148 Chapter 5 5.4.4.3. Opening up/closing down Anticipatory governance processes are more open in this context with more transformative outcomes – in the sense of more radically different and deliberate action. Focus group participants pointed to a culture of participatory approaches in Central American countries. An example is the Ministry of Agriculture in Guatemala who receives quite a large number of anticipation studies, and rejects those not formulated in a participatory manner or including the government at an early state. The Honduras scenarios illustrates how critical futures dialogues (associated with approach 4) can be part of approach 2; diverse perspectives were seen to contribute to navigating diverse futures (approach 2), not to interrogate the performative power of anticipation (approach 4). Here, small-scale farmers were included to make sure the policy would be relevant to them. The futures opened up to include perspectives on plausible drivers of change, not necessarily on political contingencies – but still it aimed to include voices whose futures were at stake. The Honduras’ National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy committee invited critical feedback from regional stakeholders to ensure that the policy would meet the local needs of farmers in an approach 2 through and pluralistic futures work. The Belize visions combined approaches 1 and 3 by aiming to reduce risks in pluralistic futures work. It was said to have resulted in a paradigm shift – changing participants’ mindset and awareness. The Costa Rican scenarios moved from approach 1 to combine all approaches; combining pluralistic futures for radical transformation (approach 3) with policy robustness (approach 2) in an open deliberative process to examining alternative visions and blind spots that may further marginalize vulnerable groups. The futures dialogue was opened up to realize more radically transformative ambitions than the models were able to show, and current transcendental emission efforts are insufficient to stay below a 1,5degree temperature rise. The Costa Rican government was committed to maintaining an open dialogue in 5-yearly iterative cycles. Like in the other regions, these examples illustrate similar forms of anticipation in hybrids of approaches of 1, 2, 3 and 4, but provided more opportunities for the opening up of anticipatory governance. 5.5. Discussion and conclusions: opening up or closing down anticipatory governance in the Global South In this paper, we set out to conduct a cross-regional analysis, investigating how anticipation processes in the Global South open up or close down potential futures and possibilities for action in the present. Our analysis finds that climate futures are predominantly framed in terms of probability or (to a somewhat lesser extent) plausibility - what we refer to as approaches 1 and 2 in our framework. Only a few processes imagine diverse and plural future worlds or critically examine assumptions
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