Future in Contention: Projecting Sustainability in the Rio+20 Debates

• In Event: 289 - Theory Section Invited Session. Future-Making in Sociological Theory

Abstract

While we have seen a recent surge of interest in role of the future imaginary in social life, there has been little attention to the processes by which future scenarios are crafted, articulated, challenged and re-formulated in contentious public conversations. We have few methodological tools for studying how contentious debates about possible futures—along with practical theorizations of change—undergird and constitute processes of critique, problem-solving, and social intervention. In this article, we analyze contending narratives about possible future in the online documents of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development and the accompanying “People’s Summit,” held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012. This event brought together government actors, scientific experts, NGOs, businesses, community organizations, labor unions and oppositional social movements in (often fierce) debates about the meaning of “sustainable futures” and the “green economy.” These groups presented contending proposals for “the future we want,” some of which were programmatic and policy-oriented, while others expressed counterhegemonic challenge and critique. Deploying tools for the textual analysis of narrative grammars, we analyze how these projective narratives differ in their temporal reach, their networks of future actors, and their attention to contingency and causality, thus generating distinctgenres of future projection, which in turn constitute contending theories of change. By means of the deployment of these projective genres, actors position themselves in a contentious field, construct alliances and oppositions, and elaborate new sets of discursive resources in dialogue with interlocutors (including predictive scenarios, moral imperatives, and practical strategies of action).

Authors

• Ann Mische, University of Notre Dame

• Leslie MacColman, University of Notre Dame