What are Climate Imaginaries?

How Indigenous Peoples and frontline communities tell stories of their past, present and future relationship with the environment, and what technologies and tools they use to do so.

Imagination is activated at all times as people make sense of their present communities, their identities, and their still unformed futures. Scholars of civic media have used the term civic imagination to explore these imaginaries of collective life. Henry Jenkins, et. al. argue is “the capacity to imagine alternatives to current cultural, social, political, or economic conditions; one cannot change the world without imagining what a better world might look like.”.¹ Before taking action in the world, there is a process by which individuals and groups construct and find power in imaginaries. This is not simply about designing possible futures, but about designing the process through which one might achieve desirable futures.

However, imagination implies a freedom to create, and that freedom is not equally distributed. This lack of freedom leads to many not being able to understand their imaginaries as something for which to strive, or even just to ponder and explore. When imaginaries intersect with politics, power determines what imaginaries matter.

We use the term climate imaginaries to refer to the application of civic imagination to climate futures. The climate imaginaries of Indigenous Peoples and the ones of hegemonic institutions are often in opposition: private firms, NGOs, governmental agencies and multilateral organizations advocate for climate imaginaries that reflect specific ideologies, normative commitments, scientific under-standings and material interests. The climate imaginaries of Indigenous Peoples are often “erased”, ceding to the monopoly of climate imaginaries that disregard Indigenous Peoples’ values and worldviews.

Indigenous Peoples and frontline communities are already imagining through a variety of media, including video documentaries, radio, TikToks, and oral storytelling. However, these efforts are too often disconnected from formal adaptation planning. Therefore, they have a limited impact on the allocation of resources related to climate adaptation processes.

As more and more Indigenous-controlled places around the planet are in need of formal climate adaptation, there is more need now than ever to support the cultivation and representation of local imaginaries. Indigenous and frontline communities need tools to tell their stories of people and place and, coupled with an understanding of climate science, project those stories onto possible and desirable futures. The Initiative for Participatory Climate Adaptation, in partnership with impacted Indigenous Peoples and frontline communities will codesign tools and processes that can nurture, amplify and distribute stories of climate futures that productively challenge the dominant values regime of government institutions and global development.

What is Deep Listening?

How Institutions understand those stories, and how those stories impact adaptation decisions and plans; what technologies and tools to they use to facilitate these processes.

Institutions are slow to respond and change. As they fail to fulfill their missions, they appear unable to learn, which leads to diminished trust and lack of engagement. To remedy this, an emerging literature proposes participatory design as key to transforming. Participatory design holds that users should be involved in designs they will be using, and that all stakeholders must have equal input into the design process.¹ When institutions engage in participatory design processes with communities, they engage in a process known as infrastructuring: institutions become more equitable through the collective articulating and reflecting on their processes, and communities are consolidated surrounding political demands, since they might discover common points for organizing.

However, participatory design processes are often focused on the design of a specific public policy or artifact that will be then utilized by a set of users. Processes that involve radically distinct worldviews −such as a climate adaptation process, where the views of Indigenous Peoples and frontline communities might be in dissonance with those of institutional actors− require a more complex communicative infrastructure, one that incorporates methodologies for understanding different worldviews and imaginaries.

Deep listening, as defined by composer Pauline Oliveros, “digs below the surface of what is heard … unlocking layer after layer of imagination, meaning, and memory down to the cellular level of human experience.” It also has the potential to reframe government and development practice: instead of proposing homogenous interventions, deep listening “holds diversity and seeks to balance the familiar with the unfamiliar, holding tensions and frictions rather than ‘resolving’ and creating ‘inauthentic’ homogeneity, for the sake of imposed health and well-being currencies.”²

Technological tools can be used to facilitate deliberate, empathic listening and capture the affective cues that are embedded in conversations. For example, Cortico’s Local Voices Network, a project created in cooperation with MIT’s Laboratory for Social Machines (now part of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication) proposes a methodology for community members to share stories, which are processed by a software that can retrieve the deeper texture and complexity of the views of the community through qualitative data captured in conversation.³ These insights are useful for institutions to understand the values of the community engaging in planning processes in a language that institutions can act upon, taking part in effective institutional transformation that bypass communicative disconnects and produce effective collaborations between institutions and the communities central to climate adaptation processes.