LIST OF PANELS

As the world is learning to live in meta-crisis or poly-crisis due to radical shifts in multiple domains, namely wars and refugees, climate change, extremism, and the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) (Wong et al., 2024), anticipating change has become a critical skill for organizations and governments worldwide.

Anticipatory governance (referred to as AG hereafter) emerged as an idea from the felt need to assimilate the concept of anticipation into governance to enhance system resilience (Boyd et al, 2015). Resilience, as described by Folke (2016), is ‘the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and recognize while changing so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, and feedbacks, and therefore identity, that is, the capacity to change to sustain identity’. The degree of change across socio-technical-politico and cultural scales demands anticipatory capabilities that lead to innovative solutions before the problem goes out of hand.

The literature on anticipation has existed within the frameworks of foresight and planning, while governance has traversed from public administration to New Public Administration.  Assimilating anticipation with governance would perhaps need a flavor of systems thinking as well since the scale under consideration goes up to national and international systems.

Defining governance as ‘decision-making rules and processes which determine stakeholders’ rights and responsibilities through coordination’ (Bevir, 2012) and anticipatory as an organization’s capacity ‘to deal with new situations and realize accepted values, changing the focus from forecasting to being ready for future challenges’ (Fuerth, 2013). In other words, this culminates in AG's capability to create decision-making processes based on a consensus around a preferred or desired future through the participation of various stakeholders including the government, the market, the public, and academics (Heo and Seo, 2021).

The gap, though, exists in understanding how policymakers operationalize AG. What are the processes by which complex problems and radical shifts can be understood well and AG can be practiced as well as implemented? What are the enablers and barriers to adopting AG at a systemic level?

The scholastic evidence on AG so far has been in disparate disciplines- studies on anticipation (Poli, 2019), anthropology (Appadurai, 2013; Bryant & Knight, 2019; Lanzeni et al., 2023), history (Andersson, 2018a), social and political thought (Rosa & Scheuerman, 2009; Delanty, 2021), studies on international relations (Berten & Kranke, 2022), sociology of time (Adam & Groves, 2007), and sociology of knowledge and expectations (Brown et al., 2020). However, public policy scholars are yet to effectuate AG in policy sciences.

This panel invites scholars to investigate the system-level practices and methods to assimilate anticipation and governance. It could be in any public policy or public systems domain- city planning, energy, health, education, etc. It could be a case study of an experiment done at a regional or sub-regional level, that could add to the body of knowledge on the success factors for AG in public policy.

This panel welcomes papers that explore and investigate the adoption of anticipatory governance by any public department. Case studies, empirical papers, and conceptual papers are welcome for this paper.

A few possible research questions that can be addressed in this panel are:

What could be the pathways from anticipatory governance to innovation and implementation?

What are the success factors for a public system to practice anticipatory governance?

What are the mechanisms that allow governments to anticipate change? What are the enablers and barriers?