Climate Imaginaries As Sites for Weather-Making

As climate change poses a new existential and epistemological crisis, many have now turned to the future to look into ways in which we can imagine and foster an alternative to business as usual. Alongside this steady rise of attention towards the future, futuring and imaginaries, there has also been growing attention on matter and materiality within the broader social sciences. In light of these two trends, we extend the 3A3 framework of participation (Hofer & Kaufmann, 2022) as a phenomenon by attending to the material implications of dominant climate imaginaries in the context of planning. We do so by employing a feminist theoretical lens of "weathering" that emphasises an inseparability of structural inequalities from the bodily experiences of more-than-human, such as weather. It is through this inseparability that we firstly re-frame climate imaginaries as sites for weathering - revealing that dominant imaginaries actively reinforce structural inequalities of understanding and knowing climate change within the planning process - and secondly, demonstrate the implications of its re-framing in our understanding of participation as a phenomenon. In doing so, this novel conceptualisation attends to the power imbalance embedded in the planning process by highlighting the materiality of climate imaginaries that 'weather' participation in planning.