86 Chapter 3 those risks. The challenge is thus great and the implications huge for a region that this already severally impacted. Nevertheless, the findings in this study identify that in the search for a more future-oriented governance of climate change, it is important to create equal opportunities for imagining and shaping futures. Such ambitions have been set in the Paris Agreement, the Sustainable Development Goals, the National Adaptation Plans and the African Union’s Agenda 2063 (African Union, n.d.), to which many of the projects included in this research aim to contribute to. However, rather than making futures more inclusive, anticipation practitioners and researchers run the risk of making anticipation an exclusive process, determined by Western science and technical expertise, which consequently includes out local worldviews and needs. Scholars have argued that anticipation often represents imagines of the world that are based on western science and western notions of what a modern society should look like in the future (Escobar, 2020). These visions are often very differently visualized by local communities (Paprocki, 2019). Therefore, questioning if anticipation processes tap into existing power imbalances or exacerbate them is important. Particularly in places with weak regulation and high scientific uncertainty of climate change impacts, are the places where international organizations are considered to have more authoritative knowledge and are consequently more powerful in shaping policy discourses (Boamah, 2014). There is an urgent role for the international community that is involved in shaping climate futures to approach anticipation in ways that open up and democratizes futures (Macnaghten et al., 2014). However, this study points to tendencies to depoliticize anticipation. Such findings endorse and complement research in other contexts that pointed out that international organizations rather distance themselves from their political role and prefer apolitical claims (Kothari, 2005; Louis & Maertens, 2021). The work of international organizations is inherently political as they are involved in shaping global problems, but they interpret the world’s most pressing problems in technical ways – trough quantification and categorization that portray knowledge as value-free - and meet them with technical solutions and assistance (Louis &Maertens, 2021). It is thus important to give approaches 3 and 4 a more prominent place in efforts to create more inclusive and equitable climate futures. While the other approaches each propose some form of stakeholder deliberation, provide approaches 3 and 4 more agency to stakeholders, and the fourth uses anticipation solely for the purpose of shedding light on power imbalances, as these futures create expectations and actions through which power imbalances further materialize. Examples include the overreliance on western science and technology which is seen to have left little room for the integration of local knowledge in climate governance and have had reverse effects on societal transformation (Eriksen et al., 2011; Akamani, 2016).
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