Where we are – a much-abbreviated account of the state of the art as presented in this volume
This book has addressed the key question of ‘future-making’, i.e. how people in Africa imagine, shape, and produce their own futures. This has been the overarching theme of all contributions, which have been based on a wide range of empirical examples and conceptual reflections. Focusing on different spatial scales, geographical areas, strategies, and social and political contexts, all chapters share three key features. Firstly, by placing the ‘making’ of futures at the forefront, they emphasize the significance of agency. They highlight the creativity and vitality of people who strive to imagine and influence the conditions under which they want to live without disregarding their social and cultural embeddedness and their positionality in networks of power and dependence. This challenges the prevailing popular development narratives that portray the continent as lacking, backward and vulnerable. Secondly, by approaching African futures ‘in the making’, the book explicitly acknowledges the incompleteness and openness of the future. Understanding futures as unfinished projects or processes acknowledges uncertainty, but also recognizes possibilities and opportunities. Thirdly, the wide range of case studies in the book illustrates why we speak of futures in the plural. There is not just one more or less predetermined future that can be clearly anticipated and predicted. On the contrary, current pathways into the future may lead in different directions; some are more probable than others, but their outcomes remain unknown. Uncertainty implies that the future is open to unexpected changes, surprises and disruptions, as well as alternative visions and initiatives that could lead to positive change. While uncertainty and unpredictability shape future-making agendas, they always have an impact on the current moment, on everyday politics, and on negotiations over the best pathway to take.
Admittedly, the focus on agency should not lead us to overemphasize personal freedom, as some people have to plan and act under severe constraints. Their endowments and entitlements – their material capacity to aspire, as Appadurai has put it – is essentially shaping the way futures are approached. We need to take into account structural disadvantages, such as poverty, marginalization, violent conflict, and environmental degradation, which reduce the scope of human agency and narrow the space in which it is possible to aspire. In order to make sense of future-making in Africa and elsewhere, the duality of structure and agency must be considered in the sense of Giddens’ structuration theory. However, the current trend in futures studies in the African context seems to prioritize agency while neglecting the relevance of structure, power, and inequality. Research should therefore also distinguish between enabling and constraining conditions and go back to the original sociological key questions that aim to trace the relation between agency and structure.