The future is neither utopia nor dystopia: it is a capability to reflect on our assumptions about what will and should be, to embrace plurality and uncertainty, to deal with change as well as shape it.
All the projects surveyed in WTFutures invited their young participants to project themselves in the future, albeit in very different ways. Many, but not all of them, sought to provide the participants with some kind of futures literacy. Others used specific foresight techniques along with other tools. And some just asked their participants to reflect on the future in whatever way they saw fit.
Defining Futures Literacy Drawing on UNESCO’s definition, the Future Is Now project defined Futures Literacy as a skill that allows persons and collectives to:
|
|---|
We all anticipate, both in the short term (before crossing a street) and the long term (to make life choices), but we mostly do this unconsciously: we are generally unable to articulate the images of the future on which we base our decisions. And we are certainly not taught to do it, except in the rare Futures Studies departments of select universities.
Futures Literacy is, above all, about turning these unconscious behaviours into conscious individual and collective practices.
But why is this important, particularly for today’s youths?
What is the future, anyway?
We will prudently refrain from providing a generic answer to this question, and rather focus on what the future is (and is not) in the projects we have studied within WTFutures:
- It is part of a temporal continuum connecting past, present and future. The future is no tabula rasa where anything goes. It is connected to history, to current conditions, to people’s experiences. In the words of Anna Barford, summarizing the British Academy’s Youth Futures Under Construction program: “Temporally speaking, there is a triple significance to understanding young people’s challenges: they are shaped by the past, matter for today and impact tomorrow”. In some projects, such as the Centre for Reworlding, revisiting the past is a precondition for becoming able to imagine different futures: “Reworlding imagines a world that could have been (…) to decouple from maladaptive ways of engaging/disengaging with the climate emergency context.”
- It is both a personal and a collective construction, using a large variety of “scaffolding” methods to associate the group’s (and its participants’) bits of knowledge, experiences, projections, values, and acts of imagination.
- As a result of this, it is multiple, fundamentally diverse and uncertain, and also open to each participant’s imagination and intervention. There can be no “true future”, even in retrospect. At best, some futures may be more performative than others, because they are borne by more powerful players.
Therefore, the future is not a place where all of our problems are either solved, or drive us to catastrophe. Rather, it is both:
- A space, continuously shaped and discussed by its participants, where various configurations of actions, intentions, and experiences can be tested; and where knowledge interacts with values in assessing what is possible, plausible, and preferable.
- An individual and collective capability to reflect on our assumptions about what will and should be, to accept the diversity of perspectives about what is possible and desirable, to collectively deal with change as well as shape it.
Climate Action Photovoice
By this description, the characteristics of the future are also those that, by essence, shape (or should shape) spaces for democratic deliberation: grounded, collective, open, diverse, inclusive, co‑produced…
This, to us, is the core lesson of how the projects featuring in WTFutures use the future: as a way to create, or recreate, democratic spaces where young participants become actors and agents of change, always in a reflexive way that allows them to pay attention to their environment as well as to the needs and desires of others.
The tired “utopia vs. dystopia” debate Working with, or on, the future, generally produces narratives: descriptions of the future, scenarios, timelines, etc. A body of literature and practice tends to warn against dire descriptions of the future, aka dystopias, as they would generate despair and apathy, and therefore prove counter-productive in terms of climate action. Based on the mostly dystopic tone of mainstream science fiction production, there is also the belief that people, if left to imagine on their own, will spontaneously produce dystopias. In our experience, as, it seems, in that of many projects identified in WTFutures, none of this is true.
|
|---|
Why is Futures Literacy so useful?
It is certainly not indispensable to be “futures literate” in order to reflect or act on climate issues. Saying that without climate action, “there is no future” is technically untrue (except, perhaps, in the very long term: barring extinction, there is always a future, however bleak), but it can work to stoke a person’s or a group’s moral fire. Working on concrete, local projects without needing to project oneself beyond solving present problems is also perfectly reasonable.
However, the projects identified by WTFutures highlight many reasons why “using the future” in some form or another can be hugely beneficial:
- Complexity: understanding that problems have multiple causes, that actions have multiple-order consequences, and that issues are interconnected. According to Mamadou Doucouré, one of UNICEF’s “Youth Foresight Fellows”, capacity building on foresight “allowed participants [in his workshops in Climate futures in Mali] to connect systemic factors and global futures to their personal futures.”
- Path-dependency: understanding that past, present and future are connected; that actions in the present may not determine the future (because of complexity), but that they do open or close certain futures (e.g., the “+1.5°C” future is now closed forever).
Note that complexity and path-dependency are also key concepts in climate science, therefore reinforcing the usefulness of using futures in connection with climate change.
Kidding the Future – An example of a Futures Triangle
- Plurality: there is not one future. How you think about the future creates different futures. In Pakistan, Kidding the Future used various modes of thinking to help school children and teenagers create “expected futures” (cause & effect thinking), “alternative futures” (contingent thinking), and “preferred futures” (value-based thinking). And of course, each participant’s own way of thinking, value system, etc., will also result in very personal images of the future.
The side-effect of plurality is openness to dialog. According to Doucouré, futures-related capacity building also “made those holding strong opinions more open” to other possibilities. - Critical thinking: becoming conscious of the constructed, “narrative” quality of the future, can help realize that these characteristics also apply to the present and the past. This helps participants question dominant narratives, revisit suppressed memories (e.g., of colonized and/or marginalized groups), take science fiction tropes with a grain of salt – and also, reframe their own memories in more empowering ways, such as those of the Covid pandemic in Beauvais 2040.
- Hope: not by passively believing in some magic (tech or otherwise) solution to the world’s trouble, but by being able to “develop images of the future economy and/or society that are more sustainable, equitable, fair & just, and simply liveable than the present or the past”, in the words of Nur Anisah Abdullah (Museum of the Not‑Yet‑Possible).
- Self-confidence and agency: the consequence of all of the above, is that participants in the projects become capable to shape, articulate, advocate and discuss alternative images of the future. They learn to connect these images with their personal experience, and picture their own role in shaping the future – their personal future, as well as that of broader communities.
Museum of the Not-Yet-Possible – production of a student
Futures Literacy is not reserved to youngsters!
The researchers involved in the Narratives of Change in Science Education project speak of “future-scaffolding skills, skills that enable people to construct visions of the future that support possible ways of acting in the present with one’s eye on the horizon.” These skills are definitely useful to youngsters. However if one goal is also for young people to play a larger role in the world, they should spread to their interlocutors too:
- Climate scientists, whatever their disciplines, could use it to open up to other disciplines and ways of thinking: as we can see in WTFutures, the simple invitation to “Listen to the science” has proven ineffective, and sometimes counter-productive, in generating climate action.
- Climate activists could often benefit from the creative part of Futures Literacy to complement denunciation with projection, becoming more capable to articulate what they fight for, not just against.
- Decision-makers, private or public, would benefit from thinking more long-term, and moving away from the linear simplicity of “problem-solution” thinking, towards a better grasp of complex interactions.
- Innovators could use it to become more capable of thinking about the second- and third-order impacts of their inventions, along with those that might be impacted…
Video by Natali Mallo