117 Anticipatory governance of sustainability transformations 4 4.5.1. Hybrid approaches and dominant perspectives: privileging prediction and uncertainty over pluralistic transformation and fundamental critique The first insight from our empirical analysis is that participants described the anticipatory approaches in their foresight projects and processes to be of a hybrid character, in relation to the four ideal-type approaches presented in the analytical framework. Thus, a given foresight initiative appeared to borrow elements from one or more of the four approaches. Understanding such hybridity and its implications is important, because the four approaches represent different fundamental assumptions about the future. For example, notions of probability and plausibility (which underpin approaches 1 and 2, respectively) were interpreted and used in diverse ways. Furthermore, anticipation processes working from a risk/prediction/probability approach to the future (associated with approach 1) also professed to incorporate deep uncertainty into their engagement with the future (associated with approach 2). However, these processes were still fundamentally concerned with prediction. It could be argued that they do not take approach 2’s insights on unknowability and uncertainty fully on board (Ramirez and Selin 2014). The second insight emerging from our empirical analysis is the dominance of approaches 1 and 2 over approaches 3 and 4, especially in terms of formulating actions in the present. Most anticipation processes in our case study provide recommendations for guiding strategic policy planning (approach 1) and developing participant capacities (approach 2), rather than mobilizing new groups of stakeholders (approach 3) or critically interrogating the assumptions underpinning future-related claims (approach 4). Approaches 3 and 4 are (sometimes) seen valuable for the design of the anticipation process itself – e.g., co-creating plural, aspirational futures, and the investigation of key assumptions - but not as guidelines for actions in the present. The first insight above about the hybrid character of foresight processes is connected to the second insight about the dominance of probability and plausibility in the foresight design. Often, imagined futures, created to greater or lesser extent using pluralistic and critically deliberative forms (approaches 3 and 4), are translated into more technical and value-neutral outcomes in policy documents. This implies that the openings that are created for plural and critical dialogue in the design of the process are closed down during the formulation of policy and action (Stirling, 2008; see also Bellamy et al., 2013) and that the epistemologies of approaches 3 and 4 that focus on the constructed and political nature of future visions are abandoned. On the whole, Foresight4food participants predominantly argued that more technical and probability-informed actions associated with approach 1 are most comfortable
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