Imaginaries: The Ideational Foundation of Sustainability Transitions

Abstract Imaginaries have (again) become a fashionable concept in economic geography and particularly in the geography of sustainability transitions, drawing on inspirations from neighbouring fields such as cultural political economy and science and technology studies. Understanding how agents imagine and give meaning to changes in their spatial context is particularly important in regional sustainability transitions. However, what precisely economic geographers and transition scholars understand under the term ‘imaginaries’ remains elusive and risks becoming another fuzzy concept. This article offers a sympathetic critique of the use of imaginaries. To achieve a nuanced conceptualization of the ideational foundation of sustainability transitions, this article understands imaginaries as specific time/geography configurations, defined along two continuous dimensions (time and geography), resulting in four stylized, overlapping categories (imagined histories, imagined futures, imagined places, imagined spaces). This article closes with a call for economic geographers and transition scholars to make more explicit what precisely they mean when writing about imaginaries.