34 Chapter 2 2.1. Introduction In times of accelerating earth system transformations and their potentially disruptive societal and distributional consequences, sustainability research and practice is increasingly focusing on imagining and governing the future (Vervoort & Gupta, 2018). The Paris Climate Agreement’s aspirational 1.5 degree target — to strive to keep average temperature increases to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels — has given further impetus to anticipation processes and tools to explore and realize plausible or desirable ‘climate futures’ (Granjou et al., 2017). With the proliferation of anticipation practices in diverse policy arenas, the (sustainable) future of our societies has become a central element in scholarly and policy debate. Numerous processes and practices are used today to imagine futures, to question assumptions about what futures are possible and to develop strategies for transformational change (Habegger, 2010). Such anticipation processes often seek to broaden the boundaries of imagination, explore future directions under multiple drivers of change, and guide sustainability transitions and policies under conditions of complexity and scientific uncertainty (Bourgeois, 2012; Habegger, 2010; Pérez-Soba & Maas, 2015; Vervoort & Gupta, 2018). Most formal approaches to anticipation relate to foresight, including qualitative and quantitative scenario planning, visioning and backcasting, horizon scanning, anticipatory gaming and other approaches (Swart et al., 2004; Turnpenny et al., 2015; Wiebe et al., 2018). Other formal anticipation practices include vulnerability and impact assessments. But anticipation also happens without formal methodologies and processes; such informal attempts are also worthy of investigation. The growing focus on anticipation in sustainability governance points to an important research agenda: to scrutinize the diverse conceptions of the future embedded within diverse perspectives, and how these shape present-day governance and policy choices. While important strands of social science scholarship, including in science and technology studies, responsible research and innovation, geography, environmental governance and futures studies, have long pointed to anticipatory processes as sites of political negotiation (Anderson, 2007, 2010; Mike Hulme, 2009, 2010; Mittelstadt et al., 2015; Nordmann, 2014), a comprehensive analysis of distinct perspectives on anticipatory processes, and their role in imagining, interrogating or seeking to realize diverse climate futures, remains timely and urgent (Vervoort & Gupta, 2018; Pulver & VanDeveer, 2009). This is the aim of our review. We survey a range of social science and sustainability science perspectives here that engage with conceptions of the future and associated present actions. The organizing concept for our review is the notion of ‘anticipatory
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