Futuring for Sustainability

Course goals

Content

The world is changing. As a consequence, sustainability is too: world leaders dismantle sustainability policies, companies walk back their climate commitment, and military concerns now rival concerns about sustainability. In all, the world feels like a darker place. How do we navigate sustainability issues in an era of political backlash and democratic decline? Where can we turn for hopeful approaches or solutions? And how can we address the 'captured futures' that stand in the way of meaningful political change?

In the course Futuring for Sustainability, these are the central questions. In the course, we investigate sustainability from the perspective of the future, and try to understand how our images of the future can help (or hinder!) the sustainability transition. How can we understand the backlash against sustainability policies? And how can we still come to a sustainable future? We address these questions by connecting technical and environmental questions around sustainability to social questions around equality, democracy, and participation – and show that these questions meet each other in our images of the future. What we do in the present is always influenced by our expectations and aspirations. We hear the story all the time: if we don't act on climate change and other ecological issues, we're headed towards a catastrophe. The science is clear. So why aren't we listening? It's a story about the future we hear a lot, a story catastrophic climate change and politicians ignoring scientists. As a story about the future, it is downright terrifying. Yet in reality, the story is much more complicated. This course is about that story, about the difficulty and potential of building a more sustainable future.

To answer these questions, we look at how 'techniques of futuring', the practices we use to create ideas about the future, influence societal transformations towards sustainability. After all, our expectations about the future, and our dreams and imaginations for it, profoundly influence the way we act in the present. Visions of plausible, possible, or desirable futures are fundamentally important in shaping our social and environmental futures. Just think about the influence that climate projections and warnings about biodiversity loss have had on the way we act. Politics, society, and technology always rely on images of the future, on people acting based on their imaginations and expectations. In society, people and groups are also always actively trying to shape expectations and visions for the future. They are always trying to shape the future.

In this course, we will use futuring to understand the cultural politics of sustainability, as well as the ways in which we imagine solutions to the climate crisis. Lecturers from various disciplines will introduce what they deem to crucial insights for building a more sustainable future. This course builds your capacity to develop new visions and imaginations of possible futures and alternative sustainability pathways. Above all, it teaches you to play a role in futuring for sustainability.