Failure of crisis imagination? Temporal worldmaking, tracking error, and non-queer futures at Norges Bank Investment Management

The aim of this paper is to expand the knowledge base of futures studies, as well as to explore queer-feminist perspectives on time, temporality and the performative materiality of future-related knowledge. This was done through an investigation of tracking error, a measure of the deviance in volatility between an active investor’s portfolio and the reference index, analysed as a tool and regulation that produces limited imaginations of crisis at Norges Bank Investment Management. The paper introduces temporal worldmaking, a description for the kind of power that financial actors have in giving time a certain closed character, and how such power plays a role in large investments of public money. As a wider concept belonging to queer temporalities, it contributes to notions of normality and the descriptions of dominant temporal forms, the forms that in this study add to what I refer to as a failure of (crisis) imagination, a notion that also should be understood in relation to the queer embrace of failure as starting point for thinking the world anew, and to imagine the world otherwise. The material for this study has involved 20 public letters from Norges Bank to Norwegian Ministry of Finance, and 17 interviews with investment executives, activists, and politicians. • The challenge of imagining a future vastly different from the present • Explore queer temporalities for thinking about financial futures • Tracking error as a sociotechnical tool and regulation • Introduces two concepts: temporal worldmaking and failure of crisis imagination