Captured futures

Your recent book Captured Futures: Rethinking the Drama of Environmental Politics (Oxford University Press, 2025) examines the failure of environmental politics as we know it. What does it mean that environmental politics are captured?

With captured futures, we mean that environmental politics is captured in narrow ideas about the future. Policy discourses are kept narrow and therefore people are simply unable to imagine futures that are meaningfully different from the present, both in terms of political configurations and in terms of material realities and distributions. It is the imagination that is captured. In that sense, we give a second meaning to the political science concept of capture. The classic literature in political science speaks about the capture of political processes through lobbying, with well-known mechanisms like the revolving door of state appointees, scaremongering, sewing of doubt, campaign financing. And such traditional capture by vested interests is certainly at play in environmental politics. Think of the denial industry or the numbers of lobbyists at Conferences of the Parties (COPs). However, capture in the second sense is more subtle – and consequently more insidious. This second sense is the capture of the imagination, the willful inability to imagine futures different from today. 

This capture of the imagination is clearly visible in the narrow framing of environmental issues, caught in the idea of an ecological modernization. In this view, environmental concerns can be addressed by savvy market-based instruments and (importantly) technological breakthroughs that are given an almost magical ability to solve all issues. There is far less attention for politically sensitive issues such as lifestyles, cultural aspirations, and consumption. Our point: the narrow imagination of the future is narrow by design. Despite appearances, environmental politics is often more about maintaining established political realities and configurations than it is about safeguarding the environment. Nation-states, for example, eagerly defend their primacy in decision-making. Likewise, fossil-fuel companies campaign and lobby heavily to be a part of the future. This ought not to be a controversial or particularly shocking observation.

However, where the capture really comes in is in the science-policy interface. In the book, we show that even scientific knowledge production is complicit in creating and maintaining these captured futures. By bringing in technological approaches to climate change and environmental concerns, such as carbon capture (yes, a third play on capture), a hydrogen economy, of even solar radiation modification, and embedding them into their projections, they keep fueling these captured futures.

Simply put then, environmental politics is captured because it cannot allow the deep cultural, political, imperial, and colonial roots of our current predicament into the political process – nor into our ideas about the future and ways out of the current crisis.

To unpack the mechanisms through which futures are captured, you combine discourse and dramaturgy analysis. How do these tools help better understand environmental politics as it is performed within multilateral institutions?

Well, to understand any political system, it is always important to understand its rules, conventions, and habits. In political science, we often have a very institutional view of how politics works. But as institutions are made up of people, they rely on people to interpret the rules and to give them meaning. It is here that discourse and dramaturgy can help us. If we keep it simple, a discourse is the political reality we build through language. Through language, people determine what is stake, what to care about, and how to think about solutions. For example, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) are institutions in which different ways of relating to environmental politics could be applied. Yet in practice, they mostly stick to the logic of ecological modernization (although this is shifting). In that sense, the discourse sets a series of implicit rules about how to navigate multilateral institutions. For decades now, people have done discourse analysis to try and understand the implicit constraints of environmental politics.

Dramaturgical analysis is a newer addition. Again, it rests on a simple insight: in politics, performance and appearance matters. Beyond constraints to what you say or prioritize in meetings or reports, there are also conventions about who gets to speak with influence, what they can say, where they can say it, and to who they say it. So a ‘D&D’ analysis, as we call it (discourse & dramaturgy), really investigates all the implicit social conventions of politics. As such, it also takes a much broader view of politics, comparing the dramaturgy of multilateral institutions with that of activism or in the science-policy interface.

A crucial part of our analysis, in this sense, rest on the idea of a dramaturgical regime. By this we mean the “routinised set of performances and conventions through which politics are enacted”. Again, this simply means the implicit rules of the game that everyone in environmental politics needs to adhere to if they want to be influential. One example is the boundary work to keep ‘policy relevant’ separate from ‘policy prescriptive’. That seems logical but also stands in the way of involving society differently. It is connected to a strict separation of the tradition of using science to define the problem up front (i.e. before political deliberation) and conduct public participation primarily after decision-making. We think that a braiding of the development of expertise and citizen involvement in how we can implement solutions can open up a new environmental politics. That might contribute to a politics of ‘a future we want’, in the UN speak.

Your book does not only explore the failure of environmental politics but also suggests alternative perspectives to liberate environmental politics. What are your main suggestions for international organizations to free themselves from the capture? Is it too late for them?

It’s never too late for institutions to free themselves from capture really. In fact, our kind of analysis stresses the contingency of political institutions – and hence, also the contingency of capture. If people recognize that the rules of the game today are failing – or worse, rigged – they can simply stop following them. But of course, we are facing a tall order. We think the first thing the people in these institutions should realize and acknowledge is that environmental politics are we know will not deliver on its aims. It cannot, it is faulty by design. By keeping out questions of culture and lifestyle, which may have been a sensible thought at the time, it has sown the seeds of its own failures. The thought was: the environment is a problem that affects us all, it doesn’t need to be political. But of course, that was always a pipedream. When you touch people’s deepest desires, their ideas about what makes life worthwhile and successful, when ask them to change their lifestyles and their dreams, of course that is political. And that is, inevitably, what environmental politics is about.

Put yourself in the shoes of people across the world. What if you are suddenly told that the dreams of a big house or a fast car you have chased all your life are problematic? Other people may have them, but now that they come in reach for you, they should be phased out? Or if a carbon tax decided on in the capital exempts industry but makes it more expensive for you to get to your job? Precisely because environmental politics has tried to be apolitical, it became an elite hobby, something far-away technocratic elites do. The backlash against environmental institutions we witness today is at least partially an understandable and justified response to less-than-democratic decision-making.

To us, that is a reason for hope too. Environmental politics is not failing because ‘people just don’t want to make sacrifices’. It is failing because people have never been asked to imagine the futures in which those ’sacrifices’ are actually a part of a better life for them and their children. Because of its capture, environmental politics is not seen as something that builds a fairer world. By and large, it also really hasn’t. But that means that is tremendous room to reimagine environmental politics. To build a science that provides aspirational images of a different future. To rethink around international organizations towards processes that allow for cultural diversity and questions of justice.

Of course, we should not be naive about the Realpolitik that makes a different environmental politics difficult to achieve, especially in this turbulent geopolitical time. But we should also not forget that to a very real extent politics follows culture. The reason why industry moguls, tech-billionaires, and proto-despots spend so much time, money, and energy trying to influence public opinion is because they know this. Why doesn’t environmental politics?

All in all, we also want to awaken the many people that currently keep up the current dramaturgical regime and stimulate them to be reflexive on the patterned rules of the system. In the months after the launch of our book, we found that quite a few actors signaled they found the book encouraged them to really try and try to change the dramaturgical patterns and help create a new environmental politics, much more focused on the imagination of new possible futures and stepping out of the capture where they can. In that regard, we follow the making of the IPCC Cities report with great interest.