Anticipatory Governance Research Articles

Anticipatory governance for newcomers: lessons learned from the UK, the Netherlands, Finland, and Korea

Anticipatory governance (AG) is defined as a “system of systems” that employs foresight to create future plans and execute relevant actions. Recently, various frameworks of AG have been introduced, but there is little practical information available for newcomers on how to do this. This research conducted a framework-based comparative country analysis to provide lessons learned for newcomers in the sphere of foresight-linked AG. By evaluating the AG levels of Finland, the UK, the Netherlands, and Korea, we found that the consequences of foresight-linked AGs were different in each country. At the same time, we also identified a common denominator, namely, future receptivity, a “human or people” capacity to accept and understand the value of foresight. Instead of temporary system changes or organizational modifications, future receptivity is an underlying element for newcomers to overcome lingering short-termism and facilitate the coordination of stakeholders concerning foresight. In conclusion, we suggest ways to promote future receptivity for newcomers. First, the government should educate and train the public and government officials to promote future literacy and future proficiency. Second, the government should provide a process for public participation such as nationwide networking that enables the public to influence their diverse future images over foresight outcomes.

Governing (through) anticipation, architecture, affect

ABSTRACT In this paper, I analyze the use of architecture and affect as means for ensuring a prepared and resilient population. I do this by exploring an empirical case of public simulation centers, which are an emerging type of educational facility with the purpose of training the public for future emergencies using advanced simulations. Accordingly, existing anticipatory techniques are being redeployed and applied to a new target group, the public, which calls for renewed engagement with the use of space, physical design, and affect as means for involving and fostering the public in societal preparedness. Drawing on literature on anticipatory governance, I focus on two questions, elaborating first how public simulation centers produce and enable security affects and, second, exploring the means, material and immaterial, by which these centers attract and involve citizens in security practices.

Anticipation and Organization: Seeing, knowing and governing futures

Anticipation is part of organizational attempts to manage their future affairs and shape their surroundings. Still, the ways in which organizations engage in anticipation have not been sufficiently conceptualized in the field of organization and management studies. This article conceptualizes organizational ways of shaping and orchestrating futures by engaging insights from Foucauldian scholarship that highlight the intersection between what we can see, know and govern. We highlight the importance of processes of knowledge production in governance efforts, and articulate how anticipatory governance is crafted through intricate combinations of resources such as narratives, numbers and digital traces. The main contribution is a conceptual typology outlining four different templates for anticipatory governance in organizational settings that we term ‘indicative snapshots’, ‘prognostic correlations’, ‘projected transformations’ and ‘phantasmagoric fictions’. We posit anticipatory governance as a knowledge-based, performative phenomenon that addresses potential and desirable futures in and between organizations. Such anticipatory activities gauge and guide organizational processes and modes of thinking and acting along different temporal orientations, and have governance effects that makes anticipation performative by its very nature. This understanding of anticipatory governance, we suggest, offers both conceptual contributions and empirical avenues for research in organization and management studies.

Anticipatory Governance in Biobanking: Security and Risk Management in Digital Health

Although big-data research has met with multiple controversies in diverse fields, political and security implications of big data in life sciences have received less attention. This paper explores how threats and risks are anticipated and acted on in biobanking, which builds research repositories for biomedical samples and data. Focusing on the biggest harmonisation cluster of biomedical research in Europe, BBMRI-ERIC, the paper analyses different logics of risk in the anticipatory discourse on biobanking. Based on document analysis, interviews with ELSI experts, and field research, three types of framing of risk are reconstructed: data security, privacy, and data misuse. The paper finds that these logics downplay the broader social and political context and reflects on the limits of the practices of anticipatory governance in biobanking. It argues that this regime of governance can make it difficult for biobanks to address possible future challenges, such as access to biomedical data by authorities, pressures for integrating biobank data with other type of personal data, or their use for profiling beyond medical purposes. To address potential controversies and societal implications related to the use of big data in health research and medicine, the paper suggests to expand the vocabulary and practices of anticipatory governance, in the biobanking community and beyond.

