Anticipation and Imagination in an Era of Polycrisis

Organized by Taskforce on Anticipatory Governance

This session aims to map the future work of the Earth System Governance Taskforce on Anticipatory Governance, which will become the Taskforce on Anticipation and Imagination to better reflect the ESG science plan and ongoing research in the community. The Taskforce fosters a thriving research community and cutting-edge science on anticipation and imagination, especially approaches that are directly useful for present day action and that offer real paradigmatic alternatives to foresight-as-usual. In this session, we scope the future work of the Taskforce, both in terms of substance and organization. We explore (1) the most important research questions and challenges ahead and (2) how the Taskforce can organize its work to best support impactful research and community development.

Part 1 - Research Directions (60 minutes): What is the role of anticipation and imagination in times of multiple interlocking crises? Many existing approaches to exploring potential futures and guiding action and policy making run the risk of being irrelevant or too restrictive in terms of whose perspectives they can accommodate and mobilize. At the same time, many new practices of anticipation and collective imagination are arising that have their roots in the desire to make the future and the ways it motivates action in the present more democratic and more truly transformative. What are the most important questions that can driver future research in this field? Based on a survey of the members of the Anticipation & Imagination community (consisting of 780 members), key questions and challenges for future research include:

Inclusive anticipation/imagination and diversity of voices:

• How can we acknowledge the cultural and socio-economic barriers that exist in terms of who can participate in imagining better futures?
• How can we truly open anticipation and imagination to different ways of knowing, including those that exist beyond mainstream comfort zones?
• How can futures thinking make use of non-traditional/non-positivist ways of imagining the future (indigenous, numinous, etc.)?
• Imagination as a resource: acknowledging cultural and socio-economic barriers in imagining better futures.

The Power of Future Making

• How can/do power relations impact anticipatory and imagination driven choices? How can we expose or enable these power differentials to push anticipatory and imagination governance in this space of polycrisis?

Practices and Institutions of Imagination

• How can anticipation and imagination practices be more fully integrated with day-to-day action?
• Overcoming legitimacy issues of creative, imaginative approaches in institutional processes.
• How to embed futures literacy and imagination capacity building in institutions
• How to visualize trade-offs between different pathways forward?

How to drive (policy) change?

• How can the imagination of more just and sustainable futures feed into policies without being diluted to ‘business as usual’?
• How to create buy-in from stakeholders to implement change?
• How can anticipation and imagination help inform decision making on how to use scarce resources in highly contentious settings?
• How to work between multiple scales to drive effective change?

In this meeting, which will be open to all interested in the theme of anticipation and imagination, we will use these questions to develop research clusters/themes that can form the basis of future collaborative activities, e.g., projects, special issues, or funding applications.

Part 2 - Taskforce Activities (30 minutes): The last part of the meeting is dedicated to a discussion of future Taskforce activities that can best support a growing, caring, creative and impactful research community. This includes different types and frequency of virtual events, e.g., workshops on different ways of knowing, facilitating knowledge synthesis, and providing a platform for collaborative project development and project work.