Conference Agenda

Environmental politics have long been depicted in terms of a tension between what is ecologically necessary and what is politically possible. Climate movements that engage in imagining alternative futures seek to overcome this tension, and ultimately the contemporary ‘crisis of imagination’ in relation to envisioning alternative futures. Yet how they define and negotiate what is necessary and/or possible has long been overlooked. Through the case of the 2022 Swedish Climate Parliament, which brings together 150 proposals for addressing the current climate crisis, we explore how environmental organizations as well as engaged individual citizens define the desirability and plausibility of their and others’ proposals in terms of necessity and possibility. If we consider being able to imagine as a first step toward creating certain futures, analyzing these articulations and processes presents important spaces of hyperprojectivity in which the social production of futures can be observed. We explore various elements that activists draw on in articulating the necessity and possibility of proposals, including the temporality of climate change and climate politics, political and discursive opportunities, and collective political efficacy. We furthermore compare the discursive legitimization of narratives focusing on either possibility or necessity, hypothesizing that each reflect reformist and radical politics, respectively, and that both will come with distinct discursive strategies to define their desirability and plausibility. The paper aims to provide a basis for identifying and analyzing competing clusters of future imagination in the climate movement.

In this paper we focus in particular on the role of democracy in activists' imaginaries. Democracy faces a dual crisis in the Anthropocene: Democratic states seem unable to address climate change while resulting climate disruptions threaten the foundations of modern democracies. Climate movements tend to express support for more (radical) democracy, which may be unsurprising given the outsider position they themselves occupy by definition. Yet they are also keenly aware of the obstacle that ‘the will of the people’ poses to the radical changes they wish to see, thus creating an often tacit ambivalence to values of democracy as well. We explore how the dual crisis of democracy is dealt with by contemporary actors. We focus on the way in which futures are imagined, and how this reflects, challenges or reproduces current power relations, presents what are considered (un)desirable and (im)possible futures, and as such, shape the social field of imaginations that produce actual futures.

Our starting point for bridging time and justice is a discourse approach focusing on justice and futures in sustainability transformations. Transformations are socially and politically complex with competing interests representing (disputing) discourses. A topic where this becomes especially clear are the discussion on loss and damages, which has been a key concern at the last COPs. It emphasizes how the climate crisis is related to competing justice conceptions and differing ideas on how future transformations should look like. Futures are not neutral but represent particular desires, values, assumptions and worldviews, including ideas on fair distributions of burdens and benefits (distributive justice), ideas on fair decision-making (procedural justice), accepted knowledge systems (epistemic justice) and the issue of respecting agents' rights and positions (recognition justice). To unpack the reciprocal relationship between justice and time, i.e., presents and futures, we distinguish two angles, which are overlapping and interacting: ‘making of futures’ and ‘using of futures’. First, ‘making of futures’ focuses on understanding the creation of (un)just futures in the context of loss and damages, working from the premise that the actions resulting from present negotiations create different futures. The second angle refers to ‘using of futures’, where futures might be (strategically) anticipated when actors construct and legitimize particular visions/ scenarios on the distribution on loss and damage. We conduct a comparative media analysis between the Netherlands and Germany on how the discussion on Loss and Damages was reported on in the media and commented on by citizens.

This contribution discusses the question how different future imaginaries of green energy and related justice claims spatialize and collide in a particular geographical context – Finnmark in northernmost Norway. Conceptually, it draws on [citation of authors removed]’s framework of the ‘futures of sustainability’ and extends this approach with the notion of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’, coined by [citation of authors removed]. Building on these elaborations, it discusses how different sociotechnical imaginaries serve to legitimize competing justice claims, and influence spatial imaginaries and space-making processes. Empirically, it draws on semi-structured qualitative interviews gathered in the Finnmark in October 2022, and shows, how the current political ambitions to turn parts of the region into centers for renewable energy and hydrogen production are interlinked and justified with declining demographics, security politics and global visions for ecological modernization. Moreover, it interrogates how these visions collide with a counter-hegemonic spatial imaginary which builds on Indigenous rights and knowledges. In doing so, the contribution aims at revealing how energy transitions in the High North are not only profoundly political in character, but also how they co-produce and are shaped by fundamentally different normative visions of the future.

Major recurring themes in energy transitions revolve around questions of energy justice: how burdens and benefits are distributed, how processes of energy choices are organized and who is recognized as a legitimate voice in these choices (and how). The inclusion of citizens in the decision-making process is suggested to increase social learning and influence of citizens; to harness local and experiential knowledge; and to generate legitimacy of policies or solve conflicts. However, literature also demonstrates that often policy or academic jargon is imposed on participating citizens. In this research, we experimented with deliberations with diverse groups of citizens, that we facilitated with two different artefacts: maps and sketches to explore if this raised new perspectives in justice dilemmas in the energy transitions. The question was of visualized information would contribute to (1) the deliberative quality of the conversation, and if the deliberations (2) led to new insights in elements of justice overlooked in the literature and by policy makers. This paper therefore discusses: What dilemmas are raised during a mapping assignment in a deliberative session with local stakeholders and citizens to create a more just energy transition? The aim of the paper is to apply the concept of energy justice and broaden it, by involving citizens in these considerations of justice. This paper is based on in depth interviews (N=8), a survey (N=1270) and 4 Deliberative sessions (N=64). Through the three tenets in energy justice (i.e., distributive, procedural, recognition, Jenkins et al., 2016) we analyze how citizens use elements of justice to design a just energy transition.

Anthropogenic climate change and associated risks are posing increasingly profound challenges for justice, equity and allocation. Indeed, addressing losses and damages resulting from global heating is now squarely on the agenda of multilateral climate governance. Corresponding discussions of ‘climate justice’ respond to the profound mismatch whereby those who contribute least to the causes of climate change are most vulnerable to its consequences. This paper addresses the interdependencies between anticipated impacts of climate change, defined as climate risks, and global financial structures. Recent empirical research analysed how vulnerability to climate risks affects the conditions for borrowing on global capital markets. Specifically, assessments of climate vulnerability drive up the cost of sovereign debt for climate vulnerable developing countries. Yet, within the given structures of the global economy, the economic prospects of developing countries depend (among other factors) on access to financial markets at reasonable conditions. The plight of climate vulnerable developing countries is thus compounded by a global financial system that braces itself against the costs of climate risks at the cost of those who are already disproportionally burdened by these risks. This contradicts the polluter pays principle, if unintentionally. Multilateral climate governance is increasingly under pressure to respond to such challenges through the mobilization of climate finance, advancing comprehensive risk management and developing climate risk insurance schemes. The decision to establish a distinct ‘Loss and Damage Fund’ by the recent UN climate change conference ‘COP27’ is a strong case in point. Yet, its eventual expedience will be contingent on the negotiation of specific funding arrangements and the level of supply that developed countries are willing to provide. The borrowing of capital, however, is a straightforward expression of developing countries’ demand. Inhibiting their access to capital markets through issue-linkages with climate risks is a further manifestation of inequity as resulting from climate change. Ultimately, it needs to be addressed in the realm of global financial governance rather than through multilateral climate policy. To this end, this paper seeks to advance a policy-relevant understanding of issue linkages between climate policy, risk management and the global financial system. It argues for a better reflection of global financial structures in climate justice discourse and to developing strong institutional interlinkages between global climate and global financial governance as a prerequisite to targeting one of the major blind spots of justice and allocation in earth system governance.