Captured Futures – Rethinking the Drama of Environmental Politics

Abstract

Speakers: Maarten Hajer, Jeroen Oomen Environmental politics as we know it cannot deliver. Despite sustained efforts, politics has been unable to bend ecological trends. Maarten A. Hajer and Jeroen Oomen argue that this is because environmental politics is captured. This capture is not limited to lobbying or a lack of political will, but manifests as a capture of the imagination: we seem unable to envision futures that are meaningfully different from the present. Examining environmental politics as drama reveals how all actors play their roles in sustaining this capture. Scientists funnel narrow policy futures through their models; activists adopt politically expedient language; and policymakers search for safe, technologically sound, win-win solutions. All are held within a regime of ecological modernisation that maintains an overly narrow solution space. For Hajer and Oomen, this is cause for concern: we have entered a radical age in which persistent policy failure fuels growing calls for speculative geoengineering as a last resort to safeguard the future. At the same time, there is a mounting societal backlash against environmental policies. In the third part of the book, however, discourse analysis and dramaturgical perspectives emerge as grounds for hope. They sketch an alternative way of understanding and practising environmental politics. This approach argues that cultural strategies may have greater leverage over the societal imagination. By pairing this with the development of new discourses and alternative dramaturgies of change, Captured Futures highlights how environmental politics might draw on more effective and more inspiring ideas about how to approach the future, and ultimately how it might be liberated.