world developments but were regardless a continuation of the status quo, i.e., the American capitalist hegemony in a modernization logic and rationalist tradition. Clashes between this hegemony and rivaling conceptions of world futures emerged during and after the Cold War, which raised attention for the plurality and uncertainty of human life, politics, and imagination (Andersson, 2018; see also for an analysis of Soviet futures Rindzevičiūtė, 2016). Escobar (2020) argues that much futures work embeds ‘one-world thinking’, i.e., the ontological assumption of the existence of one real and a possible world which is according to him a form of modernist and masculinist political thinking. In his essays on futures of Afro- and Latin-American women, he demonstrates how this worldview disempowers minority groups in having decisive power to change things globally. Instead, there is a plurality of imaginations, many ways in which humanity aspires to, anticipates and imagines pasts and futures (Appadurai, 2013) and gives meaning to and constructs worlds (Goodman, 1987). These insights increasingly merge with novel forms of anticipation. Thinking on pluralism informs methods that use scenarios as tools for worldmaking (Vervoort et al., 2015) and ethnographic experiential futures that help make futures more visible and tangible (Candy & Kornet, 2019). This thesis is informed by and contributes to this research in two ways. First, the extent to which these more critical and plural forms of anticipation inform the anticipatory governance of sustainability transformations has not been empirically and comparatively researched in diverse contexts across the globe. Second, the insights give shape to a focus on dominant dynamics in anticipatory governance and their implications. 1.5. Research design and methodology This thesis draws on relativist thinking and embeds a constructivist epistemology. I see the nature of reality as being dependent on the observer, and knowledge about reality as a construct of ideas, concepts, and theories about reality. This also implies that my findings are influenced by my (Western and secular) ideas and I consider this important
22 Chapter 1 to emphasize. In line with this, the methodology is qualitative and interpretative (see appendix 1.1 for an overview of all units of analysis, methods and data collected). The literature review in chapter 2 is a narrative-style interpretative review to understand and explain different approaches to anticipatory governance in a representative sample of literatures within the social sciences and interdisciplinary sustainability sciences. Such a qualitative and interpretative approach was chosen to synthesize implicit and explicit understandings of anticipatory governance and to develop an analytical framework – and such an approach is considered more suitable for this aim than a systematic literature review which is often paper-centric or author-centric (Rowe, 2014). Three analytical elements (conceptions of the future, implications for the present, and ultimate aims) guided the review of the literature and pointed to four diverse approaches regarding these three elements. The four approaches were presented as four narratives on these three elements; these narratives served as heuristic tools to identify how the approaches identified in the literature relate to practice across diverse sites (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017). The ‘four approaches’ framework was then applied to various case study contexts across the globe to deductively examine anticipatory governance in practice and inductively refine the framework. Each case study was thus theory-driven (Toshkov, 2016). Chapter 3 applies the ‘four approaches’ analytical framework to understand what approaches dominate, chapter 4 connects the framework to the framework on transformations (Feola, 2015) to understand how the (dominant) approaches connect to different conceptions of transformations and chapter 5 connects the framework to the notion of opening up/closing down (Stirling, 2008) to understand how anticipatory governance opens up or closes down future possibilities. Case study research has several qualities that made it most suitable for this research. Most case studies have a deductive and inductive process, which helps the further conceptualization of anticipatory governance. The inquiry often starts with developing theoretical propositions to guide data collection and analysis (Yin, 2003); in this case, the literature review guided the theoretical propositions. In addition, case studies are particularly suitable to study phenomena in their natural context in research contexts that have no clear boundary between the subject and context (Yin, 2003): in this case, the object (anticipatory governance processes) and their contexts (e.g., the diverse social, political and cultural contexts where these processes were studied) also have no clear boundary. By contrast, controlled experiments need clear boundaries (Hopkin, 2010). Case studies are pivotal to obtaining a holistic and in-depth view of the research object (Verschuren & Doorewaard, 2010) with sensitivity to empirical complexities (Flyvbjerg, 2006). In relation to this, the proximity of the research to reality is considered to create a
