178 Chapter 6 this, the future is reduced to a technocratic account of what can be projected into the future. Climate futures are reduced to yield losses and economic decline. My point is not to argue that this is not important, but to argue that these types of practices dominate anticipatory governance while moving socially, culturally and politically diverse future images to the background. Plurality is morphed into consensus. Subjectivity into objectivity. The normative and political into technical ideas. This is not what all foresight stands for, but these are dominant dynamics that enforce the closing down of anticipatory governance. Futures are about negotiating what gets to stay in the future, who wins and who loses. Anticipation processes are the infrastructures through which these ideas about the future materialize. Anticipatory action is a key means through which life in contemporary democracies is secured, conducted, disciplined and normalized (Anderson, 2010, p. 197). It is assumed that anticipation processes allow for the opening up of future possibilities, but this research shows that this is false hope. At the very least, it should be made much more transparent and explicit what choices are being made and what gets prioritized and what is marginalized – and the marketplace made visible (Jasanoff, 2004). This is an appeal to decision-makers, but also to foresight practitioners to become aware that they are actively taking part in these closing down dynamics that have remained a blind spot to many. Anticipatory governance actors are not simply demarraging into the future but are deciding along the way who gets to stay on track and who will be supported. With its export to different parts of the world, anticipation is becoming a geopolitical matter. Too often is it assumed that anticipation reduces future (climate) risks and brings prosperity and this assumption reflects the modernist and capitalist notions of development that have been criticized for decades (Escobar, 2011). Much more work is needed on how to de-universalize futures and better connect to the needs and desires of communities whose futures are to be imagined. The appeal to decolonize futures is not new (Abdulla et al., 2019; Sardar, 1993). Research could connect the framework to counter-movements such as the aforementioned in order to learn how to open up the anticipatory governance of sustainability transformations and open up space for alternative futures, such as those that go beyond growth-dominated future imaginaries of sustainability transformations (Feola, 2019; Feola et al., 2021). Many more efforts are needed to make science for sustainable futures more just and equitable (Lahsen & Turnhout, 2021). Such research could also question universal narratives of time (Mazé, 2019), how different notions of time (Granjou & Salazar, 2016) and time/space (Aradau & Van Munster, 2012) impact what can be imagined. Given my positionality as a researcher who was raised and educated in the West, I consider it important that such an agenda is designed by researchers from and in the different locations, to whom I would be happy to be of assistance.
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