The need for transformative changes to human systems in the face of urgent global sustainability challenges is gaining widespread recognition globally. At the same time, governments and organizations worldwide are looking for ways to anticipate and plan for the impacts of global environmental change in interaction with economic and/or geopolitical upheaval. The concept of ‘anticipatory governance’ describes processes of governance that aim to actively consider the future to inform present day decisions.

In this presentation, Joost Vervoort will begin by providing an overview, including examples, of how foresight and simulation gaming approaches to anticipatory governance can support the imagining and enactment of more sustainable futures, with a particular focus on linking imagined futures to present day action. He will then introduce preliminary results of the collaboration between RIHN/FEAST and the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development on a comparative analysis on simulation gaming as anticipatory governance in the Netherlands and Japan. Next, Astrid Mangnus will present the research project she leads with the FEAST project. In the last two years, this research project has focused on the implementation and evaluation of different methods for imagining and enacting transformation in the Kyoto food system – and how these methods relate to the overall process of FEAST as initiators of this future-oriented process among Kyoto’s food system actors. Astrid will place this research in her broader PhD research framing which focuses on the role of futures approaches in urban transformations.