When is the future? Temporal ordering in anticipatory policy advice

•The temporal ordering of the future in Strategic Environmental Assessment, Technology Assessment and Foresight is analyzed.•Time horizons frequently span around 10–20 years and have an upper limit of 50 years into the future.•Time horizons are related to the subject matter, epistemic considerations, human experiences, political aspects and spatial contexts.•Multiple dynamics of limiting and expanding the future in time are to be found in anticipatory policy advice.•Overall, a tendency to shorten time horizons prevails, contradicting the very purpose of instruments of anticipatory policy advice. With the increasing call for proactive and long-term policy-making, a variety of approaches and instruments of anticipatory policy advice have been devised, implemented and analyzed. However, so far, very little is known about the temporal aspects of such instruments. This article explores the temporal ordering of the future in three prominent instruments of anticipatory policy advice: Strategic Environmental Assessment, Technology Assessment and Foresight. Based on 25 cases of SEA, TA, and Foresight processes in Austria, the article first presents the specific time horizons that are applied in the instruments. Time horizons in anticipatory policy advice frequently span around 10–20 years and have an upper limit of 50 years into the future. In a second step, the article explores and discusses how the chosen time horizons explicitly and implicitly base on varying time scales that are related to the subject matter, epistemic considerations, human experiences, political aspects, and spatial contexts. Owing to these time scales, multiple dynamics of limiting and expanding the future in time are to be found in anticipatory policy advice. Overall, the article illustrates that the tendency to shorten time horizons prevails, contradicting the very purpose of instruments of anticipatory policy advice.