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This summer, Anna Hayward worked in collaboration with Global Action Plan to explore the barriers that young people face when imagining a sustainable world. This research was conducted as part of her Masters in Global Environment, Politics and Society with the University of Edinburgh. She spoke to young people aged 18-25 in the UK about their visions of the future, both ideal and expected. Their stories and visions highlight the need to tackle climate change with the imagination.

Enhancing Imaginative Capacity

In addition to being a practical challenge, climate change presents us with an imaginative challenge. Without imagining plausible ‘green’ alternatives to our current ways of life, it would be impossible to bring them about. Desire for and conviction in alternatives are essential conditions for transformative agency and change.

The imagination of young people has failed to be captured by existing narratives of sustainable futures and even those with environmental values often retain cynical or fatalistic attitudes about the future.

"It's one of those things where you don't want to think about it, at times, because it just does make you really anxious" (Kat, 23)

"I think it's just for me my way of coping with the thought of the future is to not think too far into the future"(Robin, 23).

Enhancing the imaginative capacity should be a priority in the fight for structural change. This must involve a dialogue between dominant and counter narratives of climate change. The imagination is a limiting factor to social transformation, but also has powerful potential to criticise existing ways of life and to construct alternatives. Young people are often critical of prevailing norms but struggle to articulate a coherent alternative.

"I personally find it difficult to imagine a world better than what we have, like drastically better. I can see, equality and equity being better, and I can see technology being better, but I think it's difficult to see the world as a whole better than it is now, which of course it can definitely be"(Laura, 19)

"There are times when I feel like I am stuck in a little bit of an echo chamber and I'm just meeting people that just share about anti-capitalism, anti-this, anti-that. We all agree on everything and it’s a bit like ‘okay, well what next?"(Thomas, 22)

Therefore, the next step is to enhance the creative and radical imagination. Transgressive utopian thought may be necessary in envisioning positive futures. This type of thought is subversive, by challenging existing features of a system, critical, by celebrating process over product, and transformative, by engaging with socio-political realities. Imaginative capacity may be enhanced by:

1. Challenging negative visions of the future presented mostly in mainstream media and provide counter narratives.
2. Learning about social change to increase understanding of transformational processes and enhance an open attitude to future possibilities.
3. Collaborative future visioning to disrupt existing negative visions of the future and explore positive green alternatives.
4. Enacting alternatives to experience something different and participate in the active rejection of environmentally destructive ways of life.

Currently, there is no common avenue for young people to take part in any of these forms of imaginative exercises, presenting a key barrier to transformational action. Despite having mostly negative visions of the future, young people often show a resilient sense of hope and aspiration. There is a key potential here for transformative thinking, and openness to the possibility of a sustainable future.

Further reading

• Black, R. and Walsh, L. (2019). Making the Future: Homo Promptus and the Political. In: Imagining Youth Futures. Springer, pp. 115-133.
• Carvalho, A. (2010). Media(ted)discourses and climate change: a focus on political subjectivity and (dis)engagement. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 1(2), pp.172–179.
• Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books.
  Haiven, M. and Khasnabish, A. (2010). What Is The Radical Imagination? A Special Issue. Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action, 4(2), pp.i–xxxvii.
• Herbert, J. (2021). The socio‐ecological imagination: Young environmental activists constructing transformation in an era of crisis. Area, 53(2), pp.373–380.
• Ipsos (2021). Does the world think we can still solve climate change? [online] 
• Jovchelovitch, S. and Hawlina, H. (2018). Utopias and World-Making: Time, Transformation and the Collective Imagination. In: C. de Saint-Laurent, S. Obradović and K.R. Carriere, eds., Imagining Collective Futures. Springer International Publishing, pp.129–151.
• Meadows, D. (1996). Envisioning a Sustainable World. In: R. Costanza, O. Segura and J. Martinez-Alier, eds., Getting Down to Earth, Practical Applications of Ecological Economics. Washington DC: Island Press.
• Milkoreit, M. (2017). Imaginary politics: Climate change and making the future. Elem Sci Anth, 5(0), p.62.
• Ojala, M. (2012). Hope and climate change: the importance of hope for environmental engagement among young people. Environmental Education Research, 18(5), pp.625–642.
• Pepper, D. (2005). Utopianism and Environmentalism. Environmental Politics, 14(1), pp.3–22.
• Sargisson, L. (2000). Utopian bodies and the politics of transgression. London ; New York: Routledge.
• Swyngedouw, E. (2010). Apocalypse forever?: Post-political populism and the spectre of climate change. Theory, Culture and Society, 27(2), pp. 213–232.