Comprehensive and internationally peer-reviewed handbook on tools and methods for forecasting and analysis of global change.

Comprehensive and internationally peer-reviewed handbook on tools and methods for forecasting and analysis of global change.

This book presents three examples of futures research that illustrate the problems of applying knowledge during the course of a futures research project, the ways in which different methodologies interact, and various means of combining and adapting methodological tools and techniques.

This book explores the challenges of presenting sustainability as a more actionable or practical concept and identifying approaches that might offer useful assistance in addressing the temporal and spatial representation of sustainability. The underlying premise of this book is that sustainability is a state realized in the future. In that future there is a geographic arrangement of society and economy that agrees with its environmental setting. This future perspective introduces a little examined subject area that can lend significant content to the sustainability challenge: Futures Research.

Is another future possible? So called ‘late modernity’ is marked by the escalating rise in and proliferation of uncertainties and unforeseen events brought about by the interplay between and patterning of social–natural, techno–scientific and political-economic developments. The future has indeed become problematic. The question of how heterogeneous actors engage futures, what intellectual and practical strategies they put into play and what the implications of such strategies are, have become key concerns of recent social and cultural research addressing a diverse range of fields of practice and experience. Exploring questions of speculation, possibilities and futures in contemporary societies, Speculative Research responds to the pressing need to not only critically account for the role of calculative logics and rationalities in managing societal futures, but to develop alternative approaches and sensibilities that take futures seriously as possibilities and that demand new habits and practices of attention, invention, and experimentation.