23 Introduction 1 deeper understanding and avoids bias as the research object can ‘talk back’ (Flyvbjerg, 2006; Ragin, 1992). As part of case study research, data is gathered and triangulated in an open way (Yin, 2003), in a more flexible design compared to surveys and experiments to adjust to changing situations (Verschuren & Doorewaard, 2010). In this case, data and methods were triangulated, and in chapter 5 multiple researchers were involved in the interpretation of findings. The inquiry relies on multiple sources that are examined synchronously to iteratively explore and refine research findings (Kleining & Witt, 2000). Methods included in this study are literature and document reviews, snowballing, interviewing and focus groups. This means that findings are confirmed, rejected, and adapted based on new discoveries. Such replication logic is considered to create a more in-depth understanding with robust findings and advance the generalizability and validity of data (Baxter & Jack, 2008). The empirical chapters (3-5) together present a most different case study design context to analyze anticipatory governance in contexts independently of each other (Verschuren & Doorewaard, 2010). The carefully selected case study contexts provide context-dependent knowledge to generalize insight into anticipatory governance for four regions of the Global South as well as insights at the global level: insights into a global community of practice in chapter 3, comparative cross-regional insights in chapter 5 and Global North – Global South relations throughout the thesis. The breadth of anticipation processes is comparatively analysed. This is the most obvious method in the social sciences to test theoretical propositions and analyze phenomena (here anticipatory governance) as a broader trend (Hopkin, 2010). Comparison across cases allows for the interpretation of trends and explains what can be attributed to the subject or to the context. I followed a hierarchic approach to case study analysis to find explanations for similarities and differences between the cases (Verschuren & Doorewaard, 2010). In each case study contexts, the cases are first analyzed as a sequence of separate cases before analyzing the case as a whole. More information on the content of each chapter is presented in the next section. 1.6. Thesis roadmap The thesis is structured as follows. The next chapter, chapter 2, analyses how anticipatory governance is understood across a wide range of scholarly fields on three elements: a) how the future is conceived in terms of its knowability and manageability, b) what the implications are for present-day actions, and c) to what ultimate aim the future is engaged with. The literature review identifies four diverse approaches to anticipatory governance and culminates in an analytical framework to assess anticipatory governance in practice in the subsequent chapters. Chapter 3 then applies the analytical framework on anticipatory governance to examine how anticipation processes steer climate action
24 Chapter 1 in a climate-vulnerable context: West Africa. In a single case study design, it analyzes written and spoken statements in reports, literature, policy documents, semi-structured interviews and online communication. The research demonstrates that there is a hybridity of approaches, explains why certain approaches become dominant, and what the implications of dominant and marginalized approaches may be for the democratic and transformative potential of anticipatory governance. Next, chapter 4 connects the framework with a framework on transformation to research what different approaches to anticipatory governance mean for steering actions to transform food systems. It is a case study of a global initiative of foresight practitioners working on food systems transformations across the globe that analyzes their perspectives in a survey, a two-day workshop and interview. The study helps understand what approaches dominate and why and what the implications are for realizing sustainability transformations. The final empirical chapter, chapter 5, connects the framework to the notion of opening up and closing down to investigate what approaches to anticipatory governance mean for the framing of the space of future possibilities and possibilities for action. This is a cross-regional case study that compares anticipation processes in four regions of the Global South: West Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Central America and analyzes written and spoken perspectives in reports, literature, policy documents, semistructured interviews, online communication and focus group discussions. Combining this conceptual and empirical focus allows me to address all four research questions in a cross-cutting way. I come back to this in the conclusions chapter, chapter 6, which answers each of the research questions and discusses the contribution of the thesis to the conceptualization of anticipatory governance and wider literature.
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