Anticipating the future through deliberation

Envisioning the future through Robert Rosen's theory of anticipation draws attention to the function of the system in order to achieve its desired state (Rosen 1985). The theory is considered as a novel approach to visioning futures, the present state and the past, arousing interest in a variety of scientific disciplines. At the heart of anticipation is envisioning, as well as consciously affecting the change towards the desired future, which connects the theory firmly with the fields of governance and decision-making. In this paper, anticipation is considered as a recent approach to futures studies that is expected to add value to the development of value deliberation within decision-making. The paper elaborates deliberative democracy practices and citizens’ future perspectives in the spirit of late Mika Mannermaa, who already in the 1980s understood the significance of the community in observing our future (Mannermaa 1988: 287–288): “But what is even more important to notice is that this ‘anticipatory possibility’ belongs to everyone in a society. The complexity view thus emphasizes the role of individuals, groups, movements, nations, etc., in ‘making their future’ much more explicitly than the traditional scenario thinking. Of crucial importance is that futures research in this process should have a clearly emancipatory interest of knowledge, i.e., it should help people to free themselves from old lines of thought and to create new ideas (and in this way to make ‘impossible’ into possible).” Public policy related to sustainable development debate is an example of expectations for the future that strongly reflect the underlying societal values. Values are often associated with the responsibility of present decisions for future generations. However, in the context of scientific research on the energy transition, societal values have been approached at most as cultural factors, without an element of social vision. Increasing participation and citizen’s perspective in the discussion is not straightforward in the field of futures studies, traditionally focused on expert assessment. Nevertheless, the paper suggests that without utilizing the deliberation, the process of anticipation – as presented in Rosen’s theory of anticipation – is incomplete.