Social Futures and Environmental Change In Turbulent Times: Imagining and Enacting Environmental Futures

Concern with the future is foundational to environmental politics and policy. From the United Nations’ definition of sustainable development to climate movement mobilization and long-term energy planning, environmental governance is deeply oriented toward imagined futures. Yet social‑ecological futures are increasingly uncertain and contested. Technological, ecological, political, and economic changes frequently disrupt socially accepted narratives of progress, decline, or sustainability. This session explores how social futures are imagined, produced, circulated, and contested in the context of global environmental change. It invites contributions that examine how visions of desirable and undesirable futures shape environmental action, justify political decisions, and mobilize social change. We invite papers that examine “futuring” as a social process across diverse empirical contexts, including (but not limited to) climate change, decarbonization, energy transitions, conservation, development planning, and environmental risk. The session welcomes contributions reflecting theoretical, methodological, and regional diversity, including comparative, Global South, and Indigenous perspectives. The session also attends to questions of epistemic power: whose futures are recognized as legitimate, and whose are systematically excluded from the processes through which socioecological futures are made. By examining futures as socially constructed yet materially consequential, the session aims to advance environmental sociology’s engagement with temporalities, uncertainty, power, and possibility, thereby contributing to global sociology at a moment marked by profound socio‑ecological turbulence.