Governing As If the Future Obliged the Present: A Scenario Exercise in Prefigurative Climate Policy

Abstract

Governing climate futures faces a double bind: the impending crises are both long term and acutely critical. Climate policy must thus anticipate futures as if they were available to be enacted in the present; that is, it must engage with prefigurative politics. Through an analytical reading of a climate policymaking exercise run with the leading policymakers of the City of Helsinki, this article advances the notion of prefiguration as consisting of three dimensions of the ‘as if’. It directs empirical inquiry simultaneously to the folding of futures onto the present as if they were already at hand, to the aligning of means and ends so that they contain each other, and to distinctions made between reality and fictions. The article describes the inconspicuous ways in which policymaking orients itself towards the future and carves out its conditions of possibility. Within them, policymakers are shown to reduce the prospect of alternative, prefigurative politics to problem-solving in a perpetual present that remains oblivious to the futures it implies.