35 Four approaches to anticipatory governance 2 governance’, broadly understood as governing (or steering) in the present to engage with, adapt to or shape uncertain futures (Vervoort & Gupta, 2018; see also Boyd et al. 2015; Fuerth, 2009b; Guston, 2010, 2012, 2014). We see anticipatory governance as part of longstanding debates on governing for sustainability (e.g. Andonova et al., 2009; Biermann, 2007; Bulkeley, 2012; Gupta &Möller, 2018) to which it adds an explicit future-orientation. Understood as such, large swaths of literature in the social and sustainability sciences engage directly or indirectly with anticipatory governance, regardless of whether the term is explicitly used. Our aim here is to critically assess these perspectives, in order to unearth diverse conceptions of the future and implications for governance in the present. We proceed as follows: Section 2 describes in some detail the methodology we used to conduct our literature review. In section 3 we highlight how social science and sustainability science scholarship engages, both explicitly and implicitly, with the notion of anticipatory governance. In section 4, we draw on this overview to identify four distinct approaches to anticipatory governance discernible in the reviewed literature. Section 5 maps onto these four approaches a range of methods and tools of anticipation that they utilize. In concluding, we highlight how the four approaches to anticipatory governance that we identify provide a useful analytical lens through which to assess the ongoing practices of anticipatory governance now underway in the climate and sustainability realm. 2.2. Methodology We explain here how we identified the literature to be reviewed, and how we conduced our review. Our dominant methodology was to undertake a narrative-style interpretative review in order to identify diverse perspectives on anticipatory governance in a representative sample of social science and sustainability science literatures that explicitly and implicitly engage with the term. We relied on qualitative methods that are suitable to our aim of describing, synthesizing and furthering conceptual understanding of a key concept (in our case ‘anticipatory governance’), rather than undertaking a comprehensive author-centered or article-centered review that draws on quantitative methods to build or test theory (Rowe, 2014). While concepts such as anticipation, foresight, futures and forward-looking governance are ever more widely used in social science and sustainability science scholarship, the term ‘anticipatory governance’ is explicitly used by relatively few strands of writing. We thus identified and reviewed studies that explicitly use this term but also those that address related future-oriented governance.
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