Governing As If the Future Obliged the Present: A Scenario Exercise in Prefigurative Climate Policy

Abstract

Governing climate futures faces a double bind: the impending crises are both long term and acutely critical. Climate policy must thus anticipate futures as if they were available to be enacted in the present; that is, it must engage with prefigurative politics. Through an analytical reading of a climate policymaking exercise run with the leading policymakers of the City of Helsinki, this article advances the notion of prefiguration as consisting of three dimensions of the ‘as if’. It directs empirical inquiry simultaneously to the folding of futures onto the present as if they were already at hand, to the aligning of means and ends so that they contain each other, and to distinctions made between reality and fictions. The article describes the inconspicuous ways in which policymaking orients itself towards the future and carves out its conditions of possibility. Within them, policymakers are shown to reduce the prospect of alternative, prefigurative politics to problem-solving in a perpetual present that remains oblivious to the futures it implies.

The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.

(Virginia Woolf, diary entry, 18 January 1915)

Introduction

It was becoming clear in September 2020 to the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies of the UK government that the country was rapidly headed for a second wave of Covid-19. Dominic Cummings, then special advisor to former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, presented Johnson with an analysis of how current data on case numbers and infection rates would develop in the weeks to come. Cummings has been quoted as saying:

We presented it all as if we were about six weeks in the future. This was my best attempt to get people to actually see sense and realise that it would be better for the economy as well as for health to get on top of it fast. Johnson basically said, ‘I’m not doing it, it’s politically impossible and lockdowns don’t work’ (Farrar and Ahuja, 2021: 173–174; emphases added).

It is the tension between the italicised notions that I seek to understand in this article: how could institutional policymaking come to know how to act as if the future were already at hand, and would doing so open up or close off the possibilities of what a policy can do? With a slight stretch of imagination, we can change the crisis and make the order even taller.

The unprecedented and inescapable consequences of climate and environmental change on societies are widely acknowledged. Efforts to govern climate futures, however, face a double bind of temporality and means and ends. The crises are both acute and long term; they are also compounds, and any discrete solutions are bound to bring unexpected and persistent path dependencies (Boin et al., 2020; Lazarus, 2009; Levin et al., 2012; Pot et al., 2023; Rittel and Webber, 1973). Governance and political bodies are thus forced to rethink the ways they know what to do now and for generations to come, before the time window to rein in anthropogenic climate heating closes for good (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2022; Rockström et al., 2017; United Nations Environment Programme, 2023). Achieving such reflexivity entails that governance and policymaking themselves are put under scrutiny, not only in research but also as practised (cf. Voß and Bornemann, 2011). What this means for governance bodies is that whatever techniques they adopt to anticipate and prepare for the future (e.g. Adey and Anderson, 2012; Anderson, 2010; Aykut et al., 2019; Collier, 2008; Collier and Lakoff, 2021; Guston, 2014; Hajer and Pelzer, 2018; Mallard and Lakoff, 2011; Samimian-Darash, 2011, 2016, 2022), they will need to consider how the ways in which they know how to govern will come to open up and close off future realities. To operationalise such ‘knowing governance’ (Voß and Freeman, 2016), new ‘decision platforms’ are needed to somehow consider the long-term implications of measures implemented in the present (Hukkinen et al., 2022a, 2022b; see also Voß et al., 2009).

In this article, I analyse an effort to bring envisioned future ends to bear on present policymaking: a scenario exercise on long-term climate policy conducted with the leading politicians and expert officials of the City of Helsinki (Järvensivu et al., 2021; see also Hukkinen et al., 2022a, 2022b). The exercise was designed by a multi-disciplinary research consortium with the purpose of inviting policymakers to consider the decadal timespans of the implications of climate heating and the consequences of their own policy decisions. At the heart of both questions is the widely acknowledged challenge in guiding policymakers to consider the far-reaching consequences of climate change and to prevent them from taking recourse to short-termism in the face of distant futures that appear obscure and unpalatable (e.g. Rickards et al., 2014; Willis, 2018; Wong and Lockie, 2020). The Helsinki exercise targeted the dilemma by inviting policymakers to consider how alternative lines of policy actions and the decisions they make now would lead to certain outcomes – and enable and constrain the possibilities of governing in those futures. The policymakers were let to ‘live through their decisions’ (Järvensivu et al., 2021: 2), with the express intention that they would consider futures as the outcomes of their policy choices in a way that would affect the devising of those same policies. The exercise thus contained the temporal and imaginative element much theorised under the concepts of prefiguration and prefigurative politics (e.g. Cooper, 2020; Gordon, 2018; Jeffrey and Dyson, 2021; Maeckelbergh, 2011; Monticelli, 2021; Swain, 2019; Törnberg, 2021; Van de Sande, 2015; Yates, 2021). Originating in scholarship within Marxist social movements (Boggs, 1977; Yates, 2021), the prefigurative principle of how to envision and enact in the present desired and alternative social and political futures continues to animate contemporary theoretical discussion (e.g. Gordon, 2018; Swain, 2019). I take the notion of prefiguration to be inherent in how the Helsinki exercise sought to conjure imaginations of the means and ends of climate policy in the city – and in the future-oriented sensibility of policymaking that could conceive of alternative and transformative politics.

I set out to explore two issues: how climate futures and their governance come to be known together in policymaking, and how the precept of folding futures onto the present is put into practice in the scenario technique featured in the exercise. To make detailed sense of precisely how future ends are aligned with present means, I take a cue from a recent exploration into the prefigurative expression ‘as if’ (Cooper, 2020; see also Kermode, 2000 [1967]; Vaihinger, 2021 [1911]). With the as if, I can join three dimensions of prefiguration: folding futures onto the present as if they were already at hand; aligning means and ends so that they contain one another; and using fictions, that is, the as-if real, to articulate what is real, together within the same supposition (cf. Vaihinger, 2021 [1911]: 84). Working with these three aspects simultaneously gives me the analytical leverage to understand how the Helsinki policymakers tried to know how to govern long-term futures as urgently critical concerns in the confines of the double bind of seemingly contradictory requirements (cf. Bateson, 1972). The analysis shows that the policymakers ironed out the knot in a way that allowed contradictions to persist. The long-term perspective was reduced to presentist problem-solving as a self-imposed restraint on the abilities of policymaking to know how to deal with climate futures. In describing how this was done in the exercise, I offer new analytical resources for both research on scenarios (e.g. Adey and Anderson, 2012; Collier, 2008; Samimian-Darash, 2022) and ‘techniques of futuring’ (Hajer and Pelzer, 2018) and their design for governance. By centring attention on the prefigurative aspects of accounting for the future in policymaking, the present study shows the active but conspicuous work required to contain the long term in the short run – in a discounted form that privileges the present in perpetuity.

