130 Chapter 5 5.1. Introduction Anticipation processes such as scenarios, visioning processes, and simulation gaming have become a key governance mechanism to imagine uncertain climate futures and at least potentially guide actions in the present. These processes have spread throughout different disciplines (Andersson, 2018; Edwards, 2010) and prominent norm-setting institutions such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the United Nations Environment Program’s Global Environmental Outlook (Pereira et al., 2021). However, there are very different ideas regarding how anticipation can inform governance across the social sciences and interdisciplinary sustainability sciences (Muiderman et al., 2020). Some consider anticipation processes as useful tools for designing policy trajectories that prevent future risks and hazards (Fuerth, 2009; Fuerth & Faber, 2013) while others point to a lack of reflexive engagement with diverse visions of the future (Pulver & VanDeveer, 2009). These divergent visions have different implications for how futures work can help guide actions in the present (Muiderman et al., 2020). Anticipatory governance is emerging as an integrative, interdisciplinary research agenda that analyzes the steering effects of these emerging processes of anticipation by which is meant most broadly governing uncertain futures in the present (Vervoort & Gupta, 2018). Critical social science scholars have pointed to an important research question. How can anticipation processes be understood as sites of political negotiation, where future dynamics are made sense of, and processes of prioritization and inclusion are shaped? They argue that imagining the future informs the shaping of policy choices in the present (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015; Taylor, 2004; Gupta et al., 2020). Of particular importance to this paper is Stirling (2008) who has pointed to the growing number of deliberative processes that try to engage with – or open up to - future complexities and contingencies in the anticipation of scientific and technological progress, but end up closing them down instead, because of the ways in which power limits what is considered possible and desirable to be explored; and how social actors frame and understand what are viable alternatives (Stirling, 2008; Turnhout et al., 2016). These dynamics are important, others have also argued, because futures can be framed in certain ways, e.g. as future emergencies, to either legitimize socially unwanted action (Bellamy, 2016) or comply with pragmatic solutions available to current regimes (Sarkki et al., 2017; Sova et al., 2015). The dynamics of opening up and closing down possibilities for action are important to scrutinize in the uncertain and normatively and scientifically contested terrain of futures work (Gupta et al., 2020). Anticipatory governance processes are often still quite prediction-oriented and technocratic (Low & Schäfer, 2019; Muiderman et al., 2022) even
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