Anticipatory Governance
The governance of global environmental issues increasingly requires imagining and steering towards desired sustainability futures.
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This poses a significant challenge for governance: a need to anticipate and steer in the present to realize desired but uncertain and contested futures. This present-day steering has to be developed under conditions of normative and scientific conflicts about the nature and extent of future harms and benefits.
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In my research, I focus on conceptualizing these challenges of anticipatory governance, viewing foresight, scenarios and other tools of anticipation as sites of contested knowledge politics, with consequences for the design of formal governance.
I also analyze anticipatory governance challenges posed by novel technologies, such as modern biotechnology or solar radiation modification.
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My work examines: What kinds of anticipatory governance emerges in these areas, and whose visions of uncertain and contested futures shape these ex-ante governance arrangements?
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Image credit: Emily Liang
RE-IMAGINE project
Through what anticipatory processes and mechanisms are climate futures currently being imagined, and with what implications for present-day governance?
The RE-IMAGINE project addresses these timely questions, with a focus on anticipatory climate governance in vulnerable regions of the Global South