The societal dimension of the automated vehicles transition: Towards a research agenda

Automated vehicles (AVs) represent a socio-technical transition of the mobility system. Thus far, research has focused predominantly on the technical dimension (i.e. technology development and operation, short-term impacts) of this transition. This paper presents a research agenda that contributes in rebalancing the focus from the technical to the societal dimension of the AVs transition. We adopt the social construction of technology approach, suggesting that technology and society are involved in a dialectical process over time that constructs each other and we identify three key dynamics of the societal dimension of AVs transition based on the multi-level perspective of technological transition. After reviewing the scholarly literature, we suggest an expansion of the research focus in three key research areas: societal acceptance, societal implications and governance of AVs to account for the societal dimension of the AVs transition. In the first area, we suggest an expansion of the research focus from consumers' adoption to citizens' acceptance of introduction of AVs. In the second area, we suggest an expansion of the research focus from short-term to long-term societal implications of AVs. In the third area, we suggest a shift from exploratory scenarios to participative anticipatory governance of desirable AVs futures.

Tackling Complexity of the Just Transition in the EU: Evidence from Romania

The process of reaching carbon neutrality by 2050 and cutting CO2 emissions by 2030 by 55% compared to 1990 as per the EU Green Deal is highly complex. The energy mix must be changed to ensure long-term environmental sustainability, mainly by closing down coal sites, while preserving the energy-intensive short-term economic growth, ensuring social equity, and opening opportunities for regions diminishing in population and potential. Romania is currently in the position of deciding the optimal way forward in this challenging societal shift while morphing to evidence-based policy-making and anticipatory governance, mainly in its two coal-mining regions. This article provides possible future scenarios for tackling this complex issue in Romania through a three-pronged, staggered, methodology: (1) clustering Romania with other similar countries from the point of view of the Just Transition efforts (i.e., the energy mix and the socio-economic parameters), (2) analyzing Romania’s potential evolution of the energy mix from the point of the thermal efficiency of two major power plants (CEH and CEO) and the systemic energy losses, and (3) providing insights on the socio-economic context (economic development and labor market transformations, including the component on the effects on vulnerable consumers) of the central coal regions in Romania.

Exploring the future of fishery conflict through narrative scenarios

Recent studies suggest that the pervasive impacts on global fishery resources caused by stressors such as overfishing and climate change could dramatically increase the likelihood of fishery conflict. However, existing projections do not consider wider economic, social, or political trends when assessing the likelihood of, and influences on, future conflict trajectories. In this paper, we build four future fishery conflict scenarios by considering multiple fishery conflict drivers derived from an expert workshop, a longitudinal database of international fishery conflict, secondary data on conflict driver trends, and regional expert reviews. The scenarios take place between the years 2030 and 2060 in the North-East Atlantic (“scramble for the Atlantic”), the East China Sea (“the remodeled empire”), the coast of West Africa (“oceanic decolonization”), and the Arctic (“polar renaissance”). The scenarios explore the implications of ongoing trends in conflict-prone regions of the world and function as accessible, science-based communication tools that can help foster anticipatory governance capacity in the pursuit of future ocean security.

Foresight and design fictions meet at a policy lab: An experimentation approach in public sector innovation

This paper depicts a theoretical and methodological experimentation approach developed at the EU Policy Lab of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. The approach is first framed by its larger institutional context and positioned in a back-end space of public sector innovation. With an internal and self-reflexive departure point, our purpose is to outline it as catalyst of future-oriented explorations, simultaneously nurtured by evidence-based knowledge, and its own transdisciplinary set of experimentation concepts and practices. In addition, to allow for its observation in a practical stage, the paper showcases an empirical illustration of the approach in a forward-looking project for policy advice. #Blockchain4EU was an exploration of existing, emerging or potential applications of blockchain in industrial and non-financial sectors, with attention to plausible near future applications and scenarios, and focus on possible policy, economic, social, technical, legal and environmental impacts. The approach is anchored on desk and qualitative research throughout the project. But its primary outputs emerge from participatory foresight, collective vision building and co-creation workshops, and the prototyping of speculative artefacts through multi-stakeholder engagement. The purpose is to stimulate anticipatory governance frameworks in general, and push the frontiers of what is common practice in policy when considering emerging technologies.

