Futures最新文献

Human societies are dealing with urgent and daunting societal transition challenges, such as those posed by climate change, inequality, pandemics, and digitalization. In all these cases, we know that they must fundamentally change the way they do and think about things, and urgently so, but do not know how. Uncertainty about the direction of change and resistance to change are ubiquitous. Future generations must be equipped with capabilities for dealing with these challenges. However, there is an apparent mismatch between the skills currently taught and the skills needed to address complexity, uncertainty, and resistance. Using relevant existing frameworks and experiences we created and taught a course focusing on fostering these skills. For this purpose we developed the Transition Cycle, an original educational approach in which students work on a societal transition challenge in four distinct but related phases: imagine, connect, act, and assess. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate the Transition Cycle and its underlying concepts, basic components, implementation in the course, and learning outcomes. We conclude by reviewing lessons learned and raising questions for future research and experimentation.

Future scenarios have become a familiar element of addressing complex problems such as unsustainable food systems, helping to identify alternative policies and practices around food. However, scenarios’ development and deployment in decision making processes tends to elevate and engage specific voices, quantitative data and models, and focuses on techno-scientific innovations and commercial-speculative design interventions. To ensure a just transition to more sustainable food systems it is necessary to bring diverse voices into the development of future scenarios and to consider the efficacy of alternative forms of future scenarios for expanding engagement. This paper presents an approach for more inclusionary approaches, focused on an exploratory case study of urban food sharing using the Three Horizon approach. It makes three central contributions. First, generating empirically-grounded scenarios which centre overlooked marginalised actors. Second, developing novel artistic visualisations of possible futures which incorporate emotional-affective dimensions, and third using these visualisations to engage actors and facilitate dialogue on urban food sustainability transitions. The results of scenario testing with municipal policy shapers in a location where food policy is embryonic are presented and discussed. The paper finds co-developing and visualising scenarios provides an accessible means of engagement and platforming traditionally marginalised voices and perspectives within futuring activities.

This article describes the environmental practices and discourses of local actors in the Alt Empordà region in Catalonia and how they contribute to the production of a vision of the environmental future. Based on a political ecology of hope framework, it presents different anticipatory actions and strategies which have created this vision of the environmental future since the 1970s, presenting key historic moments and actions which are central to various strategies which have been elaborated in order to secure access to the land and its resources. For decades, different successful campaigns have nourished a particular outlook, aimed at creating an environmental future which is accessible, attainable, and pragmatic. The article then analyzes how recent environmental changes and the consequences of these changes for the different local environments are significantly changing the actors’ view of the environmental future. Different shades of darker futures are emerging, in which the clear gains from environmental struggles are less tangible. It is hoped that in these futures access to nature will be more inclusive and less oriented towards a modernist and developmentalist approach to the territory. This perspective favours a thriving nature, but does so by rethinking conventional conservation models in order to take into account the changing nature of the environment in a climate change context. It is hoped that the region's demographic structure will enable its inhabitants to maintain, occupy and live on the territory, rather than leaving it to consist of protected areas or tourist areas only, and to build a different relationship with energy and water consumption. Finally, we discuss how these transformations modify local perceptions of the future and may foster an “anticipated solastalgia” as an emerging category of environmental thought.

Despite the great relevance of global environmental scenarios for the study of environmental change and sustainability transitions, they have rarely been the object of analysis for scholars of the social sciences. In this article, we analyze the ideological assumptions of 993 global environmental scenarios contained in 243 academic works. By developing a new categorization of environmental scenarios, we investigate the economic and governance organization reflected in the scenarios, as well as the portrayed human-nature relationships. We find that global environmental scenarios developed and used by the scientific community largely reproduce rather than break with dominant power structures in the economic, governance and cultural domain. The majority of scenarios reflects an anthropocentric worldview and assumes that the logic of global capitalism and of the Westphalian state-based governance system will not change radically during the 21st century. The implicit solution of sustainability problems dominating these scenarios is a combination of continuous economic growth, rapid technological progress and an international (environmental) agreement. ‘Alternative scenarios’ are scarce, often only problematize one dimension of the social structure of world society and frequently lack explicit drivers of change or pathways to desirable futures. To increase the diversity of scenarios, future research should focus on refining and quantifying existing post-capitalist, post-state-centric and/or ecocentric scenarios, and on developing a range of scenarios whose storyline systematically problematize or even break with current power structures.