Next, I outline the exercise and its context, the scenarios and the tasks presented to the participants. Then, I introduce the prefigurative ‘as if’ as a threefold analytical outlook to make sense of the particularities of futuring in policymaking as enacted in the exercise. In three empirical sections, I illustrate the intertwined as-if aspects of prefiguration at play in the Helsinki exercise. The conclusion considers the contributions of the outlook and the limitations of the single case study presented here. Overall, the article explores new ground in scholarship on prefigurative politics and for the critical study and design of scenario techniques that strive to expand the remit of policymaking as it is.

An Exercise in Governing Climate Futures With City of Helsinki Policymakers

The exercise was held in late November 2019 and involved leading politicians and sectoral expert officials of the City of Helsinki. The design had two key objectives: to experiment together with policymakers and thus create an opportunity for ‘social learning’ and to intervene in existing practices of governance (see Järvensivu et al., 2021). The normative imperative was that current climate politics will fail to account for long-term futures when considering and making decisions in the present. The exercise aimed to strike a balance between ‘credibility’ and ‘inconceivability’ and to avoid overly dramatic or catastrophic scenarios while still being jarring enough to suspend the mundanity of governance as usual (Järvensivu et al., 2021: 7).

Participants included the mayor and four deputy mayors from Helsinki and two of five invited party group leaders; combined, they represented the centre-right, green, centre-left and left (the first two being the largest groups in the city council), along with seven sectoral expert officials in energy, land use, environment, traffic and finance. ¹ All were to assume their actual current roles. Three organising officials from the city’s safety and preparedness team were also present but did not participate in the proceedings. Leading the exercise was the head of the organising research consortium, while the mayor took charge of chairing participants’ discussions. The exercise lasted 144 minutes, excluding one 15-minute break. In the weeks that followed, participants and the city’s safety and preparedness team were interviewed individually, in pairs or in trios in 10 sessions. Two politicians did not respond to enquiries following the exercise and were thus not interviewed. The interviews served as an extension of the actual debriefing session that closed the exercise. In both, participants were asked to reflect on the exercise itself, the credibility of the scenarios and how the exercise resembled or differed from actual governance in the city. ²

In a crisis meeting-like setting in the city board room, participants were introduced to an imaginary situation in the then-near future of 2022 as a narrated video scenario with imagery of familiar locations in Helsinki’s city centre often devoid of people ³ or showing large-scale maintenance work. The European Union (EU) had granted cities jurisdiction over climate change mitigation as a crisis measure against chronic extreme weather conditions and in response to rising public pressure. Member states and municipalities were allowed to shelve the EU’s Fiscal and Stability Pact and its standards for austerity to make use of cheap investment bank loans when carrying out new policies. The task of the participants was to deliberate and choose between three optional lines of policy as responses to audiovisual scenarios of the city’s near future and global developments presented to them. In what was the near future of 2022 at the time of the exercise, the policymakers were asked to determine the most viable policy approach to take them to an improved future in 2030. They were free to discuss approaches beyond the alternatives provided, but the choice had to come down to one of the three on offer. After seeing the resulting scenario of 2030, based on their choice in 2022, the participants were given a new set of three alternative policies to consider, this time with 2040 in sight.

Mitigating climate change as an issue for governance features ubiquitously on both national and municipal political agendas in Finland, even if the precise form and extent of the measures needed are the subject of constant debate. The City of Helsinki has joined 98 other Finnish municipalities (of a total 309) in pledging to achieve ‘carbon neutrality’ by 2035 and to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 80% from 2007 levels. The exercise intervened in the key problematic in this goal: in 2019, Helsinki was still heavily dependent on fossil fuels to produce energy for district heating (see Vadén et al., 2019). ⁴ Together with transportation and electricity production, district heating amounts to nearly all the total carbon emissions formally attributed to the city (Helsinki Region Environmental Services, 2023). Radical changes to the infrastructure of energy production and distribution would thus demand widespread and long-term social and economic transformations. Such upheavals would not be downright unfeasible, as the city’s annual budget surplus has fluctuated between 400 and 500 million euros since 2016, and overall public trust in government and public authorities in Finland has consistently topped the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2021) average. Accordingly, the policy options that were offered to policymakers in the exercise focused on the production and consumption of energy and transportation. Together with the liaising city officials, the exercise designers considered these a ‘relevant nexus’ of climate policy in the city that required the participants to concentrate on ‘concrete changes’ (Järvensivu et al., 2021: 6). Energy and transport infrastructure also implicates everyday social practices because the demand for energy and mobility shape both physical infrastructure and the contours of life in the city (Shove and Walker, 2014).

The policy options in 2022 were introduced as a draft drawn by the city’s own experts of alternative lines of actions that the city could take, so as to mimic the way strategic programmes and roadmaps are usually presented in decision-making processes. For example, the programme for achieving carbon neutrality by 2035 was prepared as commissioned by the chief administrative executive, a non-political figure, as a cross-sectoral effort of officials, before it was opened for political discussion.

The first option in 2022 suggested privatising energy production and opening transport infrastructures to outside investment as a cost-effective way to cut down emissions. The second tightened regulations on energy by introducing heat load caps for production and monitoring household consumption while supporting the resilience of citizens in extreme weather conditions. In addition, the city was to enforce road tolls based on vehicle emission profiles. The third option consisted of major innovation and public investment programmes for renewing heating and transportation infrastructure, totaling 15% of the city government’s annual revenue (and equal to or less than the annual budget surplus since 2016). ⁵

The first choice resulted in a dedicated scenario in 2030 and a new set of three choices along similar thematic lines. The 2030 scenario noted the following developments: the demand for motorised transport and overall consumption had declined with the amount of paid work, and ecological moderation had become a social norm; investments in Helsinki had remained low; no system-level infrastructural or emission-decreasing renewals had been made, and Finland lagged in EU emission goals; the costs of unemployment had soared while tax revenues had sunk; increasing droughts in Europe had led to intermittent disruptions in logistics chains; weeks-long periods of extremely low temperatures in winter had caused elderly and infirm residents distress and overloaded the heating system.

