February 28, 2025

Between hope and despair: Thinking about the future in 2025

Ecological economist Arthur Lauer reflects on interviews with CUSP researchers, exploring how academic backgrounds shape future visions, the challenges of interdisciplinary collaboration, and the difficulty—but necessity—of imagining positive change.

Blog by Arthur Lauer

During my research stay at CUSP, I had the opportunity to make a series of interviews on global socio-ecological and economic futures and pathways of change with different researchers from CUSP. What people told me was thought-provoking, surprising, and sometimes funny. This blog resumes my personal key learnings from this exercise. I am pretty sure nothing I will say will come as a surprise for someone doing research in the field of future and sustainability studies. Thus, the objective here is not to advance the state of the art but to provide a digestible note on thinking about the (global) future in the second quarter of the 21st century.

Scientific disciplines shape imagined futures

It is widely acknowledged that personal experiences, norms and values shape how we imagine the future, and unsurprisingly, this was also the case with my interview partners. Everyone left me a drawing of a desirable and a probable global future that had an individual mark, reflecting individually different worldviews, priorities and fears. However, what impressed me was the influence of the academic discipline on how my interview partners approached the interview. I interviewed people from economics (some of whom also had a background in natural sciences), from other social sciences and from psychology and the differences were remarkable.

While people from economics and psychology approached my questions in a rather pragmatic way, trying to answer the questions on how they imagined different global futures and how they would visualise them as picture and in different graphs, people from social science were a lot more skeptical on the very possibility of producing something of significance in this way. For example: To which extent is what we can draw and imagine limited and determined by culturally dominant images presented to us through media? To which extent is it possible to make statements on the future evolution of trends to which a probability is attached? While the focus of my interview partner from psychology was clearly the individual—and the arousal and stimulation related problems and needs of individuals—, the economists emphasised economic policies, while social scientists focused on the complexity of interacting actors across different scales that jointly drive social change.

On the one hand, this suggests that interdisciplinary scenario development is more challenging than might be currently assumed, provided that the dominance of a single discipline is to be avoided.

At the same time, I would really urge to take the often-repeated call for more interdisciplinarity seriously. Having realised these interviews, I am convinced that scenarios on socio-ecological futures will be of greater quality and greater diversity if they result from an interdisciplinary co-development process. This is especially the case for the field of scenario research that combines qualitative and a quantitative analyses.

Common themes in CUSP researchers’ discourse

Although discourse varied significantly according to the scientific disciplines and personal worldview of my interview partners, I noticed some frequently appearing themes:

First, the problem of social inequality as both cause and consequence of current sustainability problems was mentioned by practically everybody I spoke to and was identified as one of the main problems to be addressed. Since the causes of social inequality are multidimensional and to a greater or lesser extent endemic to the logic of the current socio-economic system, an obvious problem arises: how can democratic decision-making systems reduce social inequality if those benefiting from the status quo exert disproportionate control over the political system? It was also noted that, at present, in the Global North, the social dimension of the sustainability problem is perceived with a much greater urgency among the broad population than the ecological dimension. However, accumulation dynamics are often coupled with both social inequality and environmental unsustainability, as illustrated by the food and agrochemical sectors.

Second, the centrality of work was a theme throughout, reminiscent also of the essay on the meaning of work in a sustainable society written by J.B. Foster in CUSP’s Essay Series (2017). Visions of desirable futures are linked to a greater presence of care and community work, to a greater appreciation for creative and artistic work, to equality of opportunities to pursue professions individuals enjoy independent from their family backgrounds, and to greater freedom from bureaucratic constraints to do meaningful research. I think this underlines the argument that post-growth scenarios (and any scenario about desirable futures, really) should pay careful attention to the question under which systems individuals are enabled to lead meaningful lives not only apart from but also through their work.

