100 Chapter 4 The next sections are structured as follows. Section 2 reviews scholarly debates on anticipation and transformations and their relevance for governing food systems. In section 3, we explain our methodological approach. In section 4, we apply the analytical framework on anticipatory governance by Muiderman et al. (2020) to examine the diversity of perspectives in the Foresight4Food initiative regarding their conceptions of the future, implications for the present and ultimate aims for engaging with anticipation. In discussing our findings in section 5, we connect this framework to the analytical framework on transformations by Feola (2015) to analyze what these perspectives imply for governing sustainability transformations in the food systems domain and beyond. 4.2. Anticipation for food system transformations There is a growing role for anticipation to guide future sustainability transformations (Burch et al., 2019) amongst others in global norm setting institutions such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), its Shared Socio-Economic Pathways (Riahi et al., 2017), the UNFCCC, integrated assessment models (O’Neill et al., 2014), UNEP’s Global Environmental Outlook, the Millennium Ecosystems Assessment and other assessments (van Vuuren et al., 2012). A recently developed framework on anticipatory governance provides a new lens to analyze fundamental assumptions made in these ongoing practices of anticipatory governance (Muiderman et al., 2020). The framework identifies four approaches to anticipatory governance within social and interdisciplinary sustainability sciences and focuses on three often implicit and underanalyzed elements, namely: (a) diverse conceptions of the future; (b) the implications for actions to be taken in the present; and (c) the ultimate end to be realized through anticipatory governance. Scholarly debates on anticipation and transformation are closely related (Burch et al., 2019) - sustainability transformations are often seen as relying on the envisioning of future pathways (Späth and Rohracher, 2010; Wyborn, 2015; Hebinck et al., 2018). There are, however, different perspectives in transformations literature - on how change happens, and on the role of science in guiding transformations (Feola, 2015; Patterson et al., 2017). We argue that this also leads to different roles for anticipation. Feola (2015) reviewed various literatures to identify different conceptions of, and research approaches to, transformation. Figure 4.1 below illustrates these different perspectives on transformations mapped onto two axes: how change happens (from deliberate and actor-driven, to emergent out of wider structural system change), and how the aim of research is framed (prescriptive to descriptive). Feola characterizes research perspectives as either analytic-descriptive (the below left box) or solution-oriented (the top right box).
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