Background: There is a need for critical social science scrutiny of ex-ante or anticipatory governance of environmental and societal risks and harms associated with ongoing earth system transformations. By anticipatory governance, we mean governance in the face of extreme normative and scientific uncertainty and conflict over the very existence, nature and distributive implications of future risks and harms. What does and should ex-ante, anticipatory governance consist of? Who decides and how? What normative underpinnings are discernible in anticipatory governance arrangements? And how are processes of anticipation themselves being governed and to what end?
Governance has always, to some extent, been anticipatory, particularly in policy domains such as military planning or budgeting. Our concern here is to critically scrutinize the particular challenges of anticipatory governance in the environmental and sustainability realm (with its long-standing tendency towards reactive or retrospective governance), in a period of accelerating earth system transformations and their potentially disruptive societal and distributional consequences. Scrutinizing anticipatory governance also includes contemplating novel governance challenges associated with potentially transformative and powerful emerging technologies characterized by strong claims of global benefit but also extreme uncertainties and contested risk, such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, geoengineering or synthetic biology.
Numerous academic communities have long addressed various dimensions of anticipatory environmental and technological governance, including scholars of transition studies, risk, science and technology studies, and responsible research and innovation. Yet the notion is understood and deployed within these communities in very different ways, with diverse normative starting points and research agendas. Similarly, elements such as forecasting, scenario-building, long-term strategizing, real-time technology assessment, information disclosure, and citizen deliberation, are assumed to be more or less important to processes and institutional arrangements for anticipatory governance, yet how these function in contested geopolitical contexts of uneven earth system transformations remains under-analyzed. Critical social science perspectives on such processes of anticipation are thus urgently needed.
Particularly interesting and less examined questions in our view include: how are crucial aspects of governing environmental harm, such as securing accountability, ascribing responsibility, determining liability, or ensuring compensation, recast in the face of uncertain and unknowable (future) risk? How are these components being addressed in (emerging/contested) institutional arrangements for anticipatory governance in diverse issue-areas to date, and what lessons have been learned?
Equally timely is analysis of how processes of anticipation (i.e. planning and research processes aimed at exploring alternative futures) relating to environmental transformations are themselves being governed, i.e. who is steering them, to what end, and through what deliberative or representative processes? Anticipation processes increasingly entail imagining and ‘pre-experiencing’ pluralistic, challenging futures, in order to question limiting assumptions about what futures may be possible, and experiment with strategies aimed at transformational change. This has led to a proliferation of anticipation in sustainability-related research and planning contexts. There has nonetheless been very little critical social science scrutiny of the multiple global, regional and national anticipation processes now underway. There is a need for meta-analyses of anticipation processes through a critical governance lens, by asking first-order questions of who governs, for whom, and why, and examining how the content of anticipation processes is created in ways that shape and limit what futures can be imagined.
This sub-task force thus has two interlinked foci: anticipatory governance and governing anticipation
Our taskforce aims to:
- Explore the historical antecedents and understandings of anticipatory governance within the social science and global change research communities, in order to ascertain whether and how the notion is being deployed, and with what political implications and/or uptake.
- Draw on this state-of-the art review to further elaborate our own understanding of anticipatory governance, and assess the current state of play with regard to institutional arrangements and normative presumptions in diverse areas of sustainability governance
- Comparatively assess the institutional and normative elements discernible in emerging anticipatory governance of novel technological risk and harm, including in areas such as geoengineering, nanotechnology, synthetic biology and modern biotechnology
- Bring critical social science perspectives to bear on processes of anticipation, the futures they generate, and the ways in which they are integrated into governance processes
The aim is to elaborate a future research agenda with key questions, the execution of which can shed further light on the theoretical and empirical purchase that the notion of anticipatory governance provides in addressing (and redressing) the transformative sustainability challenges of our times.
For more information, please contact the co-conveners of this taskforce:
Dr. Aarti Gupta, Professor of Global Environmental Governance, Environmental Policy Group, Wageningen University. Lead Faculty, Earth System Governance Project and Coordinating Lead Author, Earth System Governance New Directions Team (email: aarti.gupta@wur.nl)
Dr. Joost Vervoort, Assistant Professor of Foresight for Environmental Governance, Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University; and Senior Researcher, Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford. Lead Author, Earth System Governance New Directions Team (email: joost.vervoort@eci.ox.ac.uk)
Links to projects
Anticipatory Governance of Climate Engineering: whether, what, how and why? (A project undertaken in the context of the Academic Working Group on Climate Engineering): http://www.wur.nl/en/project/Anticipatory-Governance-of-Climate-Engineering-Whether-What-How-Why-.htm
Scenario-guided policy formulation – the CGIAR program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) https://ccafs.cgiar.org/scenarios#.VXh_ePmqqko
FP7 TRANSMANGO scenarios and transition pathways http://www.transmango.eu/
H2020 SUSFANS scenarios and stakeholder engagement http://www.susfans.eu/wp-6-stakeholder-interaction-and-scenario-review
Bright Spots: Seeds of a Good Anthropocene http://www.pecs-science.org/research/workinggroups/seedsofagoodanthropocene.4.3056027e148c326944337ff.html
RE-IMAGINE: re-imagining anticipatory climate governance in the world’s most vulnerable regions: https://re-imagine.sites.uu.nl. With the unveiling of the new Earth System Governance Project Science and Implementation Plan, RE-IMAGINE finds itself at the centre of the new theme “Anticipation and Imagination”. Read more about RE-IMAGINE and the core theme here