The final scenario of 2040, based on the policy choices made in 2030, saw global production systems and economies faltering, food systems and logistics chains repeatedly disrupted and the market prices of goods fluctuating. Conflicts in the regions most afflicted by global heating had forced tens of millions of people to migrate to the Global North. Finland and Helsinki still had the reputation of being stable and having functioning infrastructures, although their reliability had come into question. A declining economy remained an issue for the city, and investments made in energy and transport infrastructures had only patched up legacy problems. The scenario came with two open questions for the participants: what are the main challenges in the situation depicted, and what should have been done between 2022 and 2040 so that they could have been confronted?

The exercise did not intend to lead the participants to pick up on any specific normative clues as to what kinds of policies would be ‘correct’. However, the context provided at the outset articulated the priorities and ultimate end of the proceedings: mitigating climate change and cutting down emissions will require transformative policies. The purpose of the exercise was not to draw out the policy pathways that would achieve these implied future goals – that is, to project scenarios based on observed or fabricated data of how to reach certain ends. Rather, policymakers were prompted to envision the long-term consequences of their policies so that they would bear upon their own making. The use of scenario techniques was thus distinctive: it was left open and up for political deliberation as to how the scenarios should be known to be governable and acted upon by policies. Whatever in the policies adopted would enable and constrain alternative political and climatic heating trajectories was for the participating policymakers to determine.

The scenarios depicted the present moments in the exercise (i.e. 2022, 2030, and 2040) rather than images of futures or co-created narratives on how to reach them. The impetus of the scenarios was not preparatory; that is, they were not meant to draw out and define future crises whose effects governance measures should then mitigate. The projected image of a future that policies in the exercise should anticipate was the very making of those policies and their outcomes. This outlook sides with sociological and anthropological research on preparedness that approaches uncertainty as a resource for probing and acting out possible futures (e.g. Adey and Anderson, 2012; Anderson, 2010; Collier, 2008; Mallard and Lakoff, 2011; Samimian-Darash, 2011, 2016, 2022). Here, scenario technologies are seen as ways of knowing that articulate the problems of governance (Samimian-Darash, 2016; see also Voß and Freeman, 2016). Scenarios ‘enlighten the present rather than predict the future based on the present’ and conceptualise the future as ‘engender[ing] uncertainty’ on which to act (Mallard and Lakoff, 2011: 340; Samimian-Darash, 2016: 361; respectively). The hindsight offered by the ultimate scenario of 2040, and the question of what could have been done differently, further opened up for scrutiny any past contingencies and uncertainties that come with sifting through possible courses of action (cf. Stalcup, 2016). As it turned out, these prospects were largely rejected by the Helsinki policymakers. Instead, they displayed a peculiar take on the prefigurative cues offered by the exercise format. Even if the uncertainties of climate crises managed to inform and forebode, they failed to compel present politics to treat future realities as if they were obligatory concerns.

The merits and shortcomings of the premises vis-à-vis the implementation of the exercise have been assessed in detail elsewhere (Järvensivu et al., 2021; see also Hukkinen et al., 2022a). In what follows, I concentrate instead on the aspects of prefigurative politics in climate policymaking as enacted in the exercise. Next, I provide a brief conceptual clarification on how the notions of prefiguration and prefigurative politics could be put to analytical use to make sense of a foundational paradox of modern politics. Grounding the conceptual approach in the unresolved contradiction of knowing a future that cannot be known will arguably help accentuate the strain put on any effort to govern the future, let alone in the face of climate crises that occupy most of the foreseeable horizon and undermine the very core of our policy apparatuses.

Prefigurative As-If Outlooks on Governing Futures With Policy

The guiding principle of the exercise was to have policymakers put their sense and knowledge of what governance can do vis-à-vis the decadal timespans of climate futures on the line, albeit in an artificial space that had no real-world consequences. The setting was intended to dislodge an imaginative and seriously playful disposition towards acting on and with the uncertainty and unknowability of the future (cf. Cooper, 2020; Samimian-Darash, 2022). That is at the very heart of the constitutive paradox of politics in modernity: the constant temporal crisis between the demand of knowing an open future that escapes prediction and the freedom of creating and acting out that future in a continuously unfolding present (Koselleck, 2000 [1959], 2004 [1979]; Luhmann, 1976, 1998 [1992], 2017 [1991]). Techniques of planning ahead, of anticipating and of preparing are exemplary manifestations of politics trying to deal with the paradox as if it could be resolved and controlled (cf. Beck, 1992 [1986]; Giddens, 1990, 1991).

The pushback, however, is inherent. The modern imaginary of making history, of the future being conditional on the consequences of our present actions (Giddens, 1990: 50–51, 1991: 114–133), works to ‘reassure’ us that the means and paths taken in the present will eventually ‘hurry the advent of the planned future’ while immobilising ‘all impulse toward’ acting otherwise (Koselleck, 2004 [1979]: 197–199). The present is thus only extended, with the image of a future subsumed onto it as self-similar (cf. Hartog, 2015; Reith, 2004; Savransky, 2017). Efforts to plan and influence the course of the future come with a confidence about hitting the mark of self-made prognostics and expectations, which may amount to little more than shooting in the dark (Gordon, 2018: 526; Hartog, 2015: 109; Koselleck, 2004 [1979]: 13, 17–21).