Scholarship on how speculative knowledges can contribute to envisioning sustainable futures is thriving. There is less attention to the specific ways in which political theory as speculative knowledge is relevant to these scholarly discussions. This article fosters this link by suggesting reading climate fiction as political theory. The article follows a four-step analysis. First, it clarifies the importance of pluralising and decolonising the knowledges through which climate change is engaged politically. Second, it introduces the concept of ecopolitical imaginary to capture collective visions for sustainable futures, showing the relevance of the theorising endeavour. Third, it elucidates the idea that placing political theory and climate fiction in dialogue can help envisage alternative ecopolitical imaginaries for future world ordering. Finally, it reads Robinson’s Ministry for the Future as an experiment in political thinking: an ecopolitical imaginary that helps to think through the challenges involved in countering the colonial logic of global climate governance and the Eurocentric universalism underpinning it. The overarching argument is that reading climate fiction as political theory offers insight into envisioning just sustainable futures.

This article draws on a co-design workshop with professionals working in the field of smart energy in the UK, to explore their imaginaries of smart homes and how these are (in)formed by their everyday ‘lay’ experiences. Smart home technologies (SHTs) are fundamentally embedded in future visions of energy transitions as they are expected to support actions to tackle climate change. Nevertheless, literature and adoption rates reveal an apparent gap between householders’ needs, expectations, and uses of SHTs, and how professional designers and developers view the same technology. Previous studies on SHTs imaginaries coming from industry and experts have focused on how users are represented in institutional visions, however, they routinely neglect the individual subjectivities of professionals producing such representations. The article presents three core results on the role of SHTs in digital energy futures: (1) it generates visual and textual conceptualizations of professionals’ imaginaries around smart domestic environments; (2) it identifies empirical insights on the formative role of professionals’ personal imaginaries for smart energy transitions; and (3) it calls for an alternative and more reflexive co-design practice to envision a fairer and more inclusive energy future.

This conceptual paper reconstructs an implicit ethical claim of post-normal science, namely that knowledge produced in extended peer communities (EPCs) is both epistemically better and fairer. Post-normal science introduced EPCs to operationalise better quality knowledge for decision-making in conditions when facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent. In such contexts, traditional forms of quality assurance in science are bound to fail and even risk becoming the source of harm to people, their social and natural environment. Consequently, the community of peers assessing the quality of knowledge needs to be broadened to include a plurality of perspectives and epistemic communities. To date, post-normal scholarship has focused primarily on the epistemological side of EPCs. Building on this, this paper addresses the ethical side of EPCs. In doing so, it aims to make explicit a claim that has always been at the heart of post-normal scholarship, namely that the knowledge produced in EPCs is also more just. In doing so, the paper builds on the literature on epistemic (in)justice and in particular on work done by Kristie Dotson.

This article reports on a study applying foresight methods to explore and anticipate innovation system failures in relation to a particular case sector, that of broadcasting in South Korea. Although previous studies of system failures have contributed to an in-depth understanding of innovation system as an analytical concept and provided the base of policy intervention, they have failed to capture different degrees of system failures and their changes in the process of sectoral transformation. Through the application of a sectoral innovation system foresight approach to the broadcasting sector in South Korea’s encounters with artificial intelligence (AI), a series of current and future priorities among nine system failures are identified. The shift of nine system failure priorities between current and five-year time points is captured: the highest priority of system failures moves from directionality failures to market structure failures. By applying a sectoral innovation system foresight approach, we advance theory on system failures and innovation systems. We show that the use of sectoral innovation system foresight approaches can productively be applied to the understanding of current and potential system failures.

The Long-Term Global Goal (LTGG) is the focal point for addressing future climate change. This paper explores a specific institutional context: the Structured Expert Dialogue (SED) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Set up as a platform for interaction between experts and UN negotiators, the SED is a site where scientific information about the LTGG and net-zero was translated into actionable targets for policymaking. We identify different modes of anticipation in the SED - as scientific, lived future, and ethical/political - and explore how they emerged and played out. We ask how these different modes of anticipation produce a particular vision of a desirable future and legitimise ways of governing future climate change. We observe that the scientific and technical mode of anticipation is dominant and has shaped the definition of the LTGG, focussing on numerical targets and side-lining geopolitical and distributive consequences. We also see the science-based framing being re-politicised and challenged, and discuss how capacities to get a voice in the SED were unequally distributed. Based on our findings, we suggest that care is needed to design spaces in order to consider ethical and political consequences of the LTGG and rethink modes of participation and representation.