Exploring desirable futures in the shell of the present: Prefiguration and metaphors of change for deep transformations.

Licentiate thesis, 2025

Complex global challenges, from climate change to social inequalities and more, give origin to times of ‘polycrisis’. To navigate these interconnected crises, deliberate and purposeful transformations towards just and sustainable futures are increasingly called for. Given the prevalence of pessimistic attitudes to futures, coupled with a general lack of transformative capacities, there is a quest for more hopeful and enabling approaches to transformations. With the aim of contributing to such, this thesis explores (1) how desirable futures are enacted in transformative efforts; and (2) what conceptual frameworks and practical tools can be co-created to support radical transformative processes.
Within transformation, futures, and anticipation studies in a broader context of sustainability science and political ecology, this thesis builds on relational perspectives to sustainability and takes a normative and critical stance to bring forth desirable futures through participatory experimentation. Specifically, it focuses on metaphors of change, as levers for deep transformations, and on prefiguration, as a transformative praxis to enact desired futures in the present with coherence between envisioned ends and adopted means. Through undisciplinary research underlaboured by critical realism, the appended papers focus on the ‘how’ of transformations by: (1) surfacing how the Degrowth movement uses metaphors of change to imagine desirable futures and form coherent strategies via distributed forms of prefiguration; (2) analysing and contrasting the prefigurative potential of metaphors used by the Degrowth movement, the EU mission ‘Climate-Neutral Cities’, and the Transition Towns community project; and (3) comparing and integrating how desirable futures are explored and enacted in prefiguration and backcasting.
The findings of Paper I suggests that the various currents of the Degrowth movement experiment with prefiguration by envisioning desirable futures across the planes of material transactions, human and more-than-human interactions, social structures, and inner being, while enacting symbiotic, ruptural, interstitial, intermingling, or enabling strategies. These ends and means are surfaced through metaphors as prefigurative devices that can help find balance between unity in directionality and openness to plurality. Analysing other case studies, Paper II shows how different worldviews, strategies, and resulting futures are explored through metaphors of ‘moonshot missions’ for large scale projectification in the EU Cities Mission, and by metaphors about ‘community in harmony’ for local regeneration in Transition Towns. Considering other ways of enacting desirable futures, Paper III compares the theoretical roots, conceptual positionings, and practical applications of prefiguration and backcasting. Building on their shared experimental, experiential, and learning-oriented approaches, it develops an integrative framework of prefigurative backcasting that can support transformative processes. Overall, this thesis advances theoretical and practical contributions in less researched discursive, cognitive, and embodied approaches to foster deep change within a normative and anticipatory frame.