The concept of prefigurative politics tackles the paradox head on. Living up to the ideal of enacting desired and alternative social and political futures in the present would, according to foundational (Boggs, 1977) and contemporary scholars (for a concise genealogy, see Yates, 2021), offer social movements ways to solve or at least circumvent the unknowability of open futures. The problem of how to achieve prefigurative praxis still persistently mobilises scholarship on radical and transformative change in political theory (Swain, 2019), radical leftist and anarchist thought (Gordon, 2018; Monticelli, 2021; Van de Sande, 2015), social movement studies (Maeckelbergh, 2011; Yates, 2015), critical geography (Jeffrey and Dyson, 2021) and social theorising on transformations (Cooper, 2020; Törnberg, 2021). However, contemporary debates cannot shake off the repercussions of fixing images of futures as knowable. Holding the means of present politics accountable to a desired future endpoint inevitably constrains the generative and experimental capacities of action (Cooper, 2020; Gordon, 2018; Monticelli, 2021; Swain, 2019).

The temporal imperative of prefigurative politics calls for folding the future onto the present as if the former was already at hand in the latter. The dilemma inherent in this ‘ends-guided’ conception of prefiguration is the image of the future to which present action must live up (Swain, 2019). Arguably, this logic hinders social and political transformation as it neglects to keep track of how action might gradually change the present and, with it, the range of achievable futures. Any partial instance of present action thus becomes a synecdoche of the desired future as a whole (Swain, 2019: 54). This is the first side of the temporal challenge that the exercise presented to the Helsinki policymakers: how to project the consequences of policy decisions made today onto a future that is 10 years away. The other side is the inverse of the first: how to ‘efface’ the ends (Swain, 2019) so that the variety and contingencies of the futures generated in concomitant present actions remain open.

Prefigurative politics is thus locked firmly into the temporal semantics of modernity, between present futures, the fixtures made in the now, and future presents, that is, the presents in the future that are yet to be actualised (Esposito, 2007, 2013; Koselleck, 2004 [1979]; Luhmann, 1976, 1998 [1992], 2017 [1991]). The difficulty of knowing and acting out the future stems from the dynamics between these two figures. Whereas ends-guided prefiguration relies on a specific image of a present future, future presents are impossible to control because doing so comes with the condition that their inescapable uncertainty is acknowledged and embraced.

To work around this seeming deadlock, Davina Cooper (2020) has suggested shifting the conceptual and practical focus of prefigurative politics of social and political transformations away from temporality and the appropriate praxis of fitting means to ends. For Cooper, the key stakes of imagining and playing with radical alternatives in politics should lie instead in the relations between the real and the imaginary, the fictional, the ‘as if’. ⁶ Cooper (2020: 896) adopts the as if to argue that in institutional policymaking, distinctions between what is real and not quite real are crucial for figuring the conditions of possibility for politics ‘as if they were already there’. The analytical import of the as if would then be in bringing out the contingencies of how policymaking is known and done, of the epistemic, ethical and social criteria of doing one thing instead of something else, and how such dispositions are held up as political and open for dispute (Cooper, 2020: 896–897).

While this is a line of thought worth pursuing, in looking for analytical leverage and descriptive rather than emancipatory power in prefiguration, I defer the questions of whether and what kinds of prefigurative praxis should ‘positively feed into conventional politics’ (Monticelli, 2021: 114). Treating established forms of doing politics as ‘foundationally different ontologically and epistemologically’ from prefiguration (Monticelli, 2021: 114) implies that prefigurative knowledge and attitudes are to be ‘upscaled’ to a wider ‘sense of what might be possible’ in institutional governance (Jeffrey and Dyson, 2021: 652–653). In asking how futures are folded onto the present as an effort to know how to govern them, I do not presuppose any specific ways of operating. The question occupying the empirical analysis to follow is thus not whether the Helsinki policymakers lived up to a certain ideal of prefiguration. Rather, I put the prefigurative imperative to empirical work and use three as-if dimensions – temporalities, means and ends and realities – as interpretative keys to articulate how prefiguration is enacted in the exercise.

Even if the goal of policymaking was to curtail climate heating and achieve the requisite societal transformations, just how such an end might be turned into alternative or even hopeful politics in the current course towards what seems inevitable social and ecological ruin is what the analytical use of as if strives to describe in detail. Next, I take up the temporal relations between the present and the future and the ways they were pieced together in the Helsinki exercise. Then, these temporal dispositions bleed into how policymakers consider knowing the means available for them to address climate change. Finally, I show how the previous two outlooks congealed into dissonant double realities that locked climate politics into presentist problem-solving.

The Temporalities of Prefigurative Efforts

Let us start from the end and work backwards since it was largely only with the hindsight of 2040 that the policymakers started to tap markedly into prefigurative considerations. After the final 2040 scenario, when asked what should have been done differently to reach a better outcome, the policymakers started to recall past decision points in 2022 and 2030. They considered how these junctures had been the outcome of contingent, long-term developments in a process that had happened outside and despite the city’s policies:

I guess the things that are in need of balancing have to do with the economy. Here [in 2040] we have a world that is overall in a much more difficult situation, and our chances of finding favourable dynamics are even more limited than in 2030, but at the same time it’s absolutely necessary to find the proper means. (politician; exercise)

Another politician echoed this sentiment, affirming that the adversities brought on by climate change still caught societies by surprise in 2040, rather than in the 2022 and 2030 scenarios:

In this [2040] situation, where the whole of humanity has woken up to the serious challenge posed by climate change too late and where there are immense global problems and challenges, we have for various reasons fared rather well. I mean, we have problems, but in a global comparison we have been spared for the most part. (politician; exercise)

The contention was clearly that the city had ultimately fared ‘pretty well’ in light of the 2040 scenario, since the impacts of climate heating or the consequences policymakers’ choices of policy had not taken the city by surprise in the 20 years that had passed. This reasoning betrays a peculiar temporal orientation in how policymaking is thought to work: in a constant, suspended present tense. When reflecting on their task in the exercise, a city official laid out this stance explicitly, saying that the 10-year leaps between the policy choices and the resulting scenarios made it difficult to keep the effects of policies in check. The attention span of assessing whether policy measures work as intended should be one of vigilant auditing in the now:

Making discrete decisions at certain points in time, as we did here, and then jumping ahead 10 years, that’s artificial in the sense that of course if we saw that a certain measure didn’t work, then we would make adjustments and corrections a lot more quickly than in 10 years’ time. (. . .) The city’s decision-making should adjust to changes so that we won’t let things get out of hand but take corrective measures quickly in order to have the desired impact. (city official; exercise)

