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?

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