Karlijn Muiderman

73 Approaches to anticipatory governance in West Africa 3 3.3.2. Data collection I consider the type of methods and tools of anticipation as a starting point for the analysis of which approach(es) to anticipatory governance might be taken. Therefore, the first step was to identify methods and tools that have been used to anticipate climate futures in West-Africa that are intended to inform decision-making processes. The aim was to explore their nature and to map how they relate to the analytical framework. The intention was not to cover all methods and tools illustrated in figure 3.1. Therefore, I started my search for research on anticipation processes on Scopus using the following keywords: [country] AND development AND policy AND climate AND change AND future. I read all abstracts and included papers with at least two of the following keywords: future, adaptation, anticipation, scenario, and foresight. This resulted in 11 papers that discussed anticipation processes in the climate adaptation domain. In addition, I looked on Scopus, Google Scholar and Google for national and sectoral policies (e.g., agricultural policies) policies that prioritize climate adaptation, including government websites and UN websites (e.g., adaptation-un.org). However, since policies were rarely published online, I added a snowball technique as second data collection method. I shared my findings - the list of policies and processes found so far - with several regional experts working on the foresight-policy interface who then provided additional input into the findings. The snowballing started with the regional experts of the Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). This is a large international network of research institutes that was established in 1971 to achieve future food security and a partner in the research project. Some of their experts helped to identify influential anticipation processes and climate policies. Based on these findings, other experts were contacted, and so on in order to triangulate data and validate findings (Verschuren & Doorewaard, 2010). Selecting anticipatory governance processes thus occurred in a parallel-iterative rather than linear-serial process. Consequently, I learnt more about the case context which helped to select cases (Verschuren & Doorewaard, 2010; Bryman, 2012). For each country, I set the scope to approximately six prominent anticipation processes and climate policies that had been initiated after 2008. I also included a few processes with a regional orientation (see the ‘regional’ row in Table 3.1). All climate policies were at the national level. Table 3.1 below illustrates the selected anticipation processes.

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