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Summary Slides and Articles Futuring For Sustainability (FFS)
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This is a summary of the lecture slides and all articles that we were supposed to read for the exam.
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By: tijnjurriaans • 10 months ago
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Week 1: The Future in SustainabilityIs it possible for the economy to grow without the environment being destroyed?
Catastrophes have sometimes created the moment for a new expertise, but they are not always
emergencies or ‘instant’ disasters (like Chernobyl). More often it is ‘slow catastrophes’ that change
the environment, working over longer time periods (drought and famines, acidification of oceans
etc.). The problem is that these evolve slower than the eye can see. We only know about them
because of what experts have told us. But expertise can also help us manage the environment.
Outside of your door is an environment, and this is the same environment as outside every other
door. What happened to some place has ramifications for all the others.
Four dimensions of Environment:
- Future
- Expertise – a means to try to identify and adjudicate between possible futures. Scientific expertise is
now less about fieldwork in particular places, but more about processing information from multiple
sources.
- Trust in numbers – where things are getting better or worse? The capacity of numbers to indicate
change was essential to their contribution to experts. (Concept of the environment was born out of
the idea that things changed because of humans.)
- Scale/Scalability – part of the power of the concept ‘environment’ was that it was already familiar
to people who worked on very different scales but who had not imagined all the dimensions it would
later achieve.
Due to computers, we were able to process and comprehend the environment as a complex and
interconnected web. This made authoritative expertise more aggregative, culminating in the multi
authored mega- reports, making major claims about the future.
--
Futuring: attempts at shaping the space for action by identifying and circulating images of the future,
a process by which relationships between past, present and future are enacted.
"We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they
are not equally fair. The road we have long been travelling is deceptively easy, a smooth super-
highway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the
road – the one ‘less travelled by’ – offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures
the preservation of our Earth’ p. 240
Environmentalism: relies on the idea of a ‘fragile environment’. It looks at the future as an extension
of the present, but with a catastrophic endpoint, a point of no return. It sees both the present and
the past as inherently problematic, in constant tension with the idea of a livable and desirable future.
It uses a warning, a prophecy in an attempt to inspire change.
There are two different points of view; the wizard and the prophet.
The wizard: ecological modernization. Technological progress is key. Sustainable development:
growth is essential for sustainability – and not allowing growth can even be ‘racist’ because it is to
the disadvantage of poorer countries. No inherent tension between business (e.g. capitalism) and
sustainability.
The prophet: ecological anti-modernization. Minimising ecological impact is key. Sustainability/deep
ecology: growth is likely in direct tension with sustainability. Deep tensions between business,
industrialization and sustainability.
,So what story to believe? The warnings have – to some extent – worked. Partially, the future of an
environmental catastrophe is already here. Technological change has avoided the worst catastrophes
(so far). Some of the predictions were too alarmist. In short: the future is always plural – and so will
our environment's future be.
Natural resources of the earth must be safeguarded for the benefit of present and future
generations.
The Future in sustainable development relies on the idea of a fragile environment. Looks at the
future as an extension of a problematic present, with the idea that the present can be ‘greened’.
Sees a livable and desirable future as the consequences of finding the right combination between
development and sustainability. Uses what it sees as economic and political pragmatism as a
motivator for sustainability.
In sustainability, the future is a key concern
– and thinking about how to safeguard that
future for the long-term is key.
Yet:
- Multiple ideas about the environmental
future exist, and multiple directions can be
taken.
- We tend to see the future according to our
own, recent, contextualised understandings
of the present.
- Futuring creates an understanding of what the future might be (and should be), upon which we act,
make policies and plan.
--
Since we inherited so many riches from the past, we must also pass them on to our descendants. In
order to do so, a radical shift in our temporal perspective towards one far more focused on long-term
thinking and the consequences of our actions beyond our own lifetimes. We should not think in
seconds, but in decades.
At this moment we live in an age of pathological short-termism. Politicians barely look beyond the
next election. Businesses are slaves to the next quarterly report.
Short-term thinking is not always bad! However, for most things it is better to look beyond this short-
term thinking.
“What happens now, and in these next few years, will profoundly affect the next few thousand
years.”
Today our societal attitude is one of tempus nullius: the future is seen as ‘nobody’s’ time, an
unclaimed territory that is similarly devoid of inhabitants.
There are 6 ways to think long, these are the core cognitive skills for becoming a good ancestor: a set
of fundamental attitudes, beliefs and ideals. They fall into three clusters. Imagining, Caring and
Planning. None of these alone are enough to create a long-term revolution of the human mind, but
together – and when practised by a critical mass of people and organisations – a new age of long-
term thinking could arise.
