The Politics and Science of the Future

This chapter, building on the individual contributions to this book, highlights the complex interactions and feedback-loops between the politics and the science of the future. First, the chapter reflects on current and future trends in politics, science, and society that shape the context of future-oriented thinking at the intersection between politics and academia; acknowledging the co-constitution and co-evolution of different historical, and increasingly global imaginaries of the future and the national and international social and political order across time. Second, the chapter highlights how different knowledge conceptions and temporal logics of and within politics and science complicate the processes of creating and assembling future knowledge; and how a better understanding of the interlinkages between method, practice, context, and political purpose of different types of future reasoning can facilitate collaboration between policy-makers and scientists. Third, the chapter discusses how risks and uncertainty are dealt with across different policy-fields, from climate, health, and financial markets to biological and nuclear weapons proliferation, civil war, and crime; and compares whose predictions and forecasts are integrated how deeply into what forms of governance systems and what consequences this has for politics, society, and science.