25: When Futures Get Stuck: The “Captivity” of Collective Futuring in Transitions
Filip Rozborski, Mareike Smolka and Harro van Lente
Current and anticipated environmental crises are placing unprecedented pressure on societies to transition their socio-technical systems toward more sustainable ones. These long-term processes are inherently future-oriented and necessitate radical changes across multiple domains, including energy, food, and mobility systems. Typically, broader societal visions of transition pathways are viewed as helpful or even necessary to break out of the status quo and build novel and more sustainable sociotechnical constellations. This role of expectations and visions has received ample attention in transition studies.
However, collective futures may also slow down, hinder or limit transitions. They may, for instance, not just favor transformative but rather incremental system modifications. Future representations frequently turn out to be limited to incumbency, leading to the reproduction of established power arrangements (Hawxwell et al., 2024). Similarly, supposedly transformative techno-fix solutions, imagined as key drivers of sustainability transitions, lose their sustainability potential and tend to stabilize existing structures rather than disrupt them (Markard et al., 2023). Ultimately, in their efforts to enact innovative and transformative futures, actors may find themselves imprisoned to specific technologies and innovation pathways (Berti & Levidow, 2014; Sovacool et al., 2020).
This panel explores the limiting forces of collective future-forming in sociotechnical transitions. We invite contributions that examine collective future discourses, practices, and the materialization of specific futures. By interrogating how collective futuring may both enable and restrict transformation, the panel aims to open up analytical space to question why and how futures become “captured” (Hajer & Oomen, 2025) by particular imaginaries, interests, or materialities. In doing so, we seek to move beyond narratives of possibilities, encouraging a critical reflection on the conditions and limitations of futuring.
Keywords: futures, expectations, sociology of expectations, imaginaries, sociotechnical transitions