15 Introduction 1 approaches to anticipatory governance become dominant. The analysis sheds light on what is being prioritized and marginalized. The third question is: ‘What are the implications of the prevalence of different approaches to anticipatory governance for realizing sustainability transformations?’ In answering this question, I shed light on the political implications of dominant dynamics in anticipatory governance and what they mean for global efforts toward sustainability transformations. The fourth question is: ‘How do different approaches to anticipatory governance open up or close down future possibilities?’ Building on the previous, more general question, this final question is motivated by the need to better understand specifically what the dominant approaches mean for frames of the space of future possibilities and possible forms of actions in the present to realize those futures. Through this research, I scrutinize the first-order governance question concerning the ‘what, how and why’ of anticipatory governance. More specifically, chapter 2 unpacks the notion of anticipatory governance within a wide range of dispersed literatures across the social sciences and interdisciplinary sustainability sciences on three elements: a) the conceptions of the future embedded in anticipation processes, b) their implications for actions in the present, and c) the ultimate aims intended to be realized with anticipatory governance. The literature review creates a typology of diverse approaches to anticipatory governance which are applied in theory-based case studies to examine anticipatory governance in practice in sustainability contexts across the globe. A range of perspectives on futures, anticipation and anticipatory governance are included from various research fields and practices, most prominently futures studies and environmental governance, but also research on transformations, transitions, social-ecological systems, science and technology studies, policy and planning, and responsible research and innovation. The resulting framework is used to examine anticipation processes in many culturally, socially, and politically diverse contexts of the world to generate context-specific and comparative insights. In several theory-based case studies, the insights from the literature are used to examine and explain the dynamics of anticipatory governance processes. Chapter 3 picks up on questions 1 and 2 to examine approaches through which futures conceptions steer climate decision-making in West Africa. Chapter 4 answers questions 1, 2 and 3 in its examination of dominant approaches to anticipatory governance in a global community on food systems foresight and scrutinizes what this means for realizing sustainability transformations. Chapter 5 picks up on questions 1,
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