169 Conclusions 6 of consultants battled over who gets to portray the future of Bangladesh, with four participatory scenarios losing out to two policy-relevant scenarios placed in a macroeconomic context. More unconscious closing down also seems to happen quite frequently when stakeholders are invited to create plausible future scenarios and interrogate policy effects for diverse societal groups, including marginalized groups, but (except for the Costa Rican case) such critical interrogation never informed open-ended governance commitments in which future images are frequently questioned and contestations are reflected upon (chapters 4 and 5). Sarkki (2017) has named this type of closing down the ‘trap of the day’, “a tendency of both users and producers of scenarios to use pre-existing policy agendas and scientific narratives as a pretext to promote their objectives instead of being open to transformation in science and policy”(p. 549). Such closing down while pretending to open up creates false expectations and is exclusion under the guise of inclusion. It can reassert the status quo and hinder the opening up to alternative future worlds that may be more sustainable or desirable. Identifying those dominant dynamics and what they mean is thus not an end in itself, but a way to bring issues of power and blind spots to light. 6.3. Implications for the wider literature and future research agenda The conceptual and empirical knowledge gaps that have been addressed in this thesis can be of relevance to the research strands that are close to the topic of study. 6.3.1. Insights for anticipatory governance scholarship This thesis has foremost furthered the conceptualization of the notion of anticipatory governance. It unpacked diverse understandings of anticipatory governance in the social science and interdisciplinary sustainability science in terms of their conceptions of the future, implication for actions in the present, and the ultimate aims intended to be realized. The research confirmed earlier research that anticipation processes steer futures in the present (Granjou et al., 2017; Gupta, 2001; Vervoort & Gupta, 2018) and demonstrated different approaches through which such ex-ante steering of the future takes place. In doing so, it revealed assumptions about the future that have remained implicit for a large set of anticipation processes in the sustainability domain across the globe. Once revealed, this thesis finds, the approaches have huge implications for steering sustainability transformations (see section 6.3.3). The theory-driven case studies illustrate that the four ‘ideal-type’ approaches are not neatly represented in practice (see figure 6.2). The first and second approaches are most common. The third and fourth are rarely used and appear only as elements merged into a more dominant approach. Moreover, the approaches appear in hybrid forms, and within these hybrids approach 1 is the dominant driver of action. These findings help further research on the politics of anticipation (section 6.3.4). The four approaches also serve as a boundary object for
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