The Governance of Long-Term Problems: Exploring the Role of Prospective Sensemaking for Forward-Looking Decisions

Long-term developments such as climate change, urbanization and resource depletion challenge governance actors to account for the future in their short-term decisions, in other words: to take forward-looking decisions. Decisions can be characterized as forward-looking when they include a forward-looking problem definition (referring to long-term future developments), a forward-looking solution (choosing flexible and/or robust solutions that remain effective over the long-term), and a forward-looking justification (relying on desired and/or possible future scenarios). Forward-looking decisions require governance actors to make sense of the future. We rely on sensemaking theory to theoretically explore the role and potential of prospective sensemaking for forward-looking decisions about long-term problems. The emphasis on retrospection in sensemaking theory seems at odds with our aim to understand sensemaking about the future, but has been conceptualized in the sensemaking literature with the help of future perfect thinking. This involves imagining a future situation where a number of things will have happened, and considering the current situation from that future perspective. This concept has triggered a debate about whether future-oriented sensemaking can or should go beyond future perfect thinking and can be conceptualized as prospective sensemaking. Prospective sensemaking is then characterized as speculative, reflexive, continuously in flux, embracing complexity and focused on the emergence of plausible stories about the future. Prospective sensemaking can enhance our understanding of how governance actors take forward-looking decisions in a number of ways. First, future perfect thinking is closely related to the construction of visions (i.e. desirable future scenarios) and the approach of backcasting from a desired future to current decisions. This contributes to the forward-looking justification of decisions. Second, the process of prospective sensemaking can help to increase the diversity and variety of long-term perspectives and challenges, and to grasp important future developments that will possibly impact strategic choices and policies under consideration. Prospective sensemaking refers to understanding the future with all the fundamental uncertainties attached to it, and is therefore necessarily speculative, tentative and provisional. Prospective sensemaking benefits from broad and open explorations of the universe of possible future scenarios, including unlikely scenarios. The exploration and interpretation of imagined futures can challenge existing understandings, and thereby generate novel forward-looking problem definitions. Third, the broader the variety of possible scenarios that are considered, the greater the potential for windtunneling solutions on their flexibility and robustness, and the more forward-looking a decision can become.