Navigating Climate Policy Politicization Through Creative Storytelling Futuring: An Ethnographic Case-Study

Since the second half of the twentieth century, governments have sought to design ‘future-proof’ institutions and develop their anticipatory capacities. Yet, facing increasingly complex long-term issues, most notably climate change, contemporary governments have been diagnosed as suffering from a ‘crisis of imagination’, increasingly unable to develop let alone conceive of the policy alternatives needed. In response, scholars and policy practitioners are exploring future imaginative techniques and creative interventions as tools to overcome these limitations. These initiatives tend to focus on the content and impacts of creative interventions, and are generally less interested in the backstage policy dynamics in which they take place – and the complexities that arise when unorthodox techniques are introduced in politicized policy systems. This paper contributes to the emerging futuring field by ethnographically investigating how the – in policy context ‘exotic’ – method of creative storytelling, as a method of future imagination, develops in the highly politicized and institutionalized context of national Dutch climate policy-making. This study is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Dutch Ministry of Climate and Green Growth studying a creative storytelling project where policymakers decided to experiment with future imagination as a possible way to navigate issues of politicization. Over 2024, four short cartoons were developed that served as speculative narratives to provide citizens with an ‘enticing future perspective’ of the national climate policy. Combining participant-observation, interviews and document analysis, this study depicts the subsequent efforts to institutionalize creative story-telling as a method of future imagination within the politicized domain of climate policy. The analysis reveals that implementing creative futuring interventions in the highly politicized context of climate policy-making does not simply help to break the alleged crisis of imagination and help to build consensus around a vision of the future. Rather, these results suggest that creative futuring interventions should be understood as a method to highlight and question current power structures and conflicts and open up a discussion about them, rather than as a tool to generate consensus around one desirable view of the future.