118 Chapter 4 for policy makers and resonated better with the logic of policy environments. The dominance of approach 1 is therefore motivated by the aim to produce policy-relevant outcomes rather than what is fundamentally needed to transform food systems. In the ‘present action’ element, the pluralistic and critical tendencies of approaches 3 and 4 that focus on the politics of anticipation are subsumed by approach 1 to fit outcomes into the more value-free and technocratic planning preferences of incumbent actors (such as governments). Decision-makers can then take the lead in making political choices and legitimize their actions based on what they perceive as objective expert-based input. This dominance of approach 1 in the ‘present action’ element contradicts the diversity of stated ultimate aims underpinning Foresight4Food projects, which, according to the participants, cover all four approaches. An important consequence is that several aims might not be achieved or are not fully pursued. While approach 1 action may be strategically effective in some cases, it is also problematic because it risks neglecting the inherently normative and political nature of futures work (Granjou, Walker and Salazar, 2017; Patterson et al., 2017; Esguerra, 2019). 4.5.2. Different approaches to anticipation connect to different conceptions of transformation We argued above that conceptions of the future have implications for actions in the present to transform food systems. These assumptions about the knowability and manageability of the future are thus ultimately also about how sustainability transformations take place. If so, how do current approaches and practices of anticipation in the food system domain relate to diverse implications for sustainability transformations? In Figure 4.3, we map the Muiderman et al. (2020) anticipatory governance framework onto Feola’s framing of different conceptions of transformation, and the role of transformation research. This exercise reveals that approach 1 can be understood to correspond with emergent and deliberate understandings of transformation, but in a very particular way. This approach sees the future as partly emergent from larger societal processes, but since these processes can be predicted to some degree, the future is also controllable, and therefore, transformations are seen as deliberate in some sense. Approach 1 analyses are intended to be analytical-descriptive, offering analyses of future trends and contextual developments; but they can also be prescriptive, aiming to ‘win the future’ (see e.g. Fuerth and Faber, 2013) based on (partially) knowable future developments.
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