Governing the future: science,policy and public participation in the construction of the long term in the Netherlands and Sweden

This paper is a historical study of two institutions devoted to the problem of the future – the Dutch WRR (the Scientific Council for Government) and the Swedish Secretariat for Futures Studies – both created in 1972. While there is a growing interest in the social sciences for prediction, future imaginaries and the governance of risk, few studies have examined historically the integration of the category of the ‘future’ or the ‘long term’ in political systems in the postwar years, a period in which this category took on specific meaning and importance. We suggest that governing the long-term posed fundamental problems to particular societal models of expertise, decision-making and public participation. We argue that the scientific and political claim to govern the future was fundamentally contested, and that social struggle around the role and content of predictive expertise determined how the long term was incorporated into different systems of knowledge production and policy-making.     

积极发挥农产品期货市场的风险转移功能

作者建议,推进农产品期货市场的发展,必须为农产品期货营造良好的外部环境;加强大宗农产品期货的上市研究论证工作,扩大农产品期货品种;提高农业组织化程度,引导和带动农民参与期货交易;整合农产品信息统计和发布环节,加强对农民的期货知识培训;完善保证金体系,增加商品期货期权交易;拓宽期货经纪公司的业务范围和盈利空间;加快期货市场立法工作等。     

Rural futures? Mapping newcomers' hopes about potential resettlement in Canadian rural areas

The Canadian government recently launched initiatives to promote immigrant settlement outside of traditional gateway cities, in small towns and rural areas. These initiatives attempt to mitigate socio-economic impacts of population decline, and address barriers to successful integration in urban areas. Drawing on the geographies of hope, this paper examines how newcomers navigate hopes as they imagine rural resettlement in Ontario. Based on focus groups with immigrants (n = 50), the findings suggest that newcomers' imagined rural futures are a dynamic and mobile process, shaped by competing hopes for a stable life. Rural imaginaries can sometimes provide a generative space to realize hopes and develop new future aspirations, other times they can constrain hopes for intergenerational futures. We contend that newcomer hopes arise in moments of relocation uncertainty, shaped by competing visions, interests, and priorities at individual and collective scales. Newcomers' expectations of rural futures are always enlivened with a sense of optimism for what has not yet become, but are equally replete with angst and anxiety for the future. This article concludes that future geographic research on migration-hope-place interactions, particularly in the health subfield, should engage constructions, experiences, and enactments of hope that mediate relocations and the policies governing them.     

HISTORICAL FUTURES

This article outlines the agenda of a collective research project that aims to explore modalities of historical futures that constitute our current historical condition. To present the collective work adequately, we have teamed up with History and Theory and initiated a long‐term serial publishing experiment. In the coming years, each issue of the journal will feature contributions to this research endeavor. In our project‐opening piece, we briefly introduce the experiment and the premises of the collective research agenda. We begin by recounting the many ways in which increasingly towering novel future prospects have begun to capture the scholarly world's attention across disciplinary boundaries. We then introduce the notion of historical futures. Crediting theoretical inspirations and paying intellectual debts to conceptual relatives, we define “historical futures” as the plurality of transitional relations between apprehensions of the past and anticipated futures. At the core of the article, we formulate our call for a collective investigation of modalities of historical futures and sketch three basic sets of concerns that the explorative works in this experiment may address: kinds of transitions from past to futures, kinds of anticipatory practices, and kinds of registers as interpretive tools that position such practices on a variety of spectrums between two poles (for instance, a value register with the poles of catastrophic and redemptive futures). Finally, we close with a brief note about the necessity of collective endeavors.     

Futures,intimacies, animisms: Unfinished anthropologies in the twenty-first century

This essay explores recent work in future-oriented anthropology that develops emancipatory, anticipatory, multi-modal, and participatory approaches. Through critiquing hegemonic assumptions in anthropology and in Western modernity, these works evoke both present complexity and future potentiality. Ultimately, the essay explores these works as redemptive strategies for an anthropology besieged by intolerance and authoritarianism while grappling with its colonialist underpinnings.     

Assessing the value of political science in the era of relevance and impact

The political science profession, like other social sciences, is under pressure from many quarters to demonstrate its ‘relevance’. This need arises primarily from requirements for universities to justify public investment in their teaching and research. Competition across the full range of science and humanities disciplines for public and private funding makes this an important challenge for all. This article reflects on how political scientists have seen the public value of their professional work. It concludes by suggesting some alternative ways of thinking about relevance, value and impact.     

DĒMOKRATIA'S POSSIBLE DISCONNECTION: UNTIMELY ANTIQUITY,TEMPORAL OUTSIDENESS,AND HISTORICAL FUTURES OF POLITICS*

This article discusses notions of possible disconnection in the post-1990s political present that are formulated as untimely articulations of the ancient Greek democratic past and of the concept of dēmokratia. These are modalities of transition that foreground political futurity as emanating neither from anticipation of evental change to come nor from abstract utopianism. Rather, dēmokratia’s projected break with the present and presentism is grounded in transtemporal confrontations and routes of historical memory. These are engagements with antiquity that take hold of and refigure the relation among past, present, and future politics, as well as the inside and outside of democracy, at a horizon of Nachleben (afterlife) that sustains no fixed beginning or end. I discuss these temporalities as disconnective in a sense that differs from historical futures opened up by technoscientific or anthropocenic prospects. Dēmokratia challenges the self-narration of present democracy as a project of the future by positing modalities of outsideness, repotentialization of the past, and interweaving of times and political languages in non-narrative terms. The outcome is a form of futurity that opens up the possibility of imagining not only a novel political subject and community but also a logic of their emergence that enables both to be incessantly reconfigured. Dēmokratia’s possible disconnection works against a sense of lost political futurity, but it needs to be recognized as grounded in a state of loss, insofar as political domination may also be built into future democratic principles. For this reason, it invites a reflexive problematic about the representability and translatability of disconnective political futures and communities.     

Disrupted Futures: Unpacking Metaphors of Marginalization in Eviction and Resettlement Narratives

In this paper, I examine how linguistic tropes that emerged during ethnographic fieldwork in a Delhi resettlement colony both capture and reaffirm the experiences of forced eviction and marginalization on the urban periphery. By analyzing the urban subjectivities embedded in recurrent metaphors, I explore how people “make sense” of dispossession and ultimately, articulate their “place” in the city. Drawing on Lakoff and Johnson (1980, Metaphors We Live By; 1999, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought), I argue that the utilization of metaphors in everyday language influences how people structure their relationships—with the state, with other residents of the resettlement colony, and with the city itself—and captures the pervasive uncertainty of resettlement. Unpacking such metaphors as “guides” to thought and practice can contribute to theories on spaces of insecurity and performativity of the marginalized in the city.     

Towards a multi-scalar and multi-horizon framework of energy injustice: A whole systems analysis of Estonian energy transition

The shift from carbon-intensive to low-carbon energy systems has profound justice implications as some regions are likely to lose as much as gain from decarbonization processes. Increasing calls have been made to adopt a ‘whole systems’ perspective on energy justice. Drawing on the Multi-level Perspective on socio-technical transitions this paper presents a new comprehensive framework of energy justice in system innovation, proposing to map injustices along three dimensions: 1) multiple spatial scales (regional, national, international); 2) different time horizons (currently experienced vs. anticipated injustices); 3) connections to transition dynamics (injustices related to the optimization of the currently dominant system, destabilization of the incumbent system or the acceleration of alternative solutions in niches). The framework is applied to analyse the ongoing energy transition in Estonia, involving interactions between the incumbent oil shale based regime and wind, solar, nuclear and bioenergy as emerging niche challengers. The content analysis of news items in Estonian media reveals an inventory of 214 distinct incidents of energy injustices across 21 different categories. We find that many experienced and anticipated injustices are deployed, often strategically, by certain actors to advocate specific energy futures and to influence current political choices. From the justice perspective our analysis thus raises a question whether it is ethical to use probable yet currently unrealized injustices related to regime destabilization and niche acceleration as a means to perpetuate injustices related to the optimization of the currently dominant regime.