22 Chapter 1 to emphasize. In line with this, the methodology is qualitative and interpretative (see appendix 1.1 for an overview of all units of analysis, methods and data collected). The literature review in chapter 2 is a narrative-style interpretative review to understand and explain different approaches to anticipatory governance in a representative sample of literatures within the social sciences and interdisciplinary sustainability sciences. Such a qualitative and interpretative approach was chosen to synthesize implicit and explicit understandings of anticipatory governance and to develop an analytical framework – and such an approach is considered more suitable for this aim than a systematic literature review which is often paper-centric or author-centric (Rowe, 2014). Three analytical elements (conceptions of the future, implications for the present, and ultimate aims) guided the review of the literature and pointed to four diverse approaches regarding these three elements. The four approaches were presented as four narratives on these three elements; these narratives served as heuristic tools to identify how the approaches identified in the literature relate to practice across diverse sites (Bartlett & Vavrus, 2017). The ‘four approaches’ framework was then applied to various case study contexts across the globe to deductively examine anticipatory governance in practice and inductively refine the framework. Each case study was thus theory-driven (Toshkov, 2016). Chapter 3 applies the ‘four approaches’ analytical framework to understand what approaches dominate, chapter 4 connects the framework to the framework on transformations (Feola, 2015) to understand how the (dominant) approaches connect to different conceptions of transformations and chapter 5 connects the framework to the notion of opening up/closing down (Stirling, 2008) to understand how anticipatory governance opens up or closes down future possibilities. Case study research has several qualities that made it most suitable for this research. Most case studies have a deductive and inductive process, which helps the further conceptualization of anticipatory governance. The inquiry often starts with developing theoretical propositions to guide data collection and analysis (Yin, 2003); in this case, the literature review guided the theoretical propositions. In addition, case studies are particularly suitable to study phenomena in their natural context in research contexts that have no clear boundary between the subject and context (Yin, 2003): in this case, the object (anticipatory governance processes) and their contexts (e.g., the diverse social, political and cultural contexts where these processes were studied) also have no clear boundary. By contrast, controlled experiments need clear boundaries (Hopkin, 2010). Case studies are pivotal to obtaining a holistic and in-depth view of the research object (Verschuren & Doorewaard, 2010) with sensitivity to empirical complexities (Flyvbjerg, 2006). In relation to this, the proximity of the research to reality is considered to create a
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