Experimental and speculative political ecologies for an age of crisis,hope,and action

Abstract

This review highlights the potential of a political ecology that approaches socionatures more experimentally and speculatively. We first consider theoretical frameworks which can help elucidate a conceptual and methodological pathway for more experimental and speculative political ecology scholarship. Next, we bring together and systematize multiple threads of political ecology scholarship that already lean into experimentation and speculation. We highlight what we see as their potential, particularly focusing on ongoing struggles for climate and environmental justice. First, we conclude that experimental and speculative approaches are critical for laying the foundations of a future-oriented and reparative mode of critique that illuminates emerging possibilities for alternative worlds. Second, these approaches can generate new registers of consciousness that make room for hope, possibility, creativity, and action. Third, experimental and speculative approaches reconfigure political ecological praxis by fostering a more proactive role for the researcher in addressing socioecological challenges as they emerge. It is our hope that this intervention inspires others to do work that is intentionally more experimental or speculative, creating conditions that could potentially lead to a more equitable society in the present with ramifications for a more just future.

Introduction

Political ecology is a well-established research field within environmental geography and related disciplines that aims to disentangle historical relations of power and the economic structures that drive environmental change at multiple scales and in different geographical contexts. Critique is integral to political ecology scholarship, which has long problematized apolitical interpretations of environmental governance that do not attend to sociopolitical processes generating systems of oppression and structural inequalities, environmental degradation, and the uneven outcomes thereof. Recent studies, for instance, have been instrumental in historicizing the local and global economic and sociopolitical relations of racial capitalism, class dispossession, and colonial violence, foregrounding not only the climate crisis but also the current impasse in addressing it (see, for instance, Mikulewicz et al. 2023; Perry and Sealey-Huggins 2023; Sovacool 2021; Sultana 2022). This vibrant scholarship has generated new critically informed theories shedding light on the political forces at work in the contemporary climate and environmental crises and their historical roots, thereby demonstrating the diagnostic power of the field and its “ability to adapt and evolve” (Robbins 2015, 89).

At the same time, political ecology, and the critical project of academia more broadly, have long been under scrutiny. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's (1997) Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading and Bruno Latour's (2004) Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? have problematized the hegemonic epistemological role of critique and raised fundamental questions about its explanatory and reparative potential. Sedgwick questioned the value—both in terms of effect and affect—of constantly confirming what is long known about the systems of oppression. She thus concludes that “in a world where no one need be delusional to find evidence of systemic oppression, to theorise out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naive, pious, or complaisant” (Sedgwick 1997, 5). Similarly, Latour (2004, 225) asked: “…are we not like those mechanical toys that endlessly make the same gesture when everything else has changed around them?”

As such, Sedgwick and Latour interrogate what knowledge generated through critique does. The destructive impulses of a particular form of critique, they warn, might foreclose a wider range of critical possibilities and skills, thereby undermining the ability to respond to emerging challenges, environmental or otherwise. Critique, they contend, should proliferate political possibilities—assemble and build, rather than debunk and subtract—and generate hope and action for better futures. These considerations have significant implications for the field of political ecology. Particularly, they raise questions about whether critique alone can meet the theoretical and emancipatory goals of the field. In response to these questions, this paper considers the potential of a political ecology that approaches socionatures more experimentally and speculatively, especially in relation to ongoing struggles for and over climate and environmental justice.

We proceed as follows. In the second section, we review different strands of scholarship that have problematized critique and make a case for approaching nature–society relations more experimentally and creatively. In the third section, we articulate frameworks for developing affirmative and future-oriented modes of critique, which we argue help elucidate a theoretical and methodological pathway for more experimental and speculative political ecology scholarship. Then, in the fourth section, we examine recent work within political ecology that engages with experimentation and speculation. We bring together and systematize multiple threads of political ecology scholarship that already lean into experimentation and speculation, which we argue have been largely developed in isolation from one another, thereby preventing a dialogue between these efforts and the establishment of a wider project (Harris and Santos 2023). We conclude by bringing our efforts to decenter and expand critique within political ecology together with our review of extant experimental and speculative scholarship to outline what we see as the promise of “doing” this kind of work.

The case for experimental and speculative approaches: the limits of critical inquiry

Central to the experimental and speculative turn in political ecology is the recognition that the conventional knowledge practices of the field alone may not be adequate or sufficient to meet its theoretical and normative goals. Broadly, the experimental turn is argued on four grounds. A first concern directly relates to the questions raised by Sedgwick (1997) and Latour (2004) about the performativity of critique: what critique does and, thus, what possibilities proliferate or are foreclosed. In principle, by denaturalizing different human–environment processes, critique implicitly affirms that other socioecological configurations are possible. However, the very nature of critical thought is to question and dissect knowledge claims and beliefs, which may prevent the emergence of other generative movements, such as hope, imagination, and care, needed to reconstitute the world and futures before us (Bennett 2016; Jackson 2019; Woodyer and Geoghegan 2013). In this way, critique might leave many feeling helpless, defeated, or overwhelmed. For Sue Ruddick (2008, 2600) this outcome is unavoidable in a dialectic of the negative because it is grounded on a process that prevents transformation by “engaging only in a repetition of the same masquerading as transformation.” Similarly, for Rosi Braidotti (2012, 320), politics moved by melancholia and negativity alone tends to translate into “a self-fulfilling prophecy” that ultimately forecloses the possibility of alternatives.

