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Short abstract

Whose futures matter? Stakeholder meetings and participatory research often generate as much absence as collaboration. Based on two fieldwork cases in Ghana, this paper explores what STS can contribute when the politics of gathering shape the futures constructed.

Long abstract

Collaborative future-making in science often begins with a gathering. Stakeholder meetings, participatory workshops, and multi-sectoral launches have become routine technologies for assembling the voices that supposedly matter. But who decides whose voice matters? And what happens to futures that never get a seat at the table? This paper interrogates these questions through ethnographic observation of two settings within Ghana's national agricultural research system: a participatory varietal selection (PVS) exercise and the launch of a multi-stakeholder nutrition project. Both spaces were created as collaborative environments and imagined futures on paper. However, they also resulted in absences—people who were not invited, unable to attend, attended but remained silent, or whose presence was merely ceremonial rather than impactful. Drawing on STS scholarship on participation and its limits (Chilvers and Kearnes, 2020; Joly, 2015), the paper asks what these gatherings accomplish beyond their stated aims. It argues that stakeholder mapping is inherently biased: it enacts theories, embeds assumptions about whose knowledge is valued, and makes certain futures seem impossible before any discussion starts. The paper explores what it means for STS researchers to study these dynamics not as implementation failures, but as the mundane yet consequential politics of future-making (York, 2018; Kastenhofer and Vermeulen, 2024).

Keywords: Participation, collaboration, future-making, agricultural research, Ghana.

Demonstration: Participants reverse-engineer a PVS exercise and a stakeholder workshop using anonymised fieldwork materials to map who was present and absent, and collectively reflect on what STS can offer when exclusion is built into the design.