221 Summary S notion of anticipatory governance, yet from distinct ontological and epistemological starting points. Four approaches to anticipatory governance are identified: 1. Approach 1 assesses probable (and improbable) futures in order to help inform strategic policy planning to reduce future risks. 2. Approach 2 explores plausible futures in order to build capacities and preparedness to reflexively navigate diverse uncertain futures. 3. Approach 3 focuses on the imagining of pluralistic futures in order to mobilize diverse societal actors to co-create new futures. 4. Approach 4 scrutinizes the performative power of future imaginaries in order to interrogate and shed light on their political implications in the present. These four approaches are presented in a figure that serves as an analytical framework for the rest of the thesis. The co-authors and I map a diverse set of methods and tools of anticipation onto the framework, illustrating that some methods and tools align more with a given approach, while others are used through multiple approaches. The analytical framework is thus a useful analytical lens to assess how the four approaches identified in the literature relate to practice in diverse sustainability contexts across the globe. This is done in empirical chapters 3, 4, and 5. Chapter 3 applies the analytical framework to a highly climate-vulnerable area - West Africa. In a case study analysis, I analyze through document analysis of reports and policy documents, and interviews with foresight practitioners and policymakers how anticipation processes have been used to inform climate change decision-making in Burkina Faso, Senegal, Ghana, Mali, and Niger. The study finds that the probable and plausible futures approaches (approaches 1 and 2) are dominant. They appear in various hybrid forms, but all take on a fairly technocratic interpretation, especially when actions in the present are determined. Moreover, approach 2 often becomes subservient to approach 1, which is more linear and planned in nature and therefore assumes a more predictable future. This is reflected, for example, in the way in which stakeholder participation takes shape. While many processes are participatory in nature, they often revolve around a transfer of knowledge from experts to stakeholders rather than a real exchange between a variety of people to open up dialogue on what and whose futures to engage with. Moreover, for practical reasons, it seems difficult to recruit beyond the expert. An important point is therefore that in these participatory processes the participants, but also the population (whose future, after all, participatory processes aim to visualize), have too little agency to be able to give their own vision of the future and to contribute to designing it. Furthermore, too little attention is paid to the power relations that determine the shaping of the future and thus steer actions in the present.
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