Today’s societies are widely diagnosed as suffering from a lack of compelling, long-term positive visions. Thus, the oft-heard reasoning goes, we remain stuck in short-term contestations and fail to move beyond the status quo. This is particularly troubling given the long-term, global sustainability challenges we face – challenges that require us to redirect substantial economic investment and to implement structural changes across various sectors of society and the economy.
Yet the world does not suffer from a lack of visions – or so-called sustainability scenarios. There are probably more of them now than at any point in history. Scenario reports are being produced by governments, intergovernmental organizations, NGOs, cities, corporations, and academic research projects.
Is there really a vision gap?
Why, then, do these proposed scenarios fail to address our apparent vision gap? Why are they unable to provide convincing, appealing futures that give people hope and direction?
Last year I had a rare opportunity to explore these and other questions with my colleagues. Is there really a gap? What are the visions that scenario reports actually offer?
The Sustainable Development Expert Panel, operating under the Prime Minister’s Office of Finland, commissioned Demos Helsinki to collect and analyse positive visions or “imaginaries” of society following a successful sustainability transformation. We conducted a systematic scoping review that eventually comprised 158 sources, including academic articles, policy reports, non-fiction books, websites, and works of climate science fiction or “cli-fi”. In an effort to create useful categories, we identified a dominant future scenario or vision in each of our sources and then synthesized them into general clusters.
Our review uncovered three critical gaps in existing sustainability imaginaries:
First, most visions function as bundles of existing solutions that treat technological change as a substitute for institutional reform. This reflects a sort of methodological conservatism that fails to recognize the social aspects of all technological change, thus overlooking the indirect multiplier effects that could lead to wider economic and political restructuring.
Second, existing visions rarely portray citizens as active agents of societal transformation. People are mainly depicted as users or consumers of technical solutions rather than as drivers of change. We did identify a small counter-narrative of localism and local self-sufficiency in energy and food, representing people in various prosumer roles (participating in the co-production of basic resources, in local decision-making, and in various sharing-economy solutions). But this counter-narrative remains a minority strand.
Third, cli-fi is dominated by dystopian narratives. Where hopeful storylines do appear, they are typically embedded in the following broader narrative: Our modern problems inevitably lead to a polycrisis causing widespread ruptures in the structures of society and the economy. At the same time, this broader narrative rarely offers actionable pathways for systemic yet gradual transformation.
Finally, across all our source types, we were struck by the absence of qualitative, holistic scenarios grounded in true-cost economics – in particular given today’s dominant policy narrative around carbon pricing and the need to put a cost on various environmental externalities.
A meta-vision that isn’t quite working
Despite these limitations, a number of key actors have begun operating as if a positive meta-vision actually exists, is already coming true, and will – at least in Europe – be largely complete within the next decade. Technical innovations in energy, mobility, and construction have, in fact, advanced with unprecedented speed over the past decade and a half. The assumed meta-vision holds that by exploiting these rapid advancements, perhaps aided by a sequence of targeted policy measures, we can create new markets, renew our economy, achieve productivity gains, improve the resilience of our organizations and societies, and ultimately increase the comfort of our everyday lives and work.
It is, no doubt, a powerful meta-vision or imaginary that gives directionality to a substantial share of corporate and municipal investment.
Yet it is questionable whether this meta-vision will genuinely prove positive or beneficial. While it depicts a modestly encouraging trajectory in the decarbonization of some economies, it says little about how to achieve the demand-side changes that should, according to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (2022), contribute between 40 and 70 per cent of the emissions reductions required by 2050.
As a result, this meta-vision fails to address the wider dilemma of our planetary limits versus the still-growing needs of our societies and economies. But this is not the sole or primary reason it is unable to fill our vision gap.
An imagined normality of the past
The simpler reason is that most people do not even recognize it as a vision in the first place – as something compelling and unifying. It frames the work programmes of the European Commission and features in the national strategies of most European countries. But this evidently does not help people transcend the short-sightedness, melancholy, and social tensions that hamper our societies.
The reason for this is that it aims to reproduce normality: the imagined normality of mid-to-late twentieth century industrialized welfare states. But that normality cannot be recaptured – too much has changed in technology, economic conditions, culture, and values since then. Still, without an adequate vision that offers us faith in something genuinely positive occurring on a longer time horizon, we end up seeking a lost normality instead.
The politics of compressed futures
In his recent book In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea (2024), political scientist Jonathan White argues that contemporary democratic politics is characterized by a systematic tendency to convert long-horizon challenges into short windows of emergency action. What results is a reactive politics of perpetual emergency – oriented towards restoring rather than building, and structurally unable to sustain longer-term institutional projects.
What we cannot imagine, we cannot manage. If we compress the future into the urgency of the next five to ten years, we lose our capacity to orient ourselves towards anything requiring sustained long-term commitment. Yet the actions we take today are guided by our anticipations of the future: We utilize our imagined future through expectations about tomorrow and the day after tomorrow – expectations that enable us to justify some ideas as rational and reasonable and to reject others. Without such expectations, people struggle to locate their own agency amid change and uncertainty.
Sketching alternatives
Since our scoping review did not turn up adequate positive visions for the future after a sustainability transformation, we decided to sketch some ourselves. Each positive vision is intended to serve different kinds of groups, emphasizing different systems and levers of change.
The three positive visions are:
- The true-cost economy envisions a transformed economic system in which full-cost accounting integrates ecological and social harms and benefits into prices, thus making the most damaging solutions economically unviable. This vision caters to those who believe that reformed markets can bring about a sustainable future.
- Planetary rules imagines a science-based, citizen-panel-informed planetary governance system that regulates overconsumption and restores nature while preserving national, regional, and local decision-making on other matters. This vision speaks to those who believe that democracy, institutions, and governance can successfully transform the future.
- The sustainability awareness revolution centres on transformation of values and acquisition of sustainability competences on behalf of civil-society agency, redirecting individual and community resources towards a sustainability transition. This vision is for those who believe in bottom-up transformation – already underway through better education, open information, and the decentralization of power to people.
Perhaps these blueprints for positive futures can provide inspiration and a starting point for those who require a vision for their own organization, neighbourhood, or political group. Each group may choose the one closest to its ideals and capacity to act – then formulate corresponding actions towards a better future.
The text was originally published in the blog series of University of Bern’s Centre for Development and Environment where I spent three weeks as a guest researcher in April 2026
