Reimagining Climate Futures beyond Post-Political Temporalities – Strategic and Affective Responses to Tensions in Climate Activism

Climate change is an urgent and existential threat; however, policy responses and societal ac-tion remain inadequate, despite historical mobilizations for climate action in recent years. There are signs indicating a decline of the ‘promissory legitimacy’ (Beckert, 2020) of the post-political consensus that endorsed technocratic and market-driven solutions. Still, alternative emancipatory imaginations have yet to gain traction and contour (Blühdorn & Deflorian, 2021; Marquardt & Lederer, 2022). This struggle to imagine alternative futures and temporalities pervades even change-oriented actors like climate movements in countries like Germany and the U.S., which are generally considered as actors and spaces for cultivating transformative narratives (Davis, 2002). To this end, research on the recent wave of climate activism has remained inconclusive, acknowledging the potential for emancipatory futuring practices (Friberg, 2022, Knops, 2023), but also revealing concerns about the ongoing prevalence of post-political understandings and apocalyptic temporalities (Kenis, 2021; De Moor 2023; Pavenstädt & Rödder, 2024). This raises two critical questions: how can we account for the apparent scarcity of emancipatory futures (in collective action), and what are the broader con-sequences for climate-related societal transformations? Given the pressing need for more transformative responses to the socio-ecological crises (Stoddard et al., 2021), it is essential to deepen our understanding of the scope of ‘futuring’ practices in climate activism. That means to inquire how activists themselves engage with the contexts, temporalities and future visions surrounding climate change, and how it motivates their discursive and protest action (Oomen et al, 2022; Milkoreit, 2017). Through an in-depth study composed of dramaturgical and discourse analysis of interviews, observations, and document analysis of prominent German and U.S. climate movement groups, namely Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, and the Sunrise Movement, this paper explores the intersection of the contextual conditions for climate activism, and their strategic and affective responses. The results indicate that activists need to navigate a range of tensions in their activism, which act to inhibit their scope for future agency. Among others, activists struggle with reconciling the disjointed temporalities present in different social arenas (cf. Ibrahim et al., 2023), and with the tensions between promoting pluralistic understandings of science and re-affirming the authoritative status of scientific urgency temporalities amidst climate delay and backlash (cf. Pavenstädt, 2024). These tensions are not easily reconciled, necessitating activists to navigate them by drawing on different theories of change (Hestres & Hopke, 2020). They, in turn, motivate how climate activists interpret both the constant and changing contextual conditions for their activism, and how they enact climate future visions and temporalities through their discursive and strategic action. This suggests that the potential for popularizing emancipatory visions in climate debates hinges on activists’ ability to navigate these tensions effectively. While the study suggests important structural barriers for change-oriented actors to popularize alternative visions within the politics of non-sustainability, this also calls for further investigation into the subtle practic-es of resistance (Scott, 1985) that have been noticeable throughout the material, and through which activists may challenge dominant temporalities and cultivate reimagined climate futures.