The border as archive: reframing the crisis mode of governance at the Canada-US border

Starting in January 2017 there was a dramatic increase in the number of people crossing irregularly from the US to make a claim for refugee status in Canada. Officials declared a crisis and admonished those who, in the words of one official, were crossing ‘in between the border.’ It is important to pay close attention to these spaces in-between borders: those (un)intended and strategic openings left by the working out of nation-state policies (like the Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement) and those paths that are opened through the transgressions of those borders by people on the move. Crisis is the necessary corollary of the ‘politics of anticipatory governance’ that scaffolds contemporary nation-statist border control policies and practices. Approaching the border as an archive means confronting the work that is done by such temporal and spatial manipulations, while placing contested border crossings at the centre of border formation. By examining a series of intersecting moments from the recent history of this border (1987–present), I seek to both ‘inhabit’ the crisis and understand what might remain once the crisis is declared over. I argue that migration management regimes produce the border crises they anticipate while simultaneously masking and revealing contested histories and geographies of migration.

Governing expectations of forensic innovations in society: the case of FDP in Germany

This article is about the governance of expectations of forensic DNA phenotyping (FDP) innovations in Germany used for the prediction of human externally visible traits such as eye, hair, and skin color, as well as biological age and biogeographic ancestry. In 2019, FDP technologies were regulated under the label “extended DNA analysis”. We focus on the expectations of members of the forensic genetics’ community in Germany, in anticipation and response to those of regulators who advocated for such technologies. Confronted with regulators’ expectations of omnipotent technologies and the optimistic promise that they will enhance public security, forensic geneticists responded with attempts to adjust such expectations, specifying limits and risks, along with a particular logic sorting matters of concern. We reflect on how forensic geneticists’ govern expectations through forms of distributed anticipatory governance, delimiting their obligations, and distributing accountability across the criminal justice system.

The shaping of anticipation: The networked development of inferential capacity in governing Southeast Asian deltas

Motivated by foreseeable changes in the Earth's systems, governments across the world learn to anticipate the consequences. Understanding how such anticipation comes about should ease its further development. We therefore explore the central capacity within anticipatory governance: the capacity to infer future consequences. Such inferential capacity consists of tools, techniques, and practices increasing an agent's options to infer consequences. We examine the development of this capacity for two Southeast Asian deltas, using data from a multi-sited ethnography and a social network analysis. These methods combine the small-scale ‘lived’ perspective of agents and the multiscale network in which these agents deploy strategies to entrench tools, techniques, and practices for inferential capacity. Strategic choices in positioning for network effects and fostering reciprocity matter, while values and historical contingencies cannot be brushed aside.

State and Local Economic Development and Urban Anticipatory Governance

This edition of the Zoning and Planning Law Report connects the concept of “anticipatory governance,” developed in the context of climate change adaptation and technology assessment, with urban governance challenges particularly around economic development. Climate change adaptation has to do with the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects. Technology assessment relates to public participation around understanding the ramifications of new technology. I have written elsewhere at length about approaching planning and economic development processes in cities and states both in relation to business location incentives—job buying —and through what I have termed an “urban anticipatory governance” framework. The focus of this Report is two-fold. First, it investigates and summarizes the lack of legal constraints on economic development to stimulate job creation and capital attraction. Inherent in this first point is a critique that residents frequently lack participation in economic development legal processes and approvals. Second, this Report provides guidance for officials in state and local government involved in planning and economic development decisions, as well as practitioners, to consider using anticipatory governance principles in practice. An urban anticipatory governance approach to economic development activity addresses society’s most complex local economic development issues, in flexible ways, allowing residents and experts to work together, with enough time for that collaboration to have a meaningful impact on decisions.