Other expert officials independently confirmed this rationale in post-exercise interviews. To presume politicians would make connections between decisions and their consequences in scenarios 10 years in the future was, in their view, ‘unrealistic’ and ‘not really credible’. The long temporal jumps allowed politicians to ‘just come up with whatever’ on what seemed to them, from the officials’ perspective, ‘a day like any other’. These officials took the exercise to push the participants to foresee the consequences of their policy choices as fixed outcomes in 10 years’ time; that is, as present futures. Yet what happened was that the policymakers positioned themselves in a displaced observation point from where they would only have to figure out how to outmanoeuvre the issues in the scenario snapshots of 2022 and 2030. One politician described this in an introspective tone:

Decision-making has this innate drive towards the immediate effects; by this I don’t mean we wouldn’t consider and calculate further, but there is a centrifugal force [sic – ‘centripetal’ was likely intended] bringing us back to how things could be solved now, as opposed to long-term effects. (politician; post-exercise interview)

Another group of officials saw the same effect in action in both the exercise and the everyday governance of the city, diagnosing a chronic preoccupation with the present:

For quite a while now, we’ve had the challenge in our decision-making that we are trying to solve whatever problem is currently at hand, trying to get rid of something that has fallen upon us. (city official; post-exercise interview)

In a way we’ve never made wrong decisions in the city but always worked to the best of our abilities, but things go to the dogs anyway (. . .) and rarely do we stop and analyse what went wrong (. . .) but instead go headfirst into new things, always as if from scratch. (city official; post-exercise interview)

Policymaking in these accounts seems curiously disconnected from the dual temporal orientations of present futures and future presents. In considering the policy choices in 2022 and 2030, the focus was not on the projected long-term outcomes – that is, the present futures implied in them – nor on the possible contingencies they would generate in the course of the 10 years to come and how they could shape the variety of future presents. Rather, what emerged in the exercise was the idea of ‘reassurance’ (Koselleck, 2004 [1979]), the notion that fastidiously pruning the present will eventually evolve into a desired future, irrespective of whether such an image is articulated at all and whether or not the range of unfolding possibilities is brought to bear on creating that image. The bottom line for the city’s governance was succinctly articulated by a politician from the vantage point of 2040:

Actually, the choices we made along the way have now [in 2040] turned out to be no more wrong than right, but instead, overall, we are very dependent on what happens in the rest of the world. (. . .) Everything that happened globally, whatever the situation, a strong economy is the poor person’s best friend. (. . .) The best security is making sure that there’s money in the bank so that you can do the right things when needed. (politician; exercise)

Not so much looking to predict and fix a present future to which the ‘money in the bank’ would aspire, what is at play here is rather an effacement of any figuration of the future whatsoever (cf. Swain, 2019). To replace it, the constant potential of ‘money’ – it was not specified whether that would be in the form of a surplus economy, ample liquidity or a prime credit rating – to do whatever is necessary at any given moment provides a way to contain the complexity and uncertainty of the future (cf. Simmel, 2011 [1900]: 333–344). What the city can know about how to govern in a future that remains unknown came down to a universal ability to manage any kind of risk rather than to specific future occurrences (cf. Luhmann, 1998 [1992]: 90). In this way, uncertainty is ‘absorbed’ into how governance is known to function in the now (Luhmann, 1998 [1992]: 89–91). ‘Money’ in this sense, however, does not seem to contain time as an active element. The potentiality it implies is devoid of future expectations of economic uncertainties. Instead, the future is seen in terms of ‘as long as’ and of ‘staying still and riding out the turmoil’ (Adkins et al., 2020: 74) in a perpetual present tense where the base conditions of the governability of the city and its economy are not subject to the effects of climate change.

So far, we have seen the relation between present futures and future presents enacted in ways where present futures are largely dismissed as artificial and having little bearing on the reality of governance. The scale, however, does not tip in favour of embracing the uncertainty of future presents either, so as to explore the directions in which the contingent possible paths of different policies and their implied outcomes could lead. In a post-exercise interview, one city official eloquently drove home the temporal paradox of modernity not having a stable future to anticipate while retaining the freedom to create, at least virtually, a multiplicity of such futures. However, the official implied that politicians remain suspended in between: ‘They don’t realise that the present is already lost; the future that once was is not there anymore’. Instead, the Helsinki policymakers, both lamentingly and matter-of-factly, talked about managing a perpetual present as if that would do away with the uncertainty inherent in the future.

How the policymakers effaced imageries of the future complicates the way scholars like Gordon (2018) and Swain (2019) conceive of the relation between temporal aspects and of how means and ends are aligned in prefigurative politics. Abiding to present futures means, for both authors, getting stuck in a cycle of recursion in which actions and events in the present carry with them a promise of the fulfilment of the desired future. Conversely, working with an open and uncertain image of endlessly multiple future presents would require ‘generative’ (Gordon, 2018) or ‘ends-effacing’ (Swain, 2019) prefiguration. That would make way for ‘trying out and rehearsing’ different means of doing politics as a process that is constantly revising itself on its way to open futures (Swain, 2019: 58–59). The exercise, however, evoked policymaking that sought to tighten its grip on its problem-solving abilities as new crises befell the participants. This observation compels further analysis of what can be created with the means available for policymaking and how those means are seen to contain within themselves certain ends that in turn both enable and constrain subsequent available means (cf. Latour, 2002; Schatzki, 2002: 210–216). I concentrate next on how the policymakers connected and delineated means and ends to further draw out a particular idea of professionalism and expertise, of governing as if one actually knew how to attain long-term ends.

