The Future Landscape

This working paper is a preliminary study of some central actors in the future landscape. It argues that the future landscape is a spectrum stretching from institutions claiming independent, objective expertise and scientific certainty about the future, to those focused on the social creation of knowledge through participation and public debate. We might call this a spectre encompassing radically different approaches to the knowability and governability of the future – hence a landscape that stretches from the knowable and governable future to the unknowable and ungovernable. These shifting dimensions in claims to scientific rationality and political control are discernible in definitions of future studies as an activity of knowledge production. What kind of study object is the future, what kind of knowledge can one produce, how, and with what claims to certainty and expertise?