Hope and political imagination: Beyond harmful hope in sustainable transitions

Sustainable transitions require societies to make profound changes in the ways we imagine politics, including both social relations and the relations between societies and the environment. We therefore need prefigurative politics that seeks to reconfigure our ways of imagining politics in a more sustainable way. This article looks at the role of hope in transforming the way we imagine sociopolitical relations by viewing hope as a force that sustains nondominant political imaginaries such as radical ecological imaginaries. Hope becomes central for maintaining still unrecognized ways of imagining society and politics. Two distinct harms related to hope in climate politics are then identified. The first is cruel optimism, that hope might make ecological struggles maintain facets of currently destructive political imaginaries. The second harm is a consequence of the demandingness of maintaining ecologically radical political imaginaries, linked to burnout, fatigue and isolation. To reflect on how to maintain hope in sustainable futures, an account of strategic hope is conceptualized. This account recommends alleviating the harms of hoping by forming bridges between nondominant imaginaries and by aligning nondominant political imaginaries with dominant ones where possible. • Underscores the role of political imaginaries for prefigurative ecological politics. • Conceptualizes hope as a force which sustains nondominant political imaginaries. • Identifies harms for hoping from the perspective of hope’s role for political imagination. • Argues for a strategic form of hope in relation to climate politics.