Sustainability imaginaries: competing visions, expectations, and futurity in global environmental politics

Abstract

Efforts to promote sustainability and address environmental threats, such as climate change, are inherently linked to what is desirable in the future. These imaginaries of what is worth striving for in society have effects on thinking about and negotiating contemporary politics. In addition to questions about the meaningful use of resources, imaginaries about desirable futures provide clues about the shaping of processes, the involvement of actors, and, not least, worthwhile goals. Sociotechnical Imaginaries are visions of and indicate how science and technology are said to meet public needs. In this way, imaginaries are connected with questions of governance and responsibility. They contribute to the organization of politics and indicate how governance is to be organized and which steps are to be fulfilled by those responsible, with what priority and in what order. An imaginary can guide or influence stakeholders’ policy preferences and serve as an explanatory and/or justificatory resource. Despite the growing interest in aspiration, future-making, and imagination, sustainability research still lacks a comprehensive understanding of how different visions of the future shape present politics, and vice versa. By acknowledging the co-production of what is and what ought to be, and drawing the connections between advancements in science and technology and competing ideas of social and political order, we aim to explore imaginaries in multiple sustainability contexts. This panel seeks to initiate a much-needed conversation between political scientists and science and technology scholars working on sustainability issues. Drawing on diverse fields such as food production, energy, and mobility, we unpack what is (re)imagined in sustainability politics, how alternative imaginaries emerge, and how dominant imaginaries are challenged by critical discontents. We bring together papers that explore imaginaries of sustainability in different ways and with different emphases. We thereby ask how imaginaries of successful environmental and climate policy are represented and what impulses they simultaneously set for environmental policy making.

Title	Details
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