Knowledge of the Future: Anticipatory Governance by International Organisations

Research on international organisations (IOs) tends to examine decision-making processes by asking how past actions contributed to the present state of affairs. Challenging such retrospective approaches, this predominantly conceptual paper draws on an emerging inter-disciplinary consensus on the performative effects of future making. Not only is the future both highly uncertain and mallea-ble, but imaginaries of the future orient the behaviour of actors in the present. Specifically, we propose that contemporary IOs routinely engage in various forms of anticipatory global governance as they seek to render the future less uncertain and thus more amenable to their policy interventions. Anticipatory work is essential for IOs to meet cultural expectations of ‘evidence-based’ poli-cymaking, as well as to enact their self-ascribed role as global knowledge pro-viders. They thus face the challenge of operationalising the many available fu-tures into a delimited set of implementable policies. To invoke a distinction introduced by Berenskoetter, IOs derive more ‘robust’ visions of the future from ‘creative’ ones. We illustrate these dynamics with examples from four contem-porary IOs: the International Labour Organization (ILO), the International Mon-etary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank. Our discussion demonstrates that IO poli-cymaking is rooted not only in past events but also in perceptions of potential futures. How IOs envision (the) future(s) fundamentally shapes how they con-struct problems and conceive of solutions.