46 Chapter 2 in this approach is thus about mobilizing stakeholders to imagine futures and bring these futures to life. It is about co-creating desirable futures through social processes, but also about which future challenges to engage with (Vervoort et al., 2015). Ultimate aim: This approach makes the closest connection between futures and anticipation on the one hand, and sustainability transformations and transitions on the other (Hajer & Versteeg, 2019; Hebinck et al., 2018). Thus, scholars investigate anticipation here in contexts where new configurations of societal actors are brought together for radical change (Bennett et al., 2016), with the ultimate aim of co-creating new and more transformative futures (Bendor, 2018; Sova et al., 2015; Hajer & Pelzer, 2018; Robinson & Herbert, 2004). 2.4.4. Approach 4: Performative futures, critical interrogation, and political implications The fourth approach to anticipatory governance we identify here engages with the future primarily to emphasize the performative power of future imaginaries, in shaping present-day choices and governance trajectories. This perspective is thus most concerned to interrogate and shed light on these performative effects, in order to reveal their political implications for and in the present. This approach is most fully articulated in writings in science and technology studies, sociology of the future, and critical (global) environmental governance. There are certain similarities between this and the preceding two approaches, including seeing the future as unknowable and calling for opening decision-making to lay publics. However, this approach is most fundamentally concerned with interrogating the performative power and politics of engaging with and imagining the future. Conception of the future: In this fourth approach, the future is marked by irresolvable uncertainties and unknowns. Any attempt to reduce it to something that is manageable inevitably privileges particular ways of thinking and specific priorities. All claims about the future are seen here as political interventions, as representations or “fabrications of the future” (Jasanoff & Kim, 2015, p. 337) that have performative effects in the present (Selin, 2008; Anderson, 2010). All claims about the future, even when developed through deliberative processes, have the power to call into being specific futures by shaping present-day choices. This could be, for example, through limiting future climate mitigation and adaptation possibilities to the pragmatism of current regimes (Pulver & VanDeveer, 2009; Sarkki et al., 2017; Sova et al., 2015), or shaping how novel climate engineering technologies are conceptualized and de facto governed in the present (Gupta & Möller, 2018; see also Talberg et al., 2018). Frames about the future can include both utopian and dystopian visions that create distorted images of social realities
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