75 Approaches to anticipatory governance in West Africa 3 As a third step, I examined three processes of anticipation to further analyze the implicit and explicit ways in which conceptualizations of the future impact actions in the present (see the three projects written in italics in the grey boxes of Table 3.1). I chose processes that are (a) diverse in terms of the type of method/tool used, but (b) have in common an intention to inform decision-making. This allowed me to analyze (i) if processes align with a given approach or multiple approach and (ii) how conceptions of the future are perceived to relate to actions in the present. The first anticipation process includes the climate models and policy workshops of the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis (AMMA-2050) program that has supported national climate adaptation planning in West Africa with climate scenarios and policy workshops. The second process is the participatory foresight process of the Future Scenarios Project of the CGIAR research program on Food Security, Agriculture and Climate Change (CCAFS). Here, socioeconomic and climate scenarios of a wide range of future drivers of change up to 2050 are developed to guide policy formulation. The third process is the workshop on climate information and generation of the West African Biodiversity and Climate Change (WABiCC) Program. This is a large five-year program in which many future-oriented capacity building activities are organized to support countries in the formulation of National Adaptation Plans (NAPs). This third step in the analysis builds on 14 Skype and online semi-structured interviews with people working on both sides of the anticipationpolicy interface. This included at least the designer/facilitator of the anticipation process (e.g., the workshop facilitator, modeler, etc.), an intermediary person (e.g., someone responsible for stakeholder participation and policy engagement), and a policymaker or person responsible for policy follow-up. The interviews were structured according to important topics (based on the analytical framework) yet without a fixed outline, to capture perspectives and frames of the interviewees better inductively. 3.3.3. Data analysis All data were analyzed in a qualitative case study approach that is suitable to the aim of describing, interpreting, and furthering conceptual understanding of anticipatory governance. The qualitative case study approach is an open way of gathering and triangulating data – in this case the interpretation of texts and interviews. Rather than seeking to give a systematic overview of anticipation processes in a quantitative manner, the aim of this research is to scrutinize anticipatory governance approaches in a narrative type of interpretative analysis. I used several research techniques - literature and document review, snowballing and interviewing - in parallel to iteratively explore and refine the research findings. The dialogue between exploration and discovery of new findings is a seen as a key quality of qualitative case study research (Kleining & Witt, 2000) as it allows for obtaining an in-depth understanding and holistic picture of the research object as a whole (Verschuren & Doorewaard, 2010; Yin, 2003) with sensitivity
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