Abstract
Anticipatory expertise has become an indispensable core ingredient of contemporary attempts to govern complex problem. It has also become a field of contention, wherein a variety of technologies of knowledge production, social groups, and visions of the future coexist and compete. Indeed, the production of predictions and forecasts for public policy is not only an epistemic endeavour, but also an intrinsically contested and political activity. The special issue builds on ongoing scholarly discussions about anticipatory knowledge and its ‘performativity’ on policy and governance, to take a fresh look at the politics of anticipatory expertise.
Highlights
Bilel BenbouzidUPEM, Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés (LISIS), France. The future is, as Arjun Appadurai (2013) puts it, a “cultural fact”
The Politics of Anticipatory Expertise: Plurality and Contestation of Futures Knowledge in Governance — Introduction to the Special Issue1
Formalised approaches draw on cybernetics, cognitive and behavioural sciences, gaming and econometrics, as well as techniques of computational modelling and simulation. They were forged in Cold War think tanks such as the US RAND Corporation (Andersson, 2012) and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria (Rindzevičiūtė, 2016), as well as in Soviet, Dutch and French planning circles (Desrosières, 1999; Andersson and Rindzevičiūtė, 2015)
Summary
UPEM, Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés (LISIS), France. The future is, as Arjun Appadurai (2013) puts it, a “cultural fact”. Anticipatory expertise has become an indispensable core ingredient of contemporary attempts to govern complex problems and exhibits features of an institutionalised regulatory science (Demortain, 2017) These include the standardisation of dominant knowledge practices and the emergence of professional cadres of experts forming a part of, or entertaining close ties to, the state apparatus. The special issue builds on ongoing scholarly discussions about anticipatory knowledge and its ‘performativity’, to take a fresh look at the politics of anticipatory expertise It goes beyond the political science literature, which has investigated the role of forecasts and predictions in the political struggles and framing contests that accompany policy formulation Various new developments in the interstitial space between these two, scarcely intersecting strands of literature remain unattended, which this introduction and the contributions comprising the special issue offer to identify and explore
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