172 Chapter 6 uncertainty and alternative futures and worldviews, but there is a strong tendency to formulate action in a quite technocratic and unidirectional way. The interviews highlight that the closing down of future options is not always a conscious strategy to reconstruct findings (Sarkki et al., 2017), but more a way of doing, a perceived prerequisite to connect to the logic of policy environments (Turnhout et al., 2016). Further research is needed on how to improve the ‘governance-literacy’ of anticipation (Mangnus et al., 2021), including the unmaking of existing approaches (Feola, 2019). One area is how to build in mechanisms in anticipation processes for more reflexivity and pluralism, which “starts with being literate about what attitudes toward the future exist and what the power dynamics are, with being reflexive about one’s attitude toward the future, and with being aware of what other attitudes toward the future might have to offer” (Mangnus et al., 2021, p. 3). Much foresight scholarship has developed practices to explore discomfort, but approaches in practice still move towards what is prominent in the present and observed in the past (Ramírez & Selin, 2014). These practices impede thinking beyond the status quo and create premature lock-ins (Vervoort, Mangnus, et al., 2022). 6.3.3. Insights for the literature on governing sustainability transformations The research also presents important findings to the wider and interdisciplinary field of sustainability transformations, by examining what the diverse approaches to anticipatory governance mean for realizing sustainability transformations. This is urgent as futures work can be seen as part of the transformative turn in science (Blythe et al., 2018) in which the role of science for sustainability is increasingly aiming to advance transformations by acting as a catalyst for structural social change (van der Hel, 2020) yet research is needed as to how anticipation steers such transformations (Burch et al., 2019). This thesis explained that there are different approaches to which researchers and practitioners propose to anticipate and govern the needed sustainability transformations (Boyd et al., 2015; Burch et al., 2019). Although transformation is understood to mean different things (Feola, 2015) it is often associated with fundamentally different ways of doing things and imagining fundamentally different futures (Blythe et al., 2018). There are, however, differences in the types of transformation that is proposed (chapter 5). To some scholars is anticipatory governance a way to better manage uncertainty and adapt to emergent change (Quay, 2010), as a more incremental form of transformation. To others it is deliberate action needed to transform systems to a more desirable state (Pereira et al., 2019; Vervoort, Mangnus, et al., 2022). Furthermore, the findings help explain that status-quo thinking often takes hold of its transformative potential. Anticipatory governance is ultimately about realizing transformations (Vervoort & Gupta, 2018), or even win the future (Fuerth & Faber, 2013), but mutually reinforcing interests, norms and power-structures indeed obstruct
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