54 Chapter 2 mapped the most widely used anticipation methods and tools onto our four anticipatory governance approaches (as shown in Figure 2.1), illustrating that similar methods are used in more than one approach to anticipatory governance, even as they serve distinct ends. Our review thus also builds on and complements the analysis in Low and Schäfer (2019), who investigate the conceptions of the future inherent in specific sets of methods and tools (in a climate engineering context). In concluding, we should emphasize again, as we did at the outset of our analysis, that our categorization of four approaches to anticipatory governance is not meant to imply hard boundaries between them, nor to suggest silos of scholarly inquiry that rigidly adhere to specific claims and assumptions. Instead, we recognize that the four approaches —and the diverse and overlapping scholarly perspectives underpinning them—crossfertilize and engage with each other. In distinguishing these four approaches, our aim is to identify ideal-types that serve an analytical purpose: to map and shed light on how distinct ways of imagining and engaging with the future have implications for presentday research and practice in climate and sustainability governance. Our aim also is to provide an analytical lens through which to further analyze the (likely to be) ‘messiness’ of anticipatory approaches in practice, whereby different conceptions of the future, actions to be taken in the present, and ultimate aims might co-exist in a single anticipation process. This may be the case because different groups of researchers or practitioners collaborate and bring to the table different perspectives. While this could lead to novel outcomes, the result could also be conflict or an uncomfortable subservient role becoming assigned in practice to certain approaches – such as anticipatory activities aimed at creating novel, pluralistic futures (approach 3) having to fit their outcomes into a process dominated by probabilistic assessments (approach 1) or vice versa; or researchers focused on plausibility (approach 2) struggling to engage with a process focused on imagining alternative desirable futures (approach 3). However, more deliberate and complementary combinations can also be imagined. For instance, an anticipation process may take as starting point a “multiple future worlds” approach (3) to imagining the future development of human societies and technologies, but then use a “multiple plausible trajectories” or even “most probable future” approach (approaches 2 or 1) to population or climate change projections. In this way, those involved in a process may choose to assign plausibility or likelihood assessments to specific drivers, which then feed into the imagining of more radically pluralistic worlds (Vervoort et al., 2015). Finally, when considering complementarities, there is much potential for work that falls under the critical and interrogative approach 4 to open up reflective spaces for the other approaches. Critical approach 4 can identify and create
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