Looking forward and back: building futures and encoding pasts in governance

In this chapter we look at the way communities construct pasts and futures and the role of governance in this process. We distinguish between legacies of the past and actual memories, which can pertain to organizations, individuals, but also to communities. Remembering and forgetting are discussed as co-constitutive, as forgetting is as necessary as remembering, and as they shape each other, just as stories and images of past and future are co-constitutive. This does not mean that the future is a repetition of the past, but rather that community futures are constructed in reference to positive and negative interpretations of the past. We discuss communities with particular histories, memories and legacies, where connecting past, present and future has particular difficulties, e.g. when marked by trauma, or by deep forgetting, or when a dramatic restructuring of social memory took place.