Anticipatory Governance Analysis

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.