Defining the Necessary and the Possible: Future Imaginations in the Swedish Climate Parliament

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.