Political thinking on global crises has become trapped

Environmental politics is doomed to fail — unless we tell better stories We need a new narrative

Political thinking on global crises has become trapped

Captured Futures: Rethinking the Drama of Environmental Politics Maarten A. Hajer and Jeroen Oomen Oxford Univ. Press (2025)

Every now and again, you look forward to a book. You follow the pre-publication talks, the promise, the drama. I have known political scientist Maarten Hajer for three decades as an academic, policymaker and activist. If anyone has the skills and know-how to deeply understand the logic of environmental politics, it’s him.

And this book exceeded my expectations. Written with rising-star social scientist Jeroen Oomen, Captured Futures is powerful, timely and consequential. It is arguably the most important book on environmental politics in the past decade. The concept of a ‘captured future’ shows brilliantly how environmental politics has become trapped in ways that both reproduce its own failure and restrict people’s ability to imagine alternatives.

The book starts by marshalling evidence that environmental politics is falling short on global environmental health. It’s a familiar list, including unmet targets for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions and continuing losses of biodiversity, fertile soils and fresh water.

Then, the authors present a radical idea: that environmental politics, as it is currently configured and practised, is bound to fail. This is not because of a lack of political will, or regulatory or state obstacles, but because of the conceptual framework — the ‘dramaturgical regime’ — through which the rules and conventions of environmental politics are being enacted and performed.

Failed system

At the heart of this regime is ecological modernization: a set of convictions that has held sway for three decades. These include that technological and market-based solutions can remediate environmental crises; that natural science, with its value-neutral ‘facts’, can provide the necessary knowledge to create these solutions; and that policymakers, in their ‘pilot’ role, define global options, goals and targets.

In this system, if targets go unmet despite the presentation of scientific evidence, the only response available to those in the political cockpit is to escalate the urgency of their language. Ever-stronger images of impending catastrophe further diminish citizens’ feelings of political agency and exacerbate many people’s already pronounced senses of despair, despondency and alienation. As the ultimate technocratic solution, climate geoengineering represents ecological modernization’s last stand.

The common narrative of ‘win–win solutions’ and ‘positive-sum games’ is over. The authors describe how environmental policy’s increasing effects on everyday life — through mobility, energy and housing — are generating political responses. This as an “age of backlash”, they write, pointing to the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) movement in France and farmers’ street protests across Europe.

A *gilet jaunes* protester at a demonstration in Lyon, France in 2019.Credit: Romain Costaseca/Hans Lucas/Hans Lucas/AFP/Getty

Worse, the dramaturgical regime is unwittingly contributing to political polarization. Many people, including populists and some on the right, increasingly view the climate-change community, and universities more broadly, as part of a globalist and elitist system pitted against ordinary people. This dynamic has intensified this year, particularly in the United States, where the Trump administration has attacked elite universities including Harvard, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and slashed funding for federal environmental and health agencies.

Turning the tide

Ecological politics needs to tell a more aspirational story. We need to move from stories that evoke fear and despair towards ones that give hope and renewal. And we need to raise awareness of potential futures that are just as desirable as the consumer-based dreams we have become so attached to. To convey the task ahead, the authors analyse how fossil fuels and the lifestyles they enable are deeply and seductively embedded in most people’s senses of personal freedom, lifestyle and identity. The ‘American dream’ is alive, and it’s global.

To learn about what might work, Hajer and Oomen analyse two historical examples of intellectual discourses that have shifted the societal mood. UK economist and social reformer William Beveridge laid out the principles of the modern welfare state in a 1942 report, with radical ideas about how to eradicate poverty that were strong enough for people to fight for. Efforts by think tanks and others shifted conservative thought in the 1960s and 1970s towards neoliberal concepts such as property ownership, deregulation, privatization and free markets.

Today, three eco-political discourses are bubbling: ‘beyond growth’ questions the necessity for economic growth; decolonization scholars critique models of development that reinforce the dominance of former colonial powers; and eco-conservatism focuses on one’s duty as a steward to protect the natural world. But these debates, although valuable, remain mainly intellectual and resonate only marginally with the public.

Trump supporters gathering in Nashville, Tennessee, during his 2024 presidential campaign.Credit: Sergio Flores/AFP/Getty

Where else might someone look? One approach that Hajer and Oomen don’t discuss is closer examination of shifts in everyday lived experiences, and the social, cultural and political trends that underpin them. Think of four brilliant sociologists: Ulrich Beck, John Urry, Anthony Giddens and Manuel Castells. Rather than extolling vanguard visions that could be rolled out into political projects, each of them sought to see the world around them with acute sensitivity and then develop concepts and theories attuned to what they saw.

Beck’s ‘risk society’ reflected a globalized world that is imbued with invisible, uninsurable, unattributable and potentially irreversible risks. Urry’s ‘disorganized capitalism’ describes the shift away from the structured, hierarchical and relatively stable form of ‘organized capitalism’. Giddens’s ‘reflexive modernization’ unpacks the double-edged nature of modernity in relation to science, individualism, capitalism and industrialism. Castells’ ‘network society’ describes the growth of forms of social organization based on networks rather than conventional hierarchies.

Such on-the-ground thinking could be applied, for example, to the wave of conservatism manifesting in global politics, from the United States to Argentina, Finland and Italy. On the night of US President Donald Trump’s election, when it was becoming clear that he not only won the election but had increased his majority across key demographics (including Black and Hispanic voters, rural voters, religious voters, men under 50 and even naturalized citizens), I asked myself, why? Since then, I have sought to understand, and empathize with, the structure of feeling that underpins this new form of conservatism.

Ask the people

Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in their Own Land (2016) offers some insights. Her ethnographic look at the emotional lives of arch-conservatives in Bayou country, Louisiana, based on fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2016, explores why increasingly disaffected people tend to move to the political right and not the left.