Conference Agenda

Far from being simply the natural temporal extension of the present, the future is a horizon of action that can profoundly shape the present and how political actors respond to ongoing and emerging challenges. The year 2050 is now a key date for climate action and governance, as it is the year that humanity is expected to have achieved net zero carbon emissions before catastrophic climatic events start to profoundly alter life on Earth. If the idea that ‘we are already living in the ruins’ is credible, then imagining the possible futures that can be crafted for living together—as opposed to merely surviving—on this planet is an essentially political task.

This paper takes on the idea that imaginaries—broadly, common visions of the future—play an important role shaping global environmental politics. It argues that abstractly postulating a future with more trees, industrial-size solar farms and carbon capture and storage installations and with less oil and gas pipelines and eventually less carbon and methane emissions, is inadequate to capture the possibilities for political organisation that the appeal to a net zero future offers. Therefore, foresight techniques can illuminate specific collective visions, how they agents advance them, and how the compete for public acceptance. But as [citation removed to annonymize abstract] note, foresight processes are inherently political and impact on how the future is conceptualised, how diverse imagined futures are, and what is their impact on present-day policy choices. It matters not only what futures we imagine, but also how we imagine them.

The paper makes the case for the role that political theory as a visioning technique plays. To achieve this overarching goal, the paper makes two interrelated contributions. First, it theorises the concept of ecopolitical imaginary, aiming to add clarity and specificity to our understanding of a much-used term in academic discourse on climate politics. Second, the paper sketches three ecopolitical imaginaries currently emerging in international politics and public policy with regard to net zero, each driven by a distinct principle: economic growth, well-being, and justice. Finally, the paper reflects critically on the compatibility of these three ecopolitical imaginaries. The paper, thus, makes both conceptual and empirical contributions to scholarship on imaginaries of net zero futures.

“As the last day of 2059, today marks the 10th anniversary of global carbon neutrality. So it is a good day for us to reflect on just how much this cooperative cities movement has accomplished. Cities were once anthropocentrism writ large. Then, city-making was dominated by oligopolies run largely by privileged men under a mechanistic paradigm that was profit-driven, exploitative and destructive. Through a ‘matrix of domination’, hegemonic normative power was wielded through institutions and discourse to oppress ecological beings the world over.

“This is the story of how an extraordinary cascade of tipping points that averted an ecological collapse. It is the story of democracy reborn. This transformation was big, bold, ballistic. It was precipitated through a coalescing of communities and ideas that culminated in the mass proliferation of cooperatives and participatory governance. This resulted in power in the city being profoundly inverted.”

Above is an excerpt from a counter-narrative I intend to present that upends city-making powers from the most privileged to the least. Any kind of truly inclusive city-making has been rare because it is immensely challenging. Few who struggle to put food on the table for their children are likely to invest their time and energy into cumbersome and laborious participatory processes that are ultimately of little consequence. Whilst it is essential that digital tools allow participatory governance to be woven seamlessly into our everyday lives, such technology must be coupled with an ecopedagogical approach. This is one that not only provides the explosive critical eco-literacy needed, but also motivates and empowers. Only then might a cohesive movement be galvanised with the capacity to usurp hegemonic elites and overcome ecological injustice.

To grapple with this entanglement of wicked problems of overwhelming proportions, this counter-narrative is written in the form of a fictionalised auto-ethnography using a backcasting approach. As a counter-narrative, it aims to provide a just transition scenario that foregrounds the needs and interests of marginalised people. To accurately predict the future, forecasting methods assume hegemonic structures of the past persist; backcasting methods, however, do not. Through this reverse-engineering method, the necessary prerequisites and intermediary milestones along the journey can be identified. This counter-narrative is grounded in examples from history that subvert power and advance ecological justice. Together with new ideas and technologies, these will demonstrate how participatory governance could be used in a transition to an ecologically just city of the future.

Different presents and futures of climate change are too large or difficult to fully grasp. Games are a potential help with this: They can contribute to futuring capacities, including systems knowledge, throughout the population, and disseminate experiential knowledge of realities related to Climate Change. They can grant it a place in public arenas as well as in discourse at large. It seems, then, that we should welcome the recent rise in Climate Games. However, many climate games follow a rather narrow range of goals and assumptions about change that may significantly limit their potential for societal impact.

In this article, we set out to first map a range of digital games across the spectrum of ‘serious’ to more purely ‘entertainment/commercial’ that relate to Climate Change.

We present a typology that covers the existing Climate Games, based on the location of climate in the game, and on the main goal with climate change for the audience. We find six types of Climate Change applications in games: Casual, Systems Management, Knowledge, Experience, Subversive, and ‘Backdrop’. These types seem to want to do good by influencing mechanisms that guide social action. But they appeal to this based on implicit premises. We link each type to at least one of these different theories of social action in sociology: Weberian rational action; ideology, and experience. Through this, we provide a framework to assess goals in Climate Games that can help overcome the ‘awareness problem’ and allow game designers and -funders to make an informed choice on the validity of the mechanisms they wish to tap into.

Cities lie at the nexus of sustainability and resilience challenges. Urbanization is a driver of the economic and land use transformations that underpin biodiversity and climate change, and sites of strong socio-economic gradients that underpin environmental inequities. At the same time, cities are places where social, political, and technological innovations emerge to respond to these challenges. Positive transformations are required to put cities along pathways toward sustainability and to support resilience to the effects of climate change. Imagination is a key part of visioning and scenario development to move towards these desired pathways. Science and speculative fiction offer multiple views on potential futures – a way to view the future that the ‘Hyperobject’ that is climate change brings to a creative space to envision new technologies, governances, and economies to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Science fiction thus offers interdisciplinary imaginaries for urban transitions. The available literature reflects this disciplinary breadth, with writings in the humanities, geography, planning, futures, design, and technology studies. This paper presents the results of a literature review of articles focused on science fiction, climate, and the built environment intended to integrate across these disciplines. I ask how science and speculative fiction is used and discussed across these fields with the goal of informing the use of imaginaries to envision sustainable and resilient urban futures. Exploring speculative fiction as a source of imagination spans the contextual conditions of the ESG framework, allowing authors to explore diversity, inequalities, transformations, and the Anthropocene setting. I discuss how science fiction imaginaries can be used to frame and improve scenario approaches and thought experimentation, and also the role they play in design and planning pedagogies.

The dominant way of apprehending areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJs) in global governance scholarship has been to conceive them as “global commons”, that is as resource domains to which several utility-maximizing actors have unrestricted access. This paper argues that this conception is not value-free and is only one of several possible normative frames to think about ABNJs, as much on the part of scholars as on the part of actors. Bringing International Relations social constructivist scholarship into the discussion, it identifies two central questions surrounding the governance of ABNJs, namely those of legitimate authority and justice. From these notions, the paper derives a typology of normative frames for ABNJ governance, which provides a clearer understanding of historical and potential frames and corresponding governance architectures. The usefulness of the typology is illustrated by showing how it allows to characterize more accurately the governance of Antarctica, outer space and international seabed mining. While actors have tended to promote “maximalist” forms of governance rooted in either a traditional “commons” perspective or a “common heritage of humankind” conception, real-world regimes and practices have tended to land closer to compromises between these two normative frames, namely forms of “liberal institutionalism” or “stewardship”. Beyond a better understanding of dynamics at play in ABNJ governance, the proposed typology also has the added benefit of favoring the imagination of new forms of governance for ABNJs, considering the dismal track record of solutions rooted in a “commons” perspective for environmental sustainability.