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
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