RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article
T1 Between continuous presents and disruptive futures: Identifying the ideological backbones of global environmental scenarios
A1 Lauer, Arthur
A1 Castro Carranza, Carlos de
A1 Carpintero Redondo, Óscar
K1 Global environmental scenarios
K1 Sustainability transitions
K1 Narratives
K1 Post-capitalism
K1 Human-nature relationships
AB Despite the great relevance of global environmental scenarios for the study of environmental change and sustainability transitions, they have rarely been the object of analysis for scholars of the social sciences. In this article, we analyze the ideological assumptions of 993 global environmental scenarios contained in 243 academic works. By developing a new categorization of environmental scenarios, we investigate the economic and governance organization reflected in the scenarios, as well as the portrayed human-nature relationships. We find that global environmental scenarios developed and used by the scientific community largely reproduce rather than break with dominant power structures in the economic, governance and cultural domain. The majority of scenarios reflects an anthropocentric worldview and assumes that the logic of global capitalism and of the Westphalian state-based governance system will not change radically during the 21st century. The implicit solution of sustainability problems dominating these scenarios is a combination of continuous economic growth, rapid technological progress and an international (environmental) agreement. ‘Alternative scenarios’ are scarce, often only problematize one dimension of the social structure of world society and frequently lack explicit drivers of change or pathways to desirable futures. To increase the diversity of scenarios, future research should focus on refining and quantifying existing post-capitalist, post-state-centric and/or ecocentric scenarios, and on developing a range of scenarios whose storyline systematically problematize or even break with current power structures.
PB Elsevier
SN 0016-3287
YR 2024
FD 2024
LK https://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/73295
UL https://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/73295
LA eng
NO Futures, octubre 2024, vol. 163, 103460
NO Producción Científica
DS UVaDOC
RD 22-ene-2025