The shifty dynamics of future cancellation: Longitudinal discourse analysis of future imaginaries in Dutch environmental futures reports

Over the past five decades, environmental policymaking has been heavily concerned with developing anticipatory governance capacities and designing ‘future-proof’ institutions. The literature broadly indicates that the field of governmental futuring has evolved within the past decades from ‘forecasting to foresight’, allowing more room for openness and pluralism in futuring work. This sharply differs from the contemporary critical theory analysis of ‘future cancellation’, which claims that our contemporary moment has become incapable of envisioning alternative futures beyond the late capitalist status quo. In this study we seek to empirically explore future cancellation in the context of Dutch environmental governance, a field with a long tradition of institutionalized anticipatory capacities. We conducted a longitudinal discourse analysis of a total of 20 reports from two future-oriented scientific institutes within Dutch government, tracing historical shifts in dominant futuring methods and environmental future imaginaries, and the extent to which these open or instead close the collective views of the future. Our analysis shows that, following the future cancellation thesis, futuring methods and environmental future imaginaries have over time converged into a narrower imagination of the future. This is, however, far from a stable, linear and deterministic process – as the broad-brushed thesis of future cancellation might suggest. Rather, we distinguish four distinct periods, characterized by historically contingent processes of future opening and cancellation. When studied in-depth and in historical context, future cancellation in environmental futures research appears of a more shifty nature, both related to futuring methods and the presence of dominant environmental future imaginaries. • Empirical exploration of the critical theory notion of ‘future cancellation’ • Longitudinal discourse analysis of 20 environmental futures research reports • Four distinct periods in the evolution of futuring methods and future imaginaries • From 1977-2023 increase in future cancellation alternated with moments of opening • Future cancellation is present in moderation with shifty rather than linear dynamic