Reassured Professionalism: Means Indifferent to Ends

As the discussion of the three policy choices in 2022 was drawing to a close, one politician broke form and considered long-term, almost precautionary means to an end. They suggested that the investment programme option be directed towards renewing the city-owned building stock to protect the quality of life of the elderly and infirm residents. Another politician immediately pulled epistemic rank, saying that they knew how things worked in the city’s governance and shot down the idea, echoing the Cummings–Johnson tiff cited at the beginning of this article: ‘I can tell you that that will take 10 years and a couple of billion euros, so that will get us nowhere in the hurry we’re in’. Similar ideas of matching policy means with far-reaching ends were brought up in greater depth across the political spectrum when responding to the final scenario of 2040 and to the question posed to the participants regarding what could have been done differently in the previous 20 years to reach a better outcome. Two politicians directed their hindsight to whether they should have collectively thought of grander, more value-driven goals and alternative problem framings for the city. First, one reflected on what had gone largely unnoticed between 2022 and 2040:

The premise we’ve had is that all material consumption must decrease while we stick to the logic of constant growth. These two realms were in conflict most obviously in 2030. (. . .) Could that have been a juncture where we could have stepped outside of that kind of thinking [based on growth] and asked how we must transform so that we can have a growing economy without increasing consumption? It’s an extremely difficult issue, of course. The need for a big systemic shift maybe wasn’t apparent in 2022, but in theory we could have already thought of it back then. (politician; exercise)

This proposition was commended by another politician, with the proviso that such issues are not ‘entirely in the city’s hands’ and that perhaps ‘we hadn’t managed to inject cutting down consumption into services and other things’. Soon after, however, the issue was reframed as a matter of maintaining viable domestic production for exports and of being ‘internationally competitive in innovation’, as safeguards against any kinds of future crises (cf. Karhunmaa, 2019). Overall, the comment quoted above was deemed ‘valuable’ and ‘profound’ by other politicians but nonetheless dismissed because the issues it raised, in the words of one politician, ‘about building a just society for all’ beyond economic growth and consumption ‘were already one of our strengths and didn’t pose a challenge for us’. This conclusion was drawn from the fact that the scenarios did not specify the justness of society to be an issue and not, peculiarly, from how the policymakers perceived the actual state of things in the city. I return to this double vision in the paper’s final sections.

In another prefigurative attempt slightly different in tone, one politician tried to persuade the others to rethink the city’s goals and how to achieve them:

The Nordics are now more influential in 2040 than in the present day, and when you think of Helsinki’s role as maybe even the Nordic capital (. . .) is there an alternative to us now quite modestly assessing whether we’re quite on the level now in 2040? I mean, could we be significant and exemplary as a society? If anyone has any visions about this, I’m all ears. (politician; exercise)

No one picked up on this remark, which further raises the question of how the participants conceived of the means they had available. By this, I do not mean the alternative policy instruments presented to them, but the entire repertoire of ways to govern that the participants could have brought to the table in the exercise, in which the usual constraints of doing politics in the city had been loosened. Seeing that the policymakers started entertaining explicit prefigurative notions of means only with the hindsight of 2040 suggests that there is an implicit yet powerful conception of precisely what kind of professional and expert governance is at play.

The scenarios to which the policymakers’ choices of policy led us in 2030 and 2040 included issues with increasing migration from the Global South, food security, continuous stress on energy production and provision and large-scale service disruptions. When reflecting in 2040, the politicians remarked that they really did not have the required ‘knowledge about complex, system-wide issues’ at their disposal. They also admitted that they ‘normally don’t really think about these kinds of things when making decisions’. One politician concluded that ‘we would’ve needed more knowledge on how to act otherwise and make considerable investments in energy and infrastructure and still maintain a dynamic economy’. However, questions like that were not asked of the experts present.

From the outset, the politician who chaired the discussion framed the proceedings as posing ‘short and precise questions to the experts’ to help in ‘vetting’ the best policy option, as opposed to ‘merely opining’. The same sentiment persisted throughout and effectively made the exercise about managing and comparing the technical and economic feasibility of each policy option, as opposed to, for example, their long-term social and ethical implications; by a process of exclusion, the participants went about sorting out the most and least viable ones.

The politicians aspired to a cross-sectoral overview and limited their inquiries of the experts to fact-checking or confirming whether the details in their options could be carried out quickly – for example, switching the energy mix in district heating to manage the heat load cap – and directed their questions almost exclusively to the expert on energy. One official said this was only natural because in ‘such a broad-stroke world [of the exercise], there’s little to no room for substantial information’. Counter to what the design of the exercise intended – to create a space for ‘social learning’ in ‘broad participation’ from diverse governance sectors (Järvensivu et al., 2021: 2, 7) – the experts did not speak up unless specifically addressed. They thought that this was normal protocol resembling ‘actual deliberation’, whereas politicians felt that in real life, experts do have their proper say and are welcome to step in and contribute when present in meetings comparable to the exercise.

In the post-exercise interviews, officials explained their silence during the exercise by referring to the politicians’ tendency to block multiple contradictory views of sectoral experts from deliberative procedures that are open to both politicians and experts in real life. Several politicians also stressed that they are often wary of letting expert knowledge guide their own views too strongly. One official, however, thought that by excluding expert opinion from the ‘broad-stroke realm’ of the exercise, the politicians ignored the fact that ‘no matter what the issue, it has a long journey in the administrative machinery before it ends up in political deliberation’. In effect, the politicians seemed to black-box the knowledge production and expertise that goes into the material on which their views and decisions are largely based. In making such claims to agenda-setting power, the politicians subscribed to a particular type of political professionalism, the articulation of which took shape when they considered the relation between the actual world of the city’s governance and the as-if world of the exercise. The sense of professionalism that emerged stands apart from the colloquial, pejorative connotation of a self-serving and isolated class of politicians (e.g. Hay, 2007) who undermine democratic politics by living large off it instead of devoting themselves to it as a distinct vocation of intellect and integrity (Weber, 2004 [1919]). It saw the politicians venturing into a realm of sectoral or cross-sectoral expertise on the scope, technicalities and effectiveness of climate policy measures and thus beyond mere representative claims over various constituents and public concerns (cf. Willis, 2018).

Adhering to a substantive professionalism allowed the politicians to make distinctions between what they saw as the reality of actual governance – its abilities and limits – and the world of the exercise. The overlap between the two found expression in the politicians’ mustering the expertise gained from their experience in making policy and decisions. They had grown to know how to get things done in Helsinki. The accumulated experience guided and constrained what they expected from the future as a particular kind of historically formed situation in which the policymakers saw themselves as having agency (cf. Koselleck, 2004 [1979]: 259–263). Just what these things and expectations were can be found in the plays on ‘as ifs’ that draw the limits of the real and the fictional and let them inform each other.

