The Politics of Anticipatory Expertise: Plurality and Contestation of Futures Knowledge in Governance — Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

The future is, as Arjun Appadurai (2013) puts it, a "cultural fact". Anticipatory practices -prophecies, utopias, predictions, forecasts, or scenarios -fulfil important societal functions in pre-modern and modern societies alike They provide orientation in social interactions (Luhmann, 1997), shape expectations in market transactions Since World War II, such practices have undergone a process of scientisation and professionalisation. 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