85 Approaches to anticipatory governance in West Africa 3 stakes are high (Jasanoff, 1987). The processes in this study illustrate how scientific and the policy process are considered as separate processes; scientists focus on getting the science ‘right’ and decision-makers can focus on making science-based decisions. Another example is that decision-makers are considered to have a normative vision for the country aligning with existing policy agendas and turn to anticipation for quantitative expert-based future scenarios. As such, the political process (normative) is separated from the scientific process (descriptive and quantifiable). Consequently, climate anticipation and decision-makers each consolidate their authoritative power (Shackley & Wynne, 1996) instead of pointing to the ways in which epistemic authority is used to legitimize and steer policy choices (Gupta & Möller, 2018; Jasanoff, 2004). Stakeholder deliberation is considered pivotal to legitimately making decisions about uncertain futures (Boyd et al., 2015). However, the contested nature of future engagements is often concealed. For example, a process of concealing occurred when deliberate forms of anticipation processes were considered to be subjective judgements and less transparently communicated; this was done to not frustrate the decision-making process. In general, the policy documents analyzed lacked transparently regarding how the outcomes of participatory foresight processes were translated into the document. By contrast, visualizations of quantitative scenarios (visualizations such as graphs and descriptions of model-based climate scenarios) are frequently used to legitimize policy choices. Interviewees referred to a process of depoliticization of subjective outcomes of participatory anticipation. What are essentially value-laden choices are turned into so-called ‘rational choices’ (Andersson, 2018). Most importantly, the findings illustrate that also much participatory anticipation lack an agentic perspective, where those who are affected by change have the ability to determine what the future may look like. In addition, Tschakert & Dietrich (2010) also argued that participatory approaches without agentic perspective, as associated with approaches 3 and 4, miss opportunities for building local learning spaces for anticipatory capacities. These findings point to important blind spots in the anticipatory governance of climate action in West Africa. 3.5.3. Consequences for anticipatory climate governance in West Africa The ways in which approaches 1 and 2 are used in hybrid formmight be specific to West Africa, and climate change decision-making especially. Researchers have pointed to the greater scientific uncertainty of climate change in West Africa than elsewhere in the world due to decadal and seasonal variability (Niang et al., 2014), which has drawn in the international community to increase scientific certainty about future climate change. Temperatures are expected to rise faster compared to global averages (Niang et al., 2014; Sylla et al., 2016) and the ability to cope with its impacts lowest (Yaro & Hesselberg, 2016). Researchers and decision-makers have thus called for anticipation that reduces scientific uncertainty and builds institutional capacities for anticipating
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