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- Convenor:
-
Ingmar Mundt
(Weizenbaum Institute Berlin)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
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 1Paper 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.
Paper short abstract
How does the siren make you feel? Based on sensory ethnography in Sweden and Denmark, this paper examines how siren tests act as rituals of anticipatory governance, shaping public space and creating embodied experiences of security, danger, memory, and anticipation.
Paper long abstract
Siren tests function as recurring “peacetime rehearsals” for testing the functionality of the outdoor warning system, producing a shared temporal moment in which urban space is briefly reorganized around the sound of warning. While contemporary research on early warning systems often focuses on digital emergency technologies and algorithmic predictions, this study foregrounds the embodied and sonic dimensions of outdoor warnings systems through which societies prepare for unknown crises.
Using qualitative methods such as sonic ethnography, participant observation, and interviews, this study examines the testing of sirens in Sweden and Denmark as a sociotechnical ritual of anticipatory governance. Drawing from anticipation studies and science and technology studies, the analysis identifies several moral complexities of anticipatory governance through sound. For instance, injunction, the expectation that people should be willing to anticipate; anticipatory preparedness, preparing as if the danger is already here, and the ecology of testing, in which the siren becomes pervasive, ubiquitous, and continuous in the public space.
The findings highlight a wide range of embodied experiences: safety and trust for some, irritation or indifference for others, and in some cases memories of conflict and disaster. The data furthermore illustrate how the decades-long outdoor siren system complements newer digital emergency infrastructures and is entangled with both old and new technopolitical infrastructures of national civil and military defense, as well as with broader discourses of global uncertainty and instability.
Paper short abstract
Using Valuation Studies and a relational lens on expertise, the case of EU’s vision for Energy Highways is used to explore the role of anticipatory digital technologies such as digital twins and energy modelling that increasingly are required to predict and intervene to render a resilient future.
Paper long abstract
The transition to renewable energy is ever more struggling to address the issue of building a resilient, independent and secure energy future. With renewable energy increasingly providing larger shares of generation in the energy system and with demands for sector-coupling, critical infrastructures have become fragile towards internal as well as external threats. As a counter measure, predictive control system algorithms implemented in digital twins have come to constitute a new centre of anticipatory governance. Based on a lens of Valuation Studies and a relational lens on expertise, we use the case of the EU’s vision for centralised Energy Highways, with centralised gigawatt-scale ‘energy islands‘ and green hydrogen Power-to-X technologies, to explore the role of anticipatory digital technologies such as digital twins and energy modelling that increasingly demand the likes of AI and quantum computing technologies. Through interviews conducted with Transmission System Operators, control system manufacturers, research institutes, as well as (inter)national organisations, we probe the contested ontological and epistemic bases of predictions and future knowledge for governing the energy transition when a flexible energy system must be responsive and anticipatory both in terms of internal faults but also external (cyber and physical) threats in order to prevent crises and black-outs. We further discuss how the resulting future knowledge about how the energy system is contested and challenged, e.g. in terms of favouring a more centralised and/or decentralised energy system, displays controversy over which futures predictive technologies render visible or invisible, and over which futures are rendered actionable for decision-making.