Seeing Double: Reality and the Not-Quite

Distinguishing real governance and its problems from what the exercise offered led several politicians to conclude that they usually work with climate change on a daily basis, often in more conflictual circumstances and when facing tougher choices than those in the exercise:

We’re used to having dozens of decisions in front of us every week, so in the end the material we had to work with [in the exercise] was pretty lightweight. (. . .) International guests often wonder how we (. . .) achieve political consensus on issues despite individual disagreements. It’s the large-scale things for which we have decision-making abilities, and that’s where political acumen is measured. (politician; post-exercise interview)

Another politician clearly fluctuated between real and as-if kinds of governance when relating their own profession to the problems facing the city and the world:

Running a city or the national parliament and the nature of politics in general is about retaining a focus on something. (. . .) That’s where these exercises that simulate specific situations resemble the everyday. Then again, a crucial question for decision-making and enabling societal change is persistence in keeping sight of issues that are in a way more acute than the acute crises. (. . .) The climate crisis is the obvious example. It’s as if we should think about nothing else day in and day out than whether our actions are taking us in the right direction. But the fact of the matter is that you think about a traffic accident on one day and about kids taking drugs on another. (politician; post-exercise interview)

The fine-tuned everyday procedures ended up precluding the broad, systemic issues that went beyond the city’s purview, even though their presence in both the exercise and reality was acknowledged. The fact that the policy options did not explicitly articulate the complexities of climate crises as problems to be considered meant that the exercise became a game of exclusion that was too easy for the confident and seasoned decision-makers involved. The stakes of the game, for the politicians at least, were thus not the consequences of the policy choices but how to make those choices effective. The scope of the city’s political agenda became externalised to issues and developments that are there for governance to somehow work out. The fact that the exercise did not have real repercussions apparently meant that the actions taken in it also had no immanent consequences. Without heavy external pressure, governing can hermetically seal itself off and rely on known and established ways of doing things; that is, to transpose long-term future problems onto a perpetual present.

As a result, both politicians and the procedures of governance appeared to be absolved from agenda-setting agency. As one politician put it in a post-exercise interview, ‘if you can just choose pretty much whatever, you don’t have to think about how it will affect everything else, and that would’ve been important’. Whatever this ‘everything else’ present in the reality of politics might have been remained unclear and outside of topics that merited deliberation; it was implied in the scenarios but absent in the participants’ discussions. The politician elaborated:

It didn’t bear much resemblance to our decision-making in any way, because normally when we sit in that room, people take each other on, and in the exercise our choices for solutions were so self-evident that there was no need to debate. (. . .) We would have needed more room to sort out amongst ourselves what it [the cost of the investment programme option] would be taken out of. (politician; post-exercise interview)

Across the exercise, the politicians did not allow themselves this freedom and made sure that they remained within the confines of the fiction of the exercise as presented, without bringing in and acting out the real difficulties of governance on their own accord. Instead, their expectation of decision-making exercises was zero-sum choices that would have verged on impossible or catastrophic surprises that would have undermined any and all previous actions. This was something that politicians and officials alike would have wanted the exercise to force on them, as opposed to them bringing the real hardships to the table to be worked out. They expected to be led by the fiction of the exercise and waited to see what might fall into their hands and whether they could somehow manage that, instead of incorporating the uncertainty of anticipating futures into their deliberation and decisions. Detailing this disposition towards imagination and its relation to reality is the culmination of the import of the prefigurative as if as an analytical device.

The exercise and its as-if world led the policymakers to employ and hone the skills and procedures that had served them well in actual everyday governance. The exercise created in effect a ‘reality doubling’ (Esposito, 2007, 2015) where notions of what is real and actual could coincide with the fictional or imaginary. Even if that latter realm does not ‘fully exist’, it has its ‘own structure and criteria’ (Esposito, 2015: 95) that mark it as related to but separate from what is to be considered real (Esposito, 2007: 7–8). For example, while acknowledging that climate change is an immensely complex phenomenon that carries both knowable and unknown threats, the politicians deemed their abilities to prepare and take effective action as either covered by existing initiatives or simply outside their conception of the remit of professional policymaking. While remaining confident that the stated goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2035 ⁷ in the city or the globally set targets in the 2015 Paris Agreement would keep climate change in check, the day-to-day focus of policymaking on sorting out ever-new problems here and there in the present left the worry of ‘[us, as policymakers] just speeding into a wall’. Even though these doubled realities were quite clearly kept distinct by the participants, they still hung together as ‘seen twice’ (Riles, 2000: 61–65). This is where the critical headway of the as if ultimately lies: in discerning the realities of governance and politics ‘in a zone of uncertainty between established or emerging truths’ (Cooper, 2020: 897; see also Law and Singleton, 2014).

The as-if realm of scenario exercising led the politicians to tap into ‘confidence on the end’ (Kermode, 2000 [1967]: 18): that the fiction of the not-real world of the exercise and their actions in it would reach a definite conclusion where uncertainties could be bottled up and dealt with. In his classic essays on apocalyptic fiction and myths, literary theorist Frank Kermode (2000 [1967]: 18) writes of our ‘interest in having our expectations falsified’ when engaging with fiction. This disposition comes with the double bind of operating within ‘the deterministic pattern any plot suggests’, as if agents within that plot were free to alter the story’s procession at any point (Kermode, 2000 [1967]: 30). For Kermode, the ever-present expectation of what is real now coming to an end and changing irretrievably into something as yet unknown is precisely why we need fiction to make sense of the real. By analogy, Kermode’s sense of the as if recalls modernity’s paradoxical relation to the future but now as a folding of the real and the fictional and how they are imagined together and seen twice.