Assessing the options for combatting democratic myopia and safeguarding long-term interests

Faced with intertemporal policy conflicts, democratic political systems tend to favour short-term interests over long-term interests. Such phenomena, variously described as political short-termism, democratic myopia and a presentist bias in policy-making, threaten the interests of future generations. Numerous proposals – constitutional, institutional, policy-oriented and analytical – have been advanced to counter short-termism and protect long-term interests. While differing significantly, such proposals all rest for their claimed effectiveness on at least one of six theories of change or intervention logics: 1) changing the values and goals of policy-makers so that they care more about future interests; 2) changing the political incentives facing policy-makers such that it is in their interests to give more weight to long-term considerations; 3) enhancing the capacity of policy-makers to exercise foresight, thereby improving their anticipatory governance; 4) constraining the formal decision-rights of policy-makers when long-term interests are at risk; 5) insulating policy-makers from short-term political pressures; and 6) enhancing the capacity for coordination across different tiers of government and/or policy domains. Drawing upon and scrutinizing these six intervention logics, this paper assesses the feasibility, effectiveness and overall desirability of a selection of the proposals for combatting short-termism. Based on this analysis, a reform agenda is proposed.

Italian mayors and the management of COVID-19: adaptive leadership for organizing local governance

ABSTRACT Drawing on a survey of 25 mayors of municipalities belonging to the Metropolitan City of Milan, Italy this paper presents an investigation into the main problems they faced during Phase 1 (lockdown) and Phase 2 (post-lockdown, pre-vaccine); the leadership actions they implemented in Phases 1 and 2; and the leadership actions they would prioritize in case of a new emergency. The results contribute to the building of knowledge on local governance and leadership models – specifically regarding conditions of emergency. Four key issues emerged: (i) the importance of adaptive leadership and of anticipatory governance frameworks aimed at providing direction in situations of emergency (e.g. what to do in case of scarce mask availability and/or of local coronavirus disease 2019 [COVID-19] hotspots); (ii) the importance of promoting institutional spaces for cooperation and collaboration with citizens in their role as volunteers and of other organizational stakeholders willing to contribute to public value co-creation; (iii) the role of technology as an enabler and medium for sharing information and crowdsourcing resources; and (iv) the importance of safe and trusted platforms for knowledge sharing among the mayors and with the relevant organizational stakeholders.

The Analysis of Japan’s Energy and Climate Policy from the Aspect of Anticipatory Governance

This study is a preliminary and experimental one to analyze Japan’s energy transitions to mitigate climate change from anticipatory governance aspects. Japan’s energy policy principles have been energy security, environmental considerations, economic efficiency, and safety (3E + S). According to the energy agency, the long-term energy outlook is also drawn up by “ambitious multiple track scenarios” and “multilayered and diversified flexible energy supply-demand structure.” This approach resonates with the aspects of anticipatory governance. It promotes the idea of preparing for multiple future scenarios, including the unthinkable worst case future scenario such as a nuclear accident (foresight), the interactions between the policymakers and the public (engagement), and the reflexive processes of policy innovations with a normative decision for the selection of energy mix (integration). However, this study finds that Japan’s energy policy lacks the aspects of anticipatory governance. It sticks to fixed energy policy institutionalized in the 1970s to promote nuclear energy and coal as oil alternatives. It rarely has interactions between the policymakers and the public and thus lacks a societal (normative) decision about a future energy path to energy transitions to mitigate climate change. Instead, Japan’s energy policy has not necessarily met its declared policy objective of 3E + S since the unprecedented Fukushima nuclear accidents occurred and cannot uphold an ambitious target for CO2 emissions reduction.

Four approaches to anticipatory climate governance: Different conceptions of the future and implications for the present

AbstractIn times of accelerating earth system transformations and their potentially disruptive societal consequences, imagining and governing the future is now a core challenge for sustainability research and practice. Much social science and sustainability science scholarship increasingly engages with the future. There is, however, a lack of scrutiny of how the future is envisioned in these literatures, and with what implications for governance in the present. This article analyses these two aspects, building on the concept of “anticipatory governance.” We understand anticipatory governance to broadly mean governing in the present to adapt to or shape uncertain futures. We review perspectives within public policy, futures studies, social–ecological systems, environmental policy and governance, transition studies, science and technology studies, and responsible research and innovation literatures. All these literatures engage explicitly or implicitly with the notion of anticipatory governance, yet from distinct ontological and epistemological starting points. Through our review, we identify four approaches to anticipatory governance that differ with regard to (a) their conceptions of and engagement with the future; (b) their implications for actions to be taken in the present; and (c) the ultimate end to be realized through anticipatory governance. We then map onto these four approaches a diverse set of methods and tools of anticipation that each engages with. In concluding, we discuss how these four approaches provide a useful analytical lens through which to assess ongoing practices of anticipatory governance in the climate and sustainability realm.This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance

Who gets to be born? The anticipatory governance of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis technology in the United Kingdom from 1978–2001

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on explicating and understanding important State and societally-wide capacities of the nation-state to govern emerging technologies. It examines the governance around pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) from 1978-2001 in the United Kingdom. When analyzed as a whole, the informal and formal mechanisms in British society suggest a latent form of proto-anticipatory governance around PGD technology, and that there are important and understudied linkages between anticipatory governance (AG) and Responsible Innovation (RI) that need to be explored. Additionally, I contend that an overlooked element of anticipatory governance, ‘ensembelization,' should be considered the fourth capacity of anticipatory governance, just as ‘responsiveness’ is the fourth dimension of RI. The ongoing case of PGD governance, and more recently, gene editing governance, will perhaps be one of the most challenging, provocative, and important places for development and deployment of RI and AG capacities.

Why do extreme events still kill in the São Paulo Macro Metropolis Region? Chronicle of a death foretold in the global south

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to the study of climate change and environmental justice with a particular focus on a Global South case-study in the São Paulo Macro Metropolis of Brazil. We also aim to contribute to mandatory critical dialogue between (anticipatory) governance and environmental justice. This study focuses on the rainy seasons from 2016 to 2019. We examine the incidence of 61 extreme precipitation events, as well as 47 deaths caused by rain events, considering their location based on vulnerability indicators. The correlations among these data allow us to reveal the socio-environmental patterns within the relationships between social vulnerability and deaths caused by general rainfall and, more specifically, extreme events. Based on this, we demonstrate that current infrastructure or its lack is one of the reasons why death tolls remain due to the absence of anticipatory governance.

Research Note – The New Frontier of Enhanced Terrorism with the United States In Mind

ABSTRACT The coronavirus pandemic presents opportunities for scholars and policymakers to conceptualize and scope out theoretical parameters of a new terrorism type - “enhanced terrorism,” with its potential to become an emergent reality in the “post-corona” world. Enhanced terrorism is the threat or use of traditional terrorism, or cyberterrorism, or a combination of both, to exploit, either consciously or not, calamitous conditions like COVID-19 in the role of a “force multiplier” (Jenkins). It works to intensify terrorism effect and in some instances to replicate or augment terrorism threat in other geographical locales. The threat of “enhanced terrorism” derives from conditions of enhanced security threats, namely the prospect of chemical, biological, radiological, and/or nuclear (CBRN) calamitous conditions that are a hallmark of our contemporary world. The links between challenges and opportunities that “enhanced terrorism” pose and the role of systemized “anticipatory governance” in policy-making processes are explored.

Data-driven anticipatory governance. Emerging scenarios in data for policy practices

The contemporary technological advancements in information and communication technologies (ICT) enable the employment of non-traditional data sources (e.g. satellite data, sensors, cell phone networks data, social media, etc.) in different aspects of the public sphere. Datafication is changing the relationship between governments and citizens, and the way governments address policy problems. Nowadays, policy-makers are urged to harness data for policies and public service design, while answering at the same time the demand for citizen engagement; as a consequence, innovative government/governance models appeared to connect these two instances. Although it is not a new concept, the model of Anticipatory Governance is particularly worth considering in light of contemporary data availability. Predictive analytics based on data increasingly realizes predictions for public action, although it presents many controversial implications (e.g. the epistemology of data evidence, public trust and privacy). In this article, we address Anticipatory Governance models emerging from data used in futures thinking and policy-making. To understand this phenomenon, we will briefly retrace current paradigms of futures thinking and Anticipatory Governance concerning policy-making, specifying the contemporary perspective design has on these topics. Then, we identify the use of data in futures thinking practices through a systematic literature search. Finally, we will address the challenges and implications of designing data-driven Anticipatory Governance by portraying three scenarios supported by real cases of data for policy-making.