A second concern is that critique might inadvertently become complicit to capitalism. This is especially salient given that critiques of capitalism are central to political ecology scholarship (Bridge 2015). Indeed, the performative effect of critiques that overemphasize the power of capital is to reinforce rather than challenge capitalism (Fisher 2009; Gibson-Graham 1996, 2006). Feminist scholars Gibson-Graham (1996, 2006) were wary of “capitalocentric” representations of social and economic worlds that overlook a range of non-capitalist relations, thereby contributing to a portrayal of capital as stable and ubiquitous, rather than as contested and contingent. As aptly illustrated by Jane Bennet (2016, 4), the story of the power of capitalism—the way it is told and retold—has real effects, both discursively and materially, and this story shapes how resistance to capitalism is framed and enacted. Thus, critique might have the unintended consequence of reinforcing the object of its critique and contributing to what Mark Fisher (2009) termed “capitalist realism”—a misleading perception that capitalism is the only possible paradigm to the point that it becomes easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

A third argument relates to the limited extent to which conventional critique can adequately understand the rapidly changing socionatures of climate and global environmental change. From this perspective, the experimental and speculative turn is based on the grounds of the “experimentalization of life” brought about by the realization of the apparent Anthropocene (Braun 2015a, 112). For Bruce Braun (2015a, 107), the Anthropocene is characterized by conditions of ecological novelty and uncertainty, which “pulled the rug out from under notions of timeless and ordered nature” and arguably cannot be apprehended through conventional political ecological approaches. Similarly, for Braidotti (2010, 141), knowledge production in the context of profound socioecological change is not a choice, but rather a matter of being, as we are “historically propelled into a situation in which we need to think differently.” Building on this work, Maria Rusca (2024) argues that a retrospective critique of past and present socionatures alone is not sufficient to capture the unprecedented nature of climate extremes unfolding in many regions of the world. As climate extremes are likely to become more frequent and intense, and therefore less predictable (Balch et al. 2020; Blöschl et al. 2019), they demand experimental approaches to theorize and proactively respond to socioecological configurations as they emerge (Harris and Santos 2023; Rusca 2024).

Lastly, the limits of critique as a hegemonic approach to knowledge production have also been argued in relation to the decolonial turn. For Mark Jackson (2019), critique plays a central role in unraveling and debunking past and present colonial relations, but it can also reproduce coloniality by privileging Western modes of thinking. Critical scholars, he argues, tend to conflate the imperative of being critical with social justice. Yet, the “cognitive virtue” promoted by hegemonic critical thinking, which guides both teaching in higher education and research for many political ecologists, might exclude or marginalize different modes of being critical (Blaser 2009; Jackson 2018, 2019, 13; McKittrick 2020; Radcliffe 2015).

To be clear, we recognize that political ecology is a powerful epistemic project, and we are interested in extending critique, especially in light of profound socioecological change. We hope that it can, as a mode of knowledge production, be more of a means to broader knowledge generation and, ideally, action.

Decentering and extending critique: broadening political ecology's horizons

A wide range of thinkers have, in different ways, proliferated possibilities for alternative forms of critique and knowledge production. These thinkers do not overlook the sociopolitical roots of inequalities or deny structures of oppression (Sedgwick 1997). Instead, they aim to reconceptualize critique to make room for other modes of theorizing and for alternative worlds to flourish. Here, we will briefly detail six interrelated iterations of what we see as forms of affirmative critique. We highlight how they can contribute, and in some cases have already contributed, to broadening the scope of political ecology.

Performative epistemologies for worldmaking

Feminist scholars (Gibson-Graham 2006, 2008, 2014) and other diverse/community economies scholars (Roelvink 2020; St. Martin et al. 2015) have been instrumental in composing a politics of possibility. In A postcapitalist politics, Gibson-Graham (2006) proposes actively working toward a language of possibility that focuses on the emergent, rather than assuming that the power of capital predetermines economic relations. While recognizing the challenges for academics trained in critique, they call for cultivating new habits of thinking, grounded on “ontological reframing” to make room for a politics of possibility, thick description, and “rereading” to illuminate already existing alternative practices that extend the possible, and “creativity” to perform new possibilities (Gibson-Graham 2006, xxviv–xxx; Gibson-Graham 2014).

Research is performative or worldmaking in the sense that the role of the academic and the power of research can be to re-theorize the economy by illuminating a vast landscape of non-market economic relations that are possible and already existing, as well as to enact and perform wellbeing and sustainable economies (Gibson-Graham 