,If we want to create a world fit for both current and future generations, we will need to profoundly
rethink and redesign core aspects of society – how our economies function, how our politics work,
what our cities look like – and ensure they are underpinned by new values and goals to secure the
long-term thriving
Week 2: Future in environmental politics
Beckert Imagined futures:
Fictionality in economic action is the inhabitation in the mind of an imagined future state of the
world and the beliefs in causal mechanisms leading to this future state. Actors are motivated in their
actions by the imagined future and organise their activities based on these mental representations.
Since these representations are not confined to empirical reality, fictional expectations are also a
source of creativity in the economy.
Fictional expectations are the mental representations of future states. They take narrative form as
stories, theories and discourses.
A rational expectation can be that you don’t invest because you think the price is dropping next
week, fictional expectations represent future events as if they were true, even though it is unknown,
making the actors capable of acting purposefully.
Fictional expectations have a story; underlying the imagination of a certain future state is a story of
how the present will be transformed through several causally linked steps into the depicted future
state. Stories can influence the confidence of for instance investors in markets. Stories can also
destroy worth (Thai Crisis).
A discourse is an ensemble of ideas, concepts and categorisations that are produced, reproduced and
transformed in a particular set of practices and through which meaning is given to physical and social
realities. It is the way we think and talk about things, and the way we organise our social world.
Magnus Futures literacy and the diversity of the future:
Futures research is always an intervention into the present and an attempt to shape coming times.
Rather than looking at futures research as an attempt to project or predict the future most
accurately, we see futures research as a way in which actors shape both the present and the later-
than-now.
Futures literacy is the capacity to use the future in various ways. This calls for two central questions;
What is the future? and What methods do we use to know the future?
The four approaches by Muiderman also have different implications of what it means to be futures
literate. The first two approaches (Probable/Plausible) rely on being literate about what the future
may hold and how we might react to this. The other two approaches (Pluralistic/Performative) relate
more to being aware of how the future is constructed in the present.
Techniques of futuring: Practices bringing together actors around one or more imagined futures and
through which actors come to share particular orientations for action. (Even though the different
approaches use different tools and artefacts, their practices can still be compared as practices that
bring people together around particular imagined futures).
Ideological power is the power to shape people’s wishes and desires. It shapes people’s imaginative
perceptions of power and normalcy, embedding tacit collective imaginations that organise the world.
, (For example, when thinking about the future of mobility, everyone thinks of self-driving cars,
because corporations made us think of that).
Reflexivity: systematic processes of exploration of the prior commitments framing knowledge. To
expand this definition you can add: informed capacity to critically analyse one’s underlying
assumptions, expectations, and positioning in relation to one’s involvement in outreach. It is not
simply an internal thought process, but rather a type of thinking tied to action. Reflexive thinking
makes possible ways of action that would otherwise not be possible.
-For purposes of prediction, reflexivity can help see the limits, blinkered visions, and historical
contingencies of models and projections, as well as potential problems created by the ways in which
this approach of futuring might reinforce status quo thinking.
-For navigating uncertainty, reflexivity may help see blind spots and a lack of inclusivity in futures
processes. More fundamentally, it can help identify the problems with an adaptive, and therefore
reactive rather than transformative, stance toward the future. For more open-ended
experimentation, reflexivity may help identify where the transformative and generative impulse of
this type of futures engagement may create its own blindness to contextual challenges.
-For critical futures, whose entire engagement with the future revolves around reflexive criticism, a
reflexive futures literacy can motivate a constructive engagement with the future that can help steer
into the future clear-eyed, with a keen sense of power distributions and normative commitments.
- A reflexive futures literacy, then, can help people engage and span different types of future making,
can aid inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration between different types of futuring, and can address
the ideological power that goes into shaping the later-than-now.
Reflexivity in futures literacy consistently asks how we understand, anticipate, and act on the future,
how this frames and shapes the world we live in, and how we ascribe meaning to our actions in the
present. This allows for a more diverse and holistic range of futures, images of which can guide
decisions in the present.
Slides:
Fictional expectations
- Allow actor to organise actions in the face of uncertainty
- Coordinate action
- Affect the future
- Source of innovation
- Deeply political
How can we study the ‘not yet’ that has not yet happened, which has not taken material form in the
present time? What counts as knowledge of the future if the future is not considered as already pre-
existing.
Technological innovation often follows on the heels of science fiction, lagging authorial imagination
by decades or longer.
Futures are performative (they prompt certain social actions). They are not just a description of
(future) reality, but change or create a new reality here and now. Saying: “Yes, I will bring it to you
tomorrow” creates a situation of obligation. This means that futures are political as well!
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