Co-producing ‘The Future(s) We Want’: How does political imagination translate into democratised knowledge-action models for sustainability transformations?

Abstract

Democratic societies face the challenge of effecting sustainability transformations, allowing for variously imagined futures and underpinned by a diversity of practices of knowledge production and action. This article investigates how political imagination of sustainable futures informs the ways knowledge and action are understood and linked in sustainability and research policy, and what potential implications this has for democratic transformative change. Empirically, the article analyses the overarching sustainability and research policies in Sweden, focusing on the central documents produced by the government and public research financiers. The analysis shows parallels between the conceptualisations of sustainability and knowledge-action, characterised by linearity, instrumentalisation of knowledge and circumscription of power-sharing spaces for knowledge creation against the background of endorsement of collaborations between academia and society. Such conceptualisations, apart from sending mixed signals to sustainability researchers and practitioners, potentially enable knowledge and action processes driven by impact, competitiveness and atomisation, precluding the exercise of the intrinsic value of democratic knowledge and action practices necessary for reflexive governance of transformations towards sustainability.