Walking together by asking questions: Combining backcasting and prefiguration to invite a hopeful approach to desirable futures

Offering alternative ways to approach futures beyond catastrophic and apocalyptic scenarios with varying degrees of likelihood, this research focuses on prefiguration and backcasting as hopeful approaches towards desirable futures. Through a comparative analysis based on an integrative literature review, we put in conversation prefiguration and backcasting by surfacing their similarities and differences and analysing their compatibility across the respective approaches to futures and directionality; enactment of desired changes; and relation between means and ends. In the analysis, we elaborate on how backcasting and prefiguration both work with futures in experimental and purposeful ways, exploring plural directions through various practices, strategies, or methodologies, which characterise different tendencies to “walk the talk” with action-oriented embodiment of the desired ends or “talk the walk” with more reflexivity in planning and learning. Considering how they can complement each other or “walk together by asking questions”, we open a dialogical space to speculate on whether and how actors engaging in prefiguration could benefit from using more systemic perspectives and structured methods to connect ends and means. Similarly, we inquire into how backcasting researchers and practitioners could handle the role and positioning of change agents, and consider more embodied, relational, and affective practices to bridge gaps between knowing and doing. We propose a framework for prefigurative backcasting by conceptualising three spaces key to enact transformative processes: (i) “desirable futures” to hold a common directionality; (ii) “lived reality” to engage areas with transformative potential in the thick now; and (iii) “prefigurative being” to experiment with prefigurative invitations. • Prefiguration and backcasting offer hopeful approaches to desirable futures • Both enact futures in the present with experimental learning-oriented approaches • Prefigurative backcasting can foster reflexivity and support transformations