175 Conclusions 6 shape or ‘have a future’ through exploring futures (Urry, 2016, p. 189), while others are being pushed into the ‘slow lane’ (ibid.). This means that by closing down while pretending to open up, anticipation processes may in fact further marginalize already less powerful views and groups (Escobar, 2020; Granjou & Salazar, 2016). Scholars argued for a downscaling of global environmental images to the local level by bringing places back in, along with the people who inhabit them, their communities, lifestyles, histories and memories, and their visions (Jasanoff, 2004) but this contradicts the observed closing down dynamics in anticipatory governance. The thesis furthermore points to the current Global South dependency in anticipatory governance of the Global North, which means that researchers and practitioners endanger representing a hegemony of Western science, donors and consultants who transfer their anticipatory knowledge to, or anticipate futures with incumbent national and local actors. Scholars have already pointed out that futures are being negotiated and may very well be colonized through anticipation (Feola, 2019; Sardar, 1993; Selin, 2011). Quite a few practitioners are aware of that something needs to change, but little is done to forefront the politics of anticipation, and as such actions may veer away from global aims for more inclusive and democratic futures (Kashwan et al., 2020). An important question thus remains whose future is being imagined in order to preserve it? Such insights into Global North – Global South relations open up further research on what these anticipated futures mean for climate justice (Okereke & Schroeder, 2009) and intergenerational justice (Kashwan et al., 2020). More equitable futures means to redistribute impacts and vulnerabilities between the rich and the poor, between countries and within countries (Okereke & Schroeder, 2009), that the poor be seen as legitimate participants (Kashwan et al., 2020) and indispensable to legitimately formulating decisions about the future (Macnaghten, 2009; Gupta, 2011). Further research is thus needed on pro-poor anticipation processes, to analyze which groups are represented, if participants have an active or passive role in shaping policy debates (Taylor et al., 2014), if they are able to critique instead of justify findings (Stirling, 2008) and if the processes are designed to challenge stakeholder perceptions about futures and presents (Rutting et al., 2021). As a counterresponse, some foresight work explicitly focuses on niche practices that create bottom-up transformations of socio-ecological systems (Pereira et al., 2019, 2021; Bennett et al., 2016), worldmaking (Vervoort et al., 2015), and upstream engagement (Macnaghten, 2009). These initiatives towards more equitable futures, with agency for people whose futures are impacted, provide important starting points for a research agenda on more equitable and pluralistic anticipatory governance. Such research could look into how the object that needs to be governed in the futures is shaped by colonial notions of histories and presents and impacts what can be imagined as Global Southern futures.
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