36 Chapter 2 2.2.1. Identifying and selecting literature We identified the literature to be reviewed in three steps, aiming at a representative sample rather than at comprehensiveness. First, we searched for articles in the SCOPUS database that explicitly deploy the term ‘anticipatory governance’. Specifically, we looked for articles that contained the term ‘anticipatory governance’ in the title, abstract or keywords. We limited this search to journals in the social sciences and environmental sciences, as defined by SCOPUS. This step yielded an initial set of 57 articles. Through scanning the titles and abstracts of these 57 articles, we excluded ten that were too far removed from the climate and sustainability domain (dealing, for example, with health or security). This resulted in 47 articles that covered topics such as ‘anticipatory risk governance’, ‘anticipatory governance and foresight’, ‘anticipatory governance for social-ecological resilience’, ‘anticipatory climate governance’, ‘anticipatory governance of emerging technologies’, and ‘anticipatory governance of innovation’. In a second step, we went through the citations and reference lists of these 47 articles, in order to identify any further articles that explicitly mentioned anticipatory governance (but may not have been captured in our initial search, because they were not categorized as social or environmental sciences within Scopus) (Verschuren & Doorewaard, 2010). This process yielded another 24 articles using this term. In a third step, we scanned the references in these 71 articles to identify related literature that engages with futureoriented governance, without explicitly using the term anticipatory governance. Here we looked for terms such as ‘anticipation’, ‘anticipatory planning’, ‘anticipatory knowledge’, ‘anticipatory democracy’ but also ‘sociology of the future’, ‘foresight’ and ‘scenarios’. This yielded another 73 articles, resulting in a set of 144 articles that formed the basis for our review. Through this approach, we sought to identify a broad, representative sample of relevant articles in a large swath of social science and sustainability science scholarship that engages with anticipatory and future-oriented governance. 2.2.2. Process and method of review We then analyzed these 144 articles to unpack their understandings of anticipatory governance. We looked, specifically, for three elements that often remain implicit and are under-analyzed in studies on future-oriented governance: (i) diverse conceptions of and engagement with the future, including its knowability and manageability; (ii) implications for governance and policy actions to be taken in the present; and (iii) the ultimate aim of engaging in anticipatory governance. We had identified the first two elements as important to scrutinize in an agenda-setting article on anticipatory climate governance (Gupta and Vervoort, 2018), which called for conceptual and empirical scrutiny of how often-implicit conceptions of the future influence present-day policy choices. We thus included these two elements in our present review, and added a third
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