Compare methods

	Anticipatory Governance Analysis	Sociotechnical Imaginaries Analysis
Field	Science Technology Studies	Science Technology Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2008	2009
Originator	David H. Guston, Daniel Barben, Erik Fisher, Cynthia Selin	Sheila Jasanoff & Sang-Hyun Kim
Type	Governance framework and analytic approach for emerging technologies	Qualitative interpretive and comparative method
Seminal source	Guston, D. H. (2014). Understanding 'anticipatory governance'. Social Studies of Science, 44(2), 218-242.	Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S.-H. (2009). Containing the atom: sociotechnical imaginaries and nuclear power in the United States and South Korea. Minerva, 47(2), 119-146.
Aliases	Anticipatory governance framework, Foresight-engagement-integration analysis, Reflexive technology governance	Sociotechnical imaginary analysis, Imaginaries of science and technology, Visions of desirable futures analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	Anticipatory governance is a framework for steering emerging technologies—nanotechnology, synthetic biology, AI—while their trajectories are still open, rather than waiting to react to harms after they have hardened. Developed by David Guston and colleagues at the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University, it defines anticipatory governance as a broad societal capacity, distributed across the research enterprise and the public, built from three intertwined components: foresight, public engagement, and integration. The aim is not to predict the future but to build the reflexive capacity to imagine plausible futures and act on them wisely in the present.	Sociotechnical imaginaries analysis studies the collectively held, institutionally stabilised, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures that societies attach to science and technology. Introduced by Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim in their 2009 comparison of nuclear power in the United States and South Korea, the concept treats imaginaries as more than rhetoric: they are co-produced with the material and political order, shaping how technologies are designed, governed, and lived. The method reconstructs these visions from public discourse, traces how they become embedded in institutions and policy, and compares how the same technology animates different imaginaries across nations or eras.