Introduction

John Maynard Keynes (1936) stressed that economicdecisions are always made in the context of greatuncertainty because they are based on an‘unchangeable past’ and aimed at what he called a‘perfidious future’. The same sentiment would applyto decisions made by planners, who act on futureeconomies through both knowledge of them – gainedfrom techniques like forecasting and predictiveanalytics – and the capacity to intervene in waysthat potentially influence them.

Today, future knowledge is more commonly generated byprivate consultants than by planners or developersthemselves. Economic development experts conductregional economic modelling and produce forecasts tohelp local governments imagine the costs andbenefits of major transformations, like the arrivalof a corporate headquarters. These same consultantsalso work for private actors – developers andcorporations – to demonstrate the ‘public purpose’and ‘economic impact’ of their prospective projects,which often leads to the transmission of public landand financial subsidies for development. In thissense, consultants are one of the strategic bridgingagents between state and economy, providing the gluethat has allowed myriad public– private partnershipsto flourish (Weber and O’Neill-Kohl, 2013).

In this chapter I will discuss how the anticipatorygaze – what some call ‘expectancy’ – is formalisedin the tools and techniques used by theseconsultants given the uncertainties associated withlarge-scale investments and the volatility of theglobal economy. In doing so I am making the claimthat planning technocracies can be understoodthrough their ‘instruments’ (Lascoumes and Le Galès,2007) and ‘governmental technologies’, that is, the‘complex of mundane programmes, calculations,techniques, apparatuses, documents and proceduresthrough which authorities seek to embody and giveeffect to governmental ambitions’ (Miller and Rose,1990: 175). By enquiring the inner working logics oftechnical instruments used by policy makers andplanners, it is possible to explain why certainexpertise becomes so central in the definition ofpublic policies and to question how technocraticlogics of planning are enacted andinstitutionalised.