21 Introduction 1 approaches that position futures as performance, such as techniques of futuring as a lens through which to analyze anticipation in, amongst others, discourse analysis and dramaturgy (Hajer & Pelzer, 2018). Another example is multicriteria mapping which opens up a dialogue about frames of the future, competing visions and social concerns (Bellamy et al., 2013). Another set of scholarly works on dominant visions, mainly in anthropology and history, pointed to how futures are occupied by present-day interests projected into the future (Anderson, 2006; Escobar, 2020; Sardar, 1993). Their work has been important to understanding what dominates in a pluriform world and what pushes other worldviews out. Andersson (2018) noted that Kahn’s scenarios intended to engage with the plurality of world developments but were regardless a continuation of the status quo, i.e., the American capitalist hegemony in a modernization logic and rationalist tradition. Clashes between this hegemony and rivaling conceptions of world futures emerged during and after the Cold War, which raised attention for the plurality and uncertainty of human life, politics, and imagination (Andersson, 2018; see also for an analysis of Soviet futures Rindzevičiūtė, 2016). Escobar (2020) argues that much futures work embeds ‘one-world thinking’, i.e., the ontological assumption of the existence of one real and a possible world which is according to him a form of modernist and masculinist political thinking. In his essays on futures of Afro- and Latin-American women, he demonstrates how this worldview disempowers minority groups in having decisive power to change things globally. Instead, there is a plurality of imaginations, many ways in which humanity aspires to, anticipates and imagines pasts and futures (Appadurai, 2013) and gives meaning to and constructs worlds (Goodman, 1987). These insights increasingly merge with novel forms of anticipation. Thinking on pluralism informs methods that use scenarios as tools for worldmaking (Vervoort et al., 2015) and ethnographic experiential futures that help make futures more visible and tangible (Candy & Kornet, 2019). This thesis is informed by and contributes to this research in two ways. First, the extent to which these more critical and plural forms of anticipation inform the anticipatory governance of sustainability transformations has not been empirically and comparatively researched in diverse contexts across the globe. Second, the insights give shape to a focus on dominant dynamics in anticipatory governance and their implications. 1.5. Research design and methodology This thesis draws on relativist thinking and embeds a constructivist epistemology. I see the nature of reality as being dependent on the observer, and knowledge about reality as a construct of ideas, concepts, and theories about reality. This also implies that my findings are influenced by my (Western and secular) ideas and I consider this important
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