51 Four approaches to anticipatory governance 2 2.5.3. Anticipatory tools and methods to imagine pluralistic futures (Approach 3) In this approach, participatory futures methods and tools are used to mobilize stakeholders to collectively imagine pluralistic transformative pathways. Various methods for the development of participatory futures are used with the understanding that multiple scenarios represent multiple incommensurable future worlds. This differs from the, often implicit, understanding most common in the second approach: that there is a single, shared reality from which multiple future trajectories are possible within the boundaries of plausibility (Vervoort, 2015). These innovations and experiments are ideally employed to “embrace uncertainty, discomfort and knowledge gaps, and the connected need to capture and make productive fundamental plurality among understandings of the future” (Vervoort et al., 2015, p. 62). Visions, scenarios, and backcasted pathways are intended to mobilize collective action towards more desired futures (Bennett et al., 2016; Kok et al., 2007; Robinson et al., 2011; Sova et al., 2015; Vervoort et al., 2014). Simulation gaming plays an increasingly important role among the tools associated with this approach (Vervoort, 2019) and for “thinking beyond positioned views on today’s desirable state” (Sarkki et al., 2017, p. 559). Methods and tools also include other forms of community dialogues, training, education, and experimentation (Garb et al., 2008; Karlsen et al., 2010; Mayer, 2009). Though a number of these methods overlap with the second approach, the focus here is on creating new shared futures with the purpose of realizing them, as distinct from the focus in approach 1 on navigating uncertain futures in a more adaptive mode. Notably, because of the interest in imagining and realizing pluralistic futures, there is a stronger focus within this approach 3 on methods that allow for the creation of future visions and scenarios that can be engaged with as fully embodied and realized experiences. Such ‘experiential futures’ methods (Candy & Dunagan, 2017) include turning scenarios into interactive theatre (Baena, 2017); creating exhibitions (Hajer and Versteeg 2019; (Bendor et al., 2017) and design workshops; various experientially focused games from VR games to live action role playing games (Vervoort 2019); and integrating futures into present day environments such as cityscapes (Candy & Dunagan, 2017). Such methods can and sometimes are used for futures developed from approach 2 as well, but the match between experiential futures and approach 3 is more common because of the explicit interest in bringing new desired futures to life. 2.5.4. Assessing how imagined futures are performative (Approach 4) Methods and tools deployed in critical strands of scholarship on anticipatory governance are, to some extent, similar to those used in other approaches as well, including future scenarios, technology assessment, integrative deliberation, and vision assessments. However, here such methods are either the subject of, or used for, critical interrogation
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