Contested adaptation futures: the role of global imaginaries in climate adaptation governance

Despite increasing recognition of climate risks, there is a lack of adequate adaptation responses, which the authors argue is partly due to how governance actors imagine the future. In this article, they contend that “imaginaries” – collective visions of desirable futures – shape governance regimes and their approaches to climate adaptation. With this framework, they explored the various goals and political dynamics integral to climate adaptation governance, revealing the processes through which desired futures are constructed, promulgated, and contested. Using an abductive, qualitative content analysis method, they studied academic and grey literature to map and understand globally-influential climate adaptation imaginaries. They identified six distinct imaginaries: Eco Modern State, Just Adaptation, Promethean (Green) Growth, High Tech Society, Human Stewardship, and Knowledge Society.

These adaptation imaginaries, rooted in deep-seated ethical and ontological beliefs, each present a unique vision of the future, complete with preferred adaptation strategies and key stakeholders. The research contributes to the literature by showing how the globally dominant climate adaptation imaginaries reproduce existing power relations and business-as-usual approaches. The analysis thereby provides political impetus for questioning business-as-usual approaches to climate change, enabling results that go beyond taken-for-granted assumptions of what future societies and economies might look like, and critically examining the interplay between different sociopolitical actors in adaptation governance.