A critical utopian shared socioeconomic pathway

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the utility of speculative, fictional utopian narratives to be used as a comparative and critical tool to expose taken for granted ideas, discourses and norms in the five shared socioeconomic pathways (SSP1–5) that are used by the IPCC to build future scenarios. To achieve this goal, we first invited citizens to write stories about fictional utopian futures, which they perceived as good for “both people and the planet”. We then compared these utopian stories with the SSPs by (1) a semi-quantitative thematic analysis, and (2) a critical literary analysis. Based on the thematic analysis, we found strong similarities between the utopian futures and SSP1 (“Taking the Green Road”) at a superficial level. Based on the literary analysis, we found that this apparent similarity obscured fundamental differences between the implicit mindsets that was found in SSP1 and the utopian futures; with the former underpinned by collective anthropocentrism and the latter by collective ecocentrism. We conclude that speculative utopias, that are not bound by the requirement of perceived plausibility, can provide a powerful tool to scrutinize and extend science-based future scenarios, such as the SSPs, to consider other aspects, such as different mindsets and norm-breaking solutions.