It is hard to think in a positive way about the global future…

What I realised during the interviews was how easy it is for people aware of current socio-ecological and economic dynamics to imagine ‘bad’ futures and how hard it is to imagine ‘good’ or ‘desirable’ futures. The task becomes even more difficult if we try to start thinking seriously about consistent pathways that might lead from the status quo to those envisioned desirable futures.

I think one part of this difficulty is explained by the fact that it really is difficult. Developments over the last 50 years have gone in many directions but only rarely in one that could be described as ‘socially and ecologically just’, and there is a set of interacting cultural, political, economic, social and technological factors that sustain the argument that our most probable futures are ones we would not describe as ‘desirable’, at least not for the great majority of the population.

However, I am convinced that the other reason for the difficulty of thinking, talking about and constructing a desirable scenario or even a ‘world utopia’ in 2025 consists in the dominance of certain discourses in Western society that build up considerable barriers, especially for people from research, to engage in this kind of activities. As Mark Fisher has convincingly laid out, there seems to be a pretty strong narrative suggesting that there is no alternative, and that the world will end before capitalism will end (“But of course” – the dominant narrative continues – “neither of this will happen because humans will re-invent themselves, or at least the top 10% or 1% of humans, and which system would be more adequate to deal with increasing scarcity than the master of artificial scarcity, capitalism itself?”).

In 2025, someone who speaks of system change or of necessary radical transformations or of fairer rules of the game can face a whole range of negative reactions, stemming maybe from disillusion after decade-long political engagement, from blind faith in the system, from fear of change or from the simple refusal to dedicate some serious thoughts to the state of the world. Public discourse—or what passes for it—has become so charged that merely contemplating alternatives now feels like an act of courage.

…but it is necessary and important

In my own research, I have criticised global environmental scenarios for being biased against the global south and against marginalised population groups, I have dedicated time to show the enormous barriers to successful sustainability transitions and I have pointed out the lack of consistent pathways of change in degrowth and post-growth modeling work. Nevertheless, the interview project has made me realise how important it is to seriously think about desirable global futures in order to deconstruct the evergrowing myth that there is no alternative. I think it is important to make this effort of seeking utopia and to not let one’s ethical standards be dragged down by global developments. As a famous ecological economist once stated, it makes more sense to believe in ‘social impossibilities’ than in biophysical ones. And, as Ruth Levitas writes in the CUSP Essay Series, where there is no vision, the people perish.

For a desirable scenario to work, dominant ideas, institutions and material capacities have to align to form a new world system better capable at fulfilling basic human needs without a continuous degradation of life-supporting system and human freedom and dignity.

Seeking the Holy Grail

However, if such an alternative world system existed, how to reach it? Thinking about social change toward sustainability for me is like the search for the Holy Grail. We know that so many things would need to be different to solve the deepening socio-ecological problems. But, HOW TO CHANGE? What do we actually know about how history unfolds? Where is the theoretical framework that does not only explain in hindsight how things changed but actually allows social actors interest in changing things the construction of some meaningful tactics and strategies?

The old is dying, the new struggles to be born

While we are trying to reach an accurate analysis of our global socio-economic-ecological situation, social, political and environmental change is accelerating, although not necessarily in directions we might consider desirable. More and more, a consensus seems to emerge that the old system is no longer working, that, in fact, it is dying. How will ‘the new’ look like? Will it resemble a monstrous spectre of the past? Or will mounting societal tensions push the emergence of a new and vigorous global movement decided to tackle the mounting and profound systemic problems? Everyone will ultimately rely on his or her gut feeling to decide which of these futures is more probable or whether we are moving in an altogether different direction. However, the future is not yet closed, and courageous, non-conforming utopian thinking can still positively influence the current struggle of ideas towards a direction of life filled with meaning.

About the author

Arthur Lauer is an ecological economist at the University of Valladolid and was a visiting PhD researcher with CUSP from September to December 2024. His research interests cover global environmental scenarios, ecological macroeconomic modelling and IPE related questions.