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Jörgens, H. (2026). A Research Agenda for Climate Policy Imaginaries. 17th Nordic Environmental Social Science (NESS) Conference,.

H. D. Jorgens,  "A Research Agenda for Climate Policy Imaginaries", in 17th Nordic Environmental Social Science (NESS) Conf., Uppsala, 2026

@misc{jorgens2026_1793385078536,
	author = "Jörgens, H.",
	title = "A Research Agenda for Climate Policy Imaginaries",
	year = "2026",
	url = "https://www.uu.se/en/department/earth-sciences/research/natural-resources-and-sustainable-development/ness2026"
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - A Research Agenda for Climate Policy Imaginaries
T2  - 17th Nordic Environmental Social Science (NESS) Conference
AU  - Jörgens, H.
PY  - 2026
CY  - Uppsala
UR  - https://www.uu.se/en/department/earth-sciences/research/natural-resources-and-sustainable-development/ness2026
AB  - Introduction

How societies imagine their climate futures matters profoundly for what becomes politically possible. Yet dominant approaches to envisioning climate policy – particularly Integrated Assessment Models and expert-driven scenario-building – privilege techno-economic feasibility while marginalizing the socio-cultural and political dimensions that ultimately determine whether transformative policies gain societal traction. This narrowing of imaginable futures reinforces what the workshop call identifies as inadequate “political imaginaries of control, linear progress and technocratic problem-solving”.
This conceptual paper develops the contours of a research agenda that reframes climate policy futures as sites of distributed imagination and contestation among diverse societal actors. Rather than treating the desirability and feasibility of climate policy alternatives as technical properties assessed by experts, this agenda foregrounds how governments, civil society organizations, business actors, and communities collectively construct, negotiate, and contest visions of climate governance. Such an approach unsettles the assumed hierarchy between knowledge producers and policy recipients, recognizing that future-making unfolds through multiple, often competing imaginative practices. Directing scholarly attention to imagined climate policy futures can help bridge the gap between today’s best practice in climate policy, which is insufficient for reaching global climate goals, and policies that may emerge in the future.

A typology of climate policy paradigms

To make these competing visions empirically tractable without foreclosing alternative possibilities, I propose a typology distinguishing four climate policy paradigms along two dimensions: worldview (anthropocentric versus ecocentric) and intervention logic (technological versus behavioural). Technological anthropocentrism has dominated climate policy since the late 1980s through ecological modernization, more recently expanding to include carbon removal and geoengineering. Behavioural anthropocentrism emphasizes infrastructural changes encouraging climate-friendly consumption while remaining compatible with economic growth. Behavioural ecocentrism prioritizes sufficiency and reduced consumption, encompassing degrowth and post-growth perspectives. Technological ecocentrism combines innovation with nature-based approaches. This framework ensures analytical openness to futures beyond current policy corridors while revealing the deeper normative commitments underlying different climate imaginaries.

Mixed methods approach

The paper proposes a mixed-methods approach that combines computational text analysis (topic modelling, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis etc.) with qualitative case study analysis to explore the distribution of paradigmatic visions across actor groups and explain why certain approaches remain marginalized despite high levels of attributed desirability and feasibility, while others are salient in climate policy discourses despite being less present in collective imaginaries. 
ER  -