98 Chapter 4 4.1. Introduction Diverse anticipation methods and tools have been used for decades across different domains - increasingly to support strategy and action toward sustainability transformations (Henrichs et al., 2010; Wiek et al., 2012; Pereira et al., 2019). Anticipation can be understood as a general term for formal or informal processes that attempt to make sense of uncertain futures (Vervoort & Gupta, 2018). Foresight methods and tools are most commonly associated with anticipation processes, including, amongst others, scenario planning, visioning and back-casting, horizon scanning, and gaming (Swart, Raskin and Robinson, 2004; Jordan and Turnpenny, 2015; Wiebe et al., 2018). Other methods and tools not commonly labelled foresight can nonetheless be anticipatory in character, since they explore futures in order to inform policy processes in the present. These include, among others, risk assessment, environmental impact assessment and real-time monitoring of changing sustainability conditions with an explicit futureorientation (Rogers, 2011; Fazey et al., 2015). Anticipatory governance as a concept refers to governance processes in the present that seek to use anticipation to engage with uncertain futures in order to guide action in the present (Vervoort and Gupta, 2018; Burch et al., 2019; see also Boyd et al., 2015; Fuerth, 2009; Guston, 2014). A research agenda on anticipatory governance has emerged from across critical social sciences research traditions, including science and technology studies, responsible research and innovation, and environmental policy and governance (Muiderman et al. 2020). Salient questions brought up include: whose visions are articulated in anticipation processes, what kind of futures they point to and how these visions have implications for actions in the present (Vervoort and Gupta, 2018)? Sustainability transformations take place through interconnected and often messy (non-linear) dynamics between environmental, societal, technological and economic systems (Patterson et al., 2017). One key sustainability challenge is transforming the food system to a more sustainable system - both in terms of human and planetary health (Herrero et al., 2020). The framing of ‘transformation’ is inherently anticipatory as it shifts the focus of practitioners and policymakers to envisioning more sustainable futures and identifying pathways for actions in the present to achieve transformational change (Feola, 2015; Patterson et al., 2017; Burch et al., 2019). In this context, structured, deliberate anticipation processes are considered particularly useful for engaging with the non-linearity and boundary-spanning structure of complex system change through their exploration of relationships between a wide range of drivers of change and the broadening of perceptions of what is possible (Habegger, 2010; Pérez-Soba and Maas, 2015). Just like other key sustainability domains, the food systems domain has seen a strong proliferation of anticipation approaches, from global assessments to local
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