Anticipatory knowledge: how development consultants see the future

Abstract

This chapter discusses how the anticipatory gaze — what some call ‘expectancy’ — is formalised in the tools and techniques used by private consultants given the uncertainties associated with large-scale investments and the volatility of the global economy. It makes the claim that planning technocracies can be understood through their ‘instruments’ and ‘governmental technologies’. These refer to the complex of mundane programmes, calculations, techniques, apparatuses, documents, and procedures through which authorities seek to embody and give effect to governmental ambitions. By enquiring the inner working logics of technical instruments used by policy makers and planners, it is possible to explain why certain expertise becomes so central in the definition of public policies and to question how technocratic logics of planning are enacted and institutionalised. The chapter thus pays attention to the actors that create and use techniques of anticipation in order to understand their motivations and ambitions.