220 Summary In times of accelerating earth system transformations and their potentially disruptive societal consequences, imagining and governing the future is now a core challenge for sustainability research and practice. Anticipation processes have become a key governance mechanism to imagine uncertain climate futures and guide actions in the present. Anticipation processes include foresight practices, such as scenarios, visioning processes, and games. In addition, methods that are not normally labeled as foresight can also be used to explore the future, such as impact assessments and costbenefit analyses. These methods and tools have become popular methods for imagining uncertain futures in the present and informing decision-making. They have spread throughout different disciplines and prominent norm-setting institutions such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the United Nations Environment Program’s Global Environmental Outlook. Many social science scholars have argued for understanding anticipation as a site of political negotiation, where images of the future are made sense of, and shape how we understand the future and act on it in the present. There is, however, a lack of scrutiny of how the future is conceptualized in anticipation processes, and how these conceptions steer sustainability actions in the present. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to examine how conceptions of the future steer actions in the present and what their implications are for realizing sustainability transformations. I analyze anticipation processes in various sustainability domains and global contexts through the lens of anticipatory governance, which can be broadly defined as ‘steering uncertain futures in the present’. The thesis examines the following question: ‘How are conceptions of the future steering anticipatory governance actions in the present and with what implications for realizing sustainability transformations?’ After the topic of research and its intended theoretical contributions have been introduced in chapter 1, chapter 2 unpacks divergent explicit and implicit conceptualizations of anticipatory governance in the social science and sustainability science literatures. As chapter 2 shows, there are various (often implicit) conceptions of the future embedded in these understandings of anticipatory governance, in terms of the extent to which the future can be known and steered in the present. And these conceptions each have different implications for actions to be taken in the present, and also pursue diverse ultimate aims to be realized. The chapter reviews perspectives in disciplines such as public administration, futures studies, socio-ecological system theories, environmental governance, transition studies, science and technology studies, and responsible research and innovation studies. All these perspectives engage explicitly or implicitly with the
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