99 Anticipatory governance of sustainability transformations 4 participatory foresight processes (Vervoort et al., 2014; Hebinck et al., 2018; Ingram and Zurek, 2018; Mangnus et al., 2019). However, futures are not neutral spaces (Selin, 2011). Anticipation processes are sites of political negotiation, where these messy future dynamics are made sense of and processes of prioritization and inclusion are shaped (Anderson, 2010; Granjou, Walker and Salazar, 2017; Vervoort and Gupta, 2018). Despite the seeming consensus that transformation of food systems is needed and anticipation can support these processes (Hebinck et al., 2018; Ingram and Zurek, 2018; Mangnus et al., 2019; Klerkx, 2020), anticipation practitioners often do not specify explicitly or fully what their assumptions about the future are (Vervoort and Gupta, 2018) nor how they hope to intervene in policy and governance contexts (Garb, Pulver and vanDeveer, 2008; Henrichs et al., 2010). There is a need to critically investigate how assumptions about the future in anticipation processes impact on present-day actions that seek to contribute to sustainability transformations. In this article, we connect and mobilize theory on anticipatory governance and transformations to understand how, in practice, assumptions about futures and their impacts on present action shape the anticipatory governance of sustainability transformations in the food systems domain. Our case is one of the foremost global anticipation initiatives focused on food systems change: Foresight4Food. Foresight4Food is a global network of international foresight practitioners working on the future of food security and food systems. To this end, we apply a new analytical framework on anticipatory governance that identifies four distinct approaches to anticipation which have not been empirically tested before. Guided by the framework, we examine the Foresight4Food initiative in terms of (a) how diverse processes of anticipation contain different conceptions of the future, (b) how these conceptions inform policy and governance choices in the present to transform food systems and (c) what ultimate aims are intended to be realized. We then connect this framework with an analytical framework on transformations (Feola, 2015) to further examine how these implicit assumptions about the future steer different approaches to transformations. Through this analysis, we identify which approaches might be dominant, and what they imply for sustainability transformations. By doing so, this article brings to light, for the first time, fundamental assumptions about the knowability and manageability of the future, and how such assumptions are embedded in anticipation work that seeks to guide sustainability transformations more generally, and food system transformations in particular.
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