Between Dramatising and Calculating: Futures in Global Social Policy

Both academic and political (social) policy discourse is permeated by diagnoses of crisis, ranging from various conflicts, demographic changes, migration movements to climate change. Constructions of crisis are in many of these cases founded on expectations of the future. These expectations are generated by a variety of practices of imagining futures, such as simulations, estimates, scenarios, as well as big data and algorithms, as a newer development. The envisioning of futures is supposed to eliminate uncertainties and enable pre-emptive action, to prevent crises from happening. On the other hand, the same practices of 'futuring' have been the foundation of constructions of crisis. In other words: futuring makes crises visible, but at the same time constitutes the basis for anticipatory action – to act politically on these crises to prevent certain anticipated futures from happening. The paper explores the link between the making of futures through specific technologies and their depiction of crises, as a specific and consequential way of making (a) future(s) present. Practices of futuring differ in how far and in what way they constrain and enable action, related to the ways in which they envision the future (e.g. different scenarios, or a linear path towards a definite future) and how they conceive of human and political action to influence such events. Especially scenario-making makes visible potentialities that are at the same time the foundation for action while also enabling to generate perceptions of crisis. It is high time to understand the way these practices of futuring work, and their role in social political practices. In a first instance, it is thus asked, why specific futures become central in the perception of a crisis and others do not? In a second instance, it is asked how the technologies of future-making enable and constrain political action. How do calculating, modeling and simulating futures relate to narratives of crisis, informing them and being informed by them in return? This way, the paper aims to show that and how the evaluation as crisis is dependent on the technologies doing the futuring and their cognitive and normative preconditions, e.g. discourses, data and statistics, and calculations and models. Instead of a ‘transcendent’ (meta-)perspective on how these practices work, the paper analyzes them empirically. While the future is always being associated with uncertainty, several of these crisis discourses of social policy critically rely on a specific view of the future as threatening scenario. This is especially true for climate change and associated social problems, such as climate change-induced migration, and for demographic problems of societies, which is why the paper will focus on comparing these two discourses in relation to the aforementioned questions. Empirically, the paper draws on an analysis of practices of futuring of the International Labour Organization and the United Nations and thus explicitly focuses on a case of global social policy and the role of international organizations, both having established an image to act as neutral observers of social reality.