Mysterious Faces of Hybridisation. Case: Anticipatory Hybrid Governance (AHG)

Our complex world is simultaneously facing mega-challenges and bombarded with mega-crises. Some of the global challenges are in urgent need of major responses such as Climate Change (CC), while others manifest themselves as a myriad of embedded opportunities and looming risks, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially in its general and super forms Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) – waiting for full openings. Mega-crises can emerge from unexpected events, such as COVID-19 turned into a pandemic. Blinded by this huge conundrum of mega-challenges and mega-crises, we have not looked deep enough into hybridization. What does it mean as a lever for construction of futures? At various levels and in all dimensions of society, hybridization is a phenomenon that increasingly combines and fuses things, aspects, elements, actors, et cetera. While creating multiple combinations it may blur our understanding of the world. On the other hand, hybridization may push us towards solutions to global challenges and promote futures resilience in crises. At the same time, governance needs to turn into anticipatory governance. We claim that anticipatory governance has to take hybridity into better consideration, open up its mysterious manifestations and turn itself into hybrid forms – thus becoming Anticipatory Hybrid Governance (AHG). As a dynamic and futures-conscious approach, the heuristic of hybridity and of open futures can be used as lenses for testing and ethically reflecting on scenarios and on future imaginaries. This enables actors to imagine the possible consequences of various developments on the topic under study. They help us to envisage a diverse range of futures and detect what is opening (or closing) in them, and to leave room for those yet unanticipated. Anticipatory hybrid governance could benefit from this approach.