Karlijn Muiderman

39 Four approaches to anticipatory governance 2 A third strand of writing that explicitly engages with the concept of anticipatory governance has emerged in sustainability science, for instance in the area of climate adaptation and resilience (Bates & Saint-Pierre, 2018; Boyd et al., 2015; Hurlbert & Gupta, 2019; Serrao-Neumann et al., 2013). This research engages with extant notions of anticipatory governance (e.g. Fuerth, 2009b; Guston, 2014; R. Quay, 2010) by seeking to provide “an alternative planning approach to address the adaptation challenge” (Serrao-Neumann et al., 2013, p. 441 see also Boyd et al., 2015). This approach seeks to develop proactive strategies to adapt and build the necessary resilience to contend with uncertain environmental futures (Boyd et al., 2015). The novelty lies in seeking to steer away from short-term decision-making to longer-term policy visioning in ways that can anticipate change and help realize more sustainable futures. Such perspectives also highlight the role played in anticipatory processes by local communities and a diverse array of stakeholders (Boyd et al., 2015; Serrao-Neumann et al., 2013; Tschakert & Dietrich, 2010). Fourth, there is a more critical line of research with explicit reference to anticipatory governance in global environmental governance and environmental policy literatures (Gupta, 2001, 2004, 2011; Jansen & Gupta, 2009; Mittelstadt et al., 2015; Talberg et al., 2018; see also Low, 2017a). Anticipatory governance is understood here as the attempt to govern under conditions of extreme scientific uncertainty and normative conflict over the very existence and nature of future environmental and technological risk and harm (Gupta, 2001, 2004, 2013). These studies in global environmental governance emphasize the need for critical scrutiny of anticipatory practices as contested sites of politics. 2.3.2. Implicit engagement with the concept of anticipatory governance In addition, three broad fields of study in the climate and sustainability domain engage with processes of anticipation and foresight, without using the term anticipatory governance explicitly. The first is futures studies with its strong methodological focus on anticipating and imagining futures, including in a sustainability context. While a lack of critical social science scrutiny of future-oriented anticipatory practices, such as scenario building, is noted to be an important research gap (Vervoort & Gupta, 2018), scholars in future studies have spearheaded the study of anticipatory practices and data on which other research communities have relied. Such anticipatory practices are often closely connected to policy to support long-term planning on complex and uncertain issues, such as climate change. Scenario thinking first picked up steam in futures studies in the 1960s, owing to publications such as The Year 2000 by Kahn and Wiener (Kahn & Wiener, 1967; also Wack, 1985) and the launch of a specialized journal Futures in 1968.

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