For just how the policymakers distinguished between the twin realities, anthropologist Limor Samimian-Darash’s (2022) distinction between simulative and scenaristic imaginations provides a useful heuristic. A simulative imagination is employed when scenario exercises in governance intend to rehearse existing plans and protocols. Such exercises paint a clear scene of a certain present future for which there are plans that must be followed as if such circumstances were real – while the actors involved are fully aware that they are not. Exercises that employ a scenaristic imagination, by contrast, are oriented towards the uncertainty of future presents. Instead of absorbing and controlling the unknown by rolling out appropriate procedures, a scenaristic imagination uses ‘uncertainty as a resource’ to envision and generate the multiple paths and junctions that future developments may create without trying to reduce them to existing plans or efface them altogether (Samimian-Darash, 2022). Tapping into a scenaristic imagination proved difficult in the Helsinki exercise. The policymakers did not create their own fictions and inject their sense of the conflictual reality of governance into the exercise. Instead, the exercise compelled them to take it strictly as it was, and the problems presented to them as cues to put their well-honed procedures as policymakers to the test. By contrast, they did not stretch their scenaristic imagination to speculate on how their policy choices would turn out or how to include such conjectures in their considerations, that is, they did not make use of the implied uncertainties as resources for governing (cf. Samimian-Darash, 2016, 2022).

The consistency in the way in which the politicians folded the present with the future in the previous sections – as a perpetual present – and how they conceived of the means of governance displays a more simulative imagination instead. The means were there to effectively deal with problems as they befell the city. Several politicians contended that what causes real pressure in the city’s politics is where to spend money and who and what gets the chop. Having ‘money in the bank’ – that is, being able spend money no matter the circumstances – thus provided not only the ultimate temporal reassurance of the future being under control but also the immutable baseline reality of means (cf. Simmel, 2011 [1900]); thus, the means of policymaking became ends in themselves (cf. Swain, 2019). Procedural professionalism provided the bedrock for orienting to the future, manifested as the presentist maintenance of a surplus economy.

Conclusions

I began with the double bind that climate change poses for governance: the imperative to act urgently while knowing that the relevant circumstances are unprecedented and the consequences decadal and uncertain. I set out to understand how the exercise with the City of Helsinki invited policymakers to consider long-term alternative policy approaches to scenarios of climate futures. I likened the temporal and imaginative precepts of the exercise to the notion of prefigurative politics, of folding desired futures onto the present as if they were already at hand and compelled politics in the now. I further broke down prefiguration into three dimensions of the as if, where futures and presents, means and ends, and realities and fictions are related to each other, as efforts to work around the constitutive temporal paradox of politics in modernity. Exactly how that was done was the open empirical question posed to the analysis of the exercise and the policymaking carried out within its parameters.

In working through the exercise, the Helsinki policymakers sought to efface the long-term implications of the scenarios and policy choices and replaced them with dexterity and vigilance that could fix problems and introduce corrective policies on the fly, in a perpetual present (cf. Barbehön, 2022; Reith, 2004; regarding climate policy in Finland specifically, see Karhunmaa, 2019). This kind of short-termism should not, however, be understood simply as a counter-reaction from the policymakers to the uncertainty and obscurity of the temporal scope of climate crises (Rickards et al., 2014; Willis, 2018). In circumscribing their temporal orientations and the abilities of governance, the policymakers ended up with doubled realities that can co-exist and be seen twice, even as they are starkly dissonant (cf. Riles, 2000, 2011; see also Harvey and Knox, 2015: 88–89; Knox, 2020: 117, 138–139). This is also a lopsided version of the preparatory logic of governance conceptualised by Samimian-Darash (2011: 940–942): the future and the present inhabit a ‘non-linear temporal realm’ where they ‘can be seen simultaneously’. The balance here tips in favour of the present, however, to the extent that the future carries little to no weight. For example, to insist that ambitious carbon neutrality goals will be met with current measures proved to be a necessary fiction, but it came with the acknowledgement that the centripetal force pulling politics towards acute issues makes it lose sight of long-term concerns. The counterfactuality of these two temporal realities was held in abeyance so as to go on with policymaking as is (cf. Vaihinger, 2021 [1911]) and not to open up space for alternative, contingent politics.

Even though the politicians readily put themselves in a distinct mode of knowing how to govern, they remained aware of both alternative positionings and the possibility of disastrous futures. Yet they did not break their self-cast mould. The fiction of the exercise and the scenarios led them to act as if fiscal prudence and their flavour of professional decision-making ‘guarantee[d] something that by definition cannot be guaranteed’ (Riles, 2011: 177). The exercise appeared to reassure them that open and uncertain futures could be outlasted by being able to endure any challenge in a present with no end but itself. What ultimately restrained the conditions of possibility of policymaking was the political economy of ensuring that having ‘money in the bank’ will keep the city resilient to all kinds of future crises. Even if the harrowing prospects of climate change were acknowledged, they were not allowed to impose on the scope and sense of actual, achievable politics.

While the resulting interpretation pertains mostly to the single case study presented here, the analytical scheme and attention that the as if provided hint at conclusions that go well beyond that original context. First, inasmuch the goal of scenario exercising in governance is to have policymakers prefigure and bring the imaginable scope of futures to bear on the present means of doing politics, the reluctance or possible inclination to do so becomes tractable through the at-odds parities of the as-if kind. Second, to escape the centripetal force of presentism, the design of scenario exercises like the one studied here could specifically target as-if logics, both as embedded in exercise formats and as enacted by policymakers. The challenge would then be to engage conjectured outcomes as present futures with the inherent contingencies of future presents so that the former cannot evade the multiple realities and politics insisted on by the latter.

That would undoubtedly be an uneasy feat (cf. Gordon, 2018: 534). The position it implies falls between a future effaced by climate heating only intensifying and the ‘now that is already lost’. If that indeed leaves us in the dark at best (Woolf, 1977: 22), finding our bearings in it need not lead to feigning readiness to take on whatever might be ahead with tried-and-true means. Reassured obliviousness is not the only recourse for climate policy. Letting go of a fixed, prefigured image of the future, whether dystopian or utopian, can also mean constantly trying out and experimenting with alternative trajectories and holding to them as thoroughly political (Gordon, 2018; Swain, 2019). Paying analytical attention to the prefigurative aspects of policymaking, to the as-if parities at play, offers a critical resource for making sense of how policymakers sift through the dark when there is no escaping from making and remaking political choices as if one knew how.