Post normal science in backcasting processes: Anticipation in Climate Change

MARIA ELINA ESTÉBANEZ; ROQUE PEDACE

Arizona

Conferencia; I N T E R N A T I O N A L C O N F E R E N C E Of A N T I C I P A T I O N; 2022

Arizona State University

The urgency of climate change and the necessity to accelerate global mitigation efforts have prompted energy researchers to move from analysing the fossil fuel-dominated past towards anticipating fossil-fuel-free futures. Among different approaches that can help us better understand energy futures, the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries (STIs) has been increasingly employed in social science research to scrutinise the power to imagine future transition pathways or the impotence to imagine alternative energy futures (Jasanoff and Kim 2009, 2015; Kuchler 2014, 2017; Kuchler and Bridge 2018). The STIs approach highlights the cultural and political work done by the shared social meanings associated with technical infrastructures and how ?the capacity to imagine futures is a crucial constitutive element in social and political life? (Jasanoff and Kim 2009: 122). Recent work on natural resources, however, shows how the capacity to imagine energy futures is strongly shaped by ? and often trapped within - the resources, infrastructures and materialities of the present and/or past (Kuchler 2014, 2017; Kuchler and Bridge 2018). Moreover, by arguing that imaginaries ?project visions of what is good, desirable, and worth attaining for a political community? (Jasanoff and Kim 2009: 123), a critical question arises as to ?whose visions of future possibilities these are, for whom they are good and desirable (?), and why certain policymakers would find them worth realising? (Kuchler 2014:433). Additionally, research increasingly observes how sociotechnical imaginaries of energy futures often entail plural (and sometimes competing) temporalities (Kinsella 2020; Kristoffersen et al. 2021; Mutter and Rohracher 2021). For example, some energy visions require more time to become embedded into specific institutions or materialities, while others face resistance much more quickly. The overall aim of this Curated Session is to undertake some co-creative, -critical thinking about the processes of anticipating and (re)imagining energy futures. We will explore the utility and limits of STIs as a conceptual framework for understanding the social power of energy imaginaries. We will also consider how climate emergency and the urgency of disassembling incumbent fossil-fuel infrastructures challenge parts of the STI framework and provoke novel ways of conceptualising how energy futures are anticipated and imagined. The session is anchored by four original papers focused on the anticipation of energy transition. It uses these papers to develop an empirically-grounded and conceptually-informed conversation on the potential and challenges of the STIs concept in exploring energy futures. In doing so, the session takes inspiration from ? and aims to take forward ? an interdisciplinary body of work on energy imaginaries that reaches across science and technology studies (STS), anthropology, political ecology, and cultural and political geography.