Guest editorial to the special issue 'Politics of Anticipation : on knowing and governing environmental futures'

In this special issue of Futures we concentrate on a particular figure: the politics of environmental anticipation. Through a stimulating collection of eight original articles we aim to provide a critical assessment of a range of sites where varied and conflicting politics of environmental anticipation are constituted and resisted. In doing so we are interested in illustrating the multiple ways through which the anticipation of environmental futures has come to the fore as a developing field of expertise and practice. More so, as a mode of thinking that is propelling new ways to engage with earth processes and economic organization. Our aim as guest editors of this special issue of Futures is to connect new scholarship across ‘epistemic trading zones’ (Skrydstrup, 2013; p. 225) bringing into dialogue a range of disciplines including STS, cultural geography, environmental humanities, futures studies, sociology, history, political science and anthropology. The articles build on empirical investigations of a range of sites and infrastructures of environmental anticipation in order to examine the broad reconfiguration of research agendas, environmental governance and techno-industrial innovation pathways toward anticipatory and security purposes regarding biodiversity, ecosystems and the biosphere. They reveal insights into the complexities of anticipating the futures of entangled socio-technical-ecological dynamics whereby scientific research, government, industries, markets and civil society produce the future of nature and society in the same movement. They also reveal how, similarly to the 1960s and 1970s, environmental politics are at play today against the backdrop of sustained action from sceptic and anti-enviromentalist lobby groups launching global anti-science campaigns.