55 Four approaches to anticipatory governance 2 new spaces for imagined futures, and for the inclusion of new groups of societal actors and their perspectives. For instance, Low & Buck (2020) investigate the extent to which responsible research and innovation (RRI) perspectives are an attempt to bring insights relating to performative futures (approach 4) to enrich approach 2’s focus on enhancing societal preparedness and adaptive capacities. Related to this, our mapping also serves to highlight that the scholarly perspectives that underpin the four approaches identified here vary in their degree of engagement with anticipatory governance on the ground. Thus, we see our categorization as useful not only because it helps to identify similarities and differences across scholarly engagement with concepts of anticipation and anticipatory governance, but also because it can serve as an analytical lens to assess ongoing practices of anticipatory governance that are now underway in various global contexts. In doing so, a number of questions merit further scrutiny. For instance, an important first-order question is: what types of anticipatory practices are dominant in and around policy processes, and which conception of the future do they take as a starting point? What are the desired ends of engaging with anticipatory governance in policy environments? Our own experience working with anticipatory climate governance processes in the field indicates that approach 1, focused on mitigating future risk, is far more common in policy environments than any of the other approaches – since it connects more with dominant, pre-existing conceptions of the future among policy makers, in terms of likelihood and risk, as well as with their interest in the development of long-term plans with predictable outcomes. In a similar finding for the specific domain of climate engineering, Low and Schäfer (2019) indicate that participatory foresight associated with what we characterize as approaches 2 and 3 here still plays a minor role in research on futures, when compared to probabilistic modelling. If this is the case, what opportunities are missed in the relative lack of prevalence of the approaches 2, 3 and 4 in practice? What impact might a greater mainstreaming of these other approaches have on anticipatory governance practices, in terms of the inclusion of more plausible context scenarios, more fundamentally pluralistic desirable futures, and more critical investigation of the basic assumptions underpinning anticipatory governance practice? What preconditions would be needed for this, in terms of the future-related skills, backgrounds, and conventions of those involved in climate and sustainability governance? Questions raised about different approaches in practice are very relevant also in climate-vulnerable regions of the developing countries, where anticipation processes are proliferating in climate policy and planning but have not
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