{"id":3513482,"date":"2025-06-05T09:34:34","date_gmt":"2025-06-05T09:34:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3513482"},"modified":"2025-06-05T19:43:16","modified_gmt":"2025-06-05T19:43:16","slug":"creating-a-politics-of-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2025-06-05\/creating-a-politics-of-the-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Creating a politics of the future"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was asked to talk about resilience at an event last month organised by the architects Perkins & Will, and decided to speak to the idea of \u201ca politics of the future\u201d, which seems increasingly important if we\u2019re going to navigate a world of climate disruption and psychic loss\u2014quite apart from the practicalities of de-carbonising our societies. This is a slightly expanded version of my remarks there.<\/p>\n

I drew quite heavily on a paper from last year by Julian White, at the LSE, called \u2018The Future as a Democratic Resource<\/a><\/strong>\u2019. He asks, rhetorically,<\/p>\n

What gets lost when the future gets lost?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Imagined futures<\/h3>\n

The answer, rather starkly, is democratic politics. The reason for this is that elections within a democracy are supposed to be a competition between different parties offering differing imagined futures. (This is similar to Jens Beckert\u2019s argument in\u00a0Imagined Futures<\/em>\u00a0that within businesses senior managers compete on visions of the future of the organisation.)<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a big hole where these imagined futures ought to be. The right tends to offer a vision of an imagined past, while centre parties, whether centre-left or centre-right, are intent on managing the present. They are focused on policy, not politics. I\u2019ll come back to this distinction.<\/p>\n

The research suggests that this lack of alternatives affects voting level because people start abstaining from voting, and that the more disadvantaged are the first to drop out.<\/p>\n

Better life<\/h3>\n

And maybe there are a couple of findings from polling research that are relevant here.<\/p>\n

The first is that people are likely to believe that other people are less concerned about climate change than they are, which reduces public pressure for political action. You have to wonder if the technocratic way that climate change and related policies are discussed in public influences this perception.<\/p>\n

At the other end of the political spectrum, people who voted for Trump in 2016 and Brexit in 2017 are more likely to answer \u2018no\u2019 to a question about whether their children will have a better life than they did. They believe that the future is closing down on them.<\/p>\n

Three Cs, or four<\/h3>\n

White argues in his paper that there are three benefits of a politics of the future. These are:<\/p>\n