84 Chapter 3 with approaches 3 and 4. Instead, they ask participants to help determine politically sound pathways from expert-based future possibilities. Such statements were made Burkina Faso’s National Climate Adaptation Plan: “stakeholder empowerment is essential for successful implementation and behavioral change” (Ministry of Environment and Fishery Resources, 2015, p. 59), using the term empowerment in a paradoxical way - to advance buy-in of adaptation measures. For approach 2 in particular, researchers have argued that a lack of full engagement with what is associated with approach 2 here can result in inadequate efforts to build the adaptive capacities of those whose futures are at stake. Others also argued that by focusing primarily on a technology transfer of capacities one does not really connect to the local institutional context (Croxatto et al., 2020) and may constrain policy processes (Dessai et al., 2009). Several interviewees indeed pointed to such challenges, for example, they encountered a lack of institutional capacities to implement the recommendations from anticipation processes as to how to build exactly those institutional capacities (e.g., in the case of the meteorological services). In short, while the examples in this study point to a dominance of a technocratic orientation in the hybrid of approaches 1 and 2, there are several issues that may arise when in practice, as the framework helps bring to light. Alternatively, participatory approaches with agentic perspective, as associated with approaches 3 and 4, as seen to provide opportunities for building local learning spaces for anticipatory capacities (Tschakert & Dietrich, 2010) and such new configurations of approaches are important to explore. 3.5.2. Placing politics central in anticipatory governance The absence of approaches 3 and 4 has several implications for the anticipatory governance of climate change in West Africa. Approach 3 helps engaging with the constructed nature of futures by mobilizing new coalitions of actors who can co-create more radically transformative futures (Hajer & Versteeg, 2019; Mangnus et al., 2019), for example, in experimental and experiential methods (Candy & Kornet, 2019; Vervoort et al., 2022). In addition, approach 4 helps in the interrogation of visions of the future, by seeing anticipation as an inherently uncertain and normative process and a site of conflicting social interests (Urry, 2016). Anticipation can open up critical dialogue about what futures to engage with and make futures work more reflexive (Bellamy, 2016; Mangnus et al., 2021). Both these approaches accommodate maintaining more openended governance commitments, a focus on future risks as calculable and manageable (approach 1), which tends to reveal the contested nature of anticipation (Andersson, 2018; Gupta, 2011). As such, approaches 3 and 4 address the political role of science in informing decision-making about the future – since decisionmakers often turn to science for guidance on policy issues that are most uncertain and where political
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