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- Convenor:
-
Ingmar Mundt
(Weizenbaum Institute Berlin)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
- Location:
- C-7, 2.15
- Sessions:
- Thursday 10 September, -
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
Short Abstract
Panel explores proactive crisis forecasting that uses new digital systems and technologies to anticipate events and guide resilient action. It maps networks of Anticipatory Governance and probes the contested ontological and epistemic bases of predictions and future knowledge for policy practice.
Description
Producing knowledge about the future to prepare for potential crises is essential across many fields for robust decisions. In humanitarian crisis foresight, responses were for a long time reactive, arriving only once a crisis had already begun, when at best the worst could be averted. With the arrival of new possibilities of digital information systems, predictive algorithms, and Big Data methods, crisis early warning is shifting to a proactive orientation that seeks to anticipate future events and unencountered situations. Ideally, crises should be predicted long before they occur, so that responses to climate change can begin early, humanitarian organisations can arrive in time, and financial support can be released quickly before disaster unfolds.
This shift is driven by broad networks of diverse actors and entities. Developer teams building new forecasting technologies, international organisations, political actors, ecological environments, and the technologies themselves form a network of Anticipatory Governance in which different aims and logics meet. The resulting future knowledge is contested and challenged, translated into technical calculations and pattern recognition, and open to flexible interpretation. The ontological and epistemic bases of this knowledge also remain unclear.
The panel invites contributions that address, and may go beyond, the following questions.
-Which material and discursive translation processes bring economic, political, and societal aims into forecasting systems, and how can these be traced?
-Which ontological and epistemological dimensions are produced, omitted, or challenged when generating knowledge about the future or about previously unencountered situations?
-Which forecasting technologies are used, for example simulations, scenarios, predictions, extrapolation, dashboards, and algorithmic pattern recognition, and which futures do these technologies render visible or invisible?
-Which structures of Anticipatory Governance can be observed, which networks form around the early detection of crises, and how can political aims such as resilience, preparedness, and anticipation be traced within and beyond these networks? How are future predictions made actionable for decision making?
Accepted papers
Session 1 Thursday 10 September, 2026, -Paper short abstract
This paper explores how synthetic knowing emerges through monitoring and forecasting climate related hazards in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, enabling anticipatory decision making while reshaping how gradually unfolding environmental risks are understood and governed.
Paper long abstract
Preventing and mitigating the effects of global climate change is among the defining challenges of our time. Longyearbyen, Svalbard is an Arctic settlement located in one of the world’s most rapidly warming regions, where climate change manifests through an increasing range of natural hazards, including permafrost thaw, landslides, rockslides, slushflow avalanches, snow avalanches, river flooding, increased sediment flow from melting glaciers, groundwater pollution, and coastal erosion. These developments are driving the rapid reconfiguration of local risk governance practices that must generate, synthesize, and act upon diverse forms of environmental knowledge derived from observations, sensors, and simulation data. In this context, monitoring and forecasting become synthetic practices that bring together heterogeneous data sources, disciplinary expertise, and technological infrastructures in order to anticipate and respond to emerging risks. Drawing on four years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with researchers and stakeholders involved in multidisciplinary projects in Longyearbyen over the past decade, this article examines how such knowledge practices are assembled and mobilized to support decision making under conditions of accelerating environmental change. In doing so, it highlights how anticipatory practices challenge established epistemic and ontological frames by reconfiguring how gradually unfolding environmental phenomena are known, interpreted, and governed.
Paper short abstract
We examine how shared guiding visions for situation pictures can be developed across divergent future imaginaries in heterogeneous actor networks. Using a workshop-based design on an ideal 2040 system, we translate narrative imaginaries into operational chains of action.
Paper long abstract
A situation picture allows for the exchange of situation-relevant information in crises and disasters. Therefore, it is key to system resilience and to shared situational awareness. However, their design can be contested, as heterogeneous actor networks are shaped by divergent imaginaries of the future, ultimately hindering efficient system design and use.
Therefore, we propose developing shared guiding visions despite these differing future imaginaries and to test and improve chains of action. Specifically, we ask how shared guiding visions can be developed across divergent future imaginaries to inform and operationalize chains of action.
To address this question, we adopt a qualitative, workshop-based research design to investigate the production and operationalization of future knowledge in heterogeneous actor networks. Specifically, we report on an exploratory analysis of participant responses to a story completion exercise, in which a transdisciplinary group of partners from five German research projects in the field of civil security were asked to imagine an ideal situation picture for the year 2040, describing its components and functioning. Using the normative scenario technique, implicit future imaginaries are a) synthesized into guiding visions and b) stress-tested by prompting participants to plan actions and tracing how imaginaries inform operational knowledge under uncertainty.
The aim of our analysis is to show how narrative future imaginaries can be translated into operational chains of action in complex actor networks and to identify structures (e.g., networks, technologies) that can be mobilized to approximate these guiding visions and address vulnerabilities we might face today.