170 Chapter 6 cross-disciplinary learning (Shackley &Wynne, 1996) and highlight conceptual plurality on concepts such as probability and plausibility. This is an anything but settled field. Anticipation processes are often practiced by a consortium of international partners that conjoin the natural and social sciences. Disciplinary differences, such as ontological and epistemological views on the future, are not made explicit from the onset of a project (chapter 4). Conceptual plurality exists for example about probability in futures work – e.g., it is generally used as a synonym for a most likely future, but some see probability purely as a statistical measure that is wrongly used in futures studies while others see it as subjected to one’s beliefs (chapter 5). The framework has thus proven to be a useful analytical tool for boundary work and can be expanded to other sustainability domains (beyond climate change and food systems), or even beyond sustainability. The fourth approach, with its focus on performative futures and insights in the politics of anticipation, has offered a ‘meta-perspective’ to scrutinize any form of anticipation (including those covered by the other three approaches). It has shown how such implicit and different viewpoints about the future can create tensions once they surface in the process of formulating actions in the present – and how viewpoints that are attuned with incumbent views can become dominant in the process. These findings confirm research that points to the need for more reflexivity of the role of power in anticipation and thus bringing approach 4 to the fore (Granjou et al., 2017; Gupta, Möller, et al., 2020), but the empirical work illustrates that this is an aim rarely achieved. The framework helps to make such power imbalances explicit in the design of anticipation, as well in the translation of recommendations into policy guidance. Furthermore, the integration with the framework on transformations (Feola, 2015) and the connection with the notion of opening up and closing down (Stirling, 2008) are of added value to the further conceptualization of anticipation governance. It helped illustrate how more technocratic forms of anticipatory governance constrain the transformative potential of anticipatory governance and may close down possibilities for future action. As such, it confirms research in other contexts that anticipation processes prefer to delimit socio-political contingencies (Low & Schäfer, 2019; Sarkki et al., 2017) to which this research adds insights into the dynamics of strategic and unconscious forms of closing down, and their impact on framing future possibilities. The focus on Global North-Global South relations has been pivotal in this regard, placing these dominant dynamics and blind spots in a context of increasing awareness of the colonization of the future in sustainability contexts of the Global South (Bristow, 2017; Feola, 2019; Gram-Hanssen et al., 2022; Sardar, 1993). Pretending to include culturally, socially, and political diverse futures while in reality closing them down to existing policy frames may push out alternative worldviews and further donor dependencies. The technocratic approach to anticipation can be seen in light of the technocratic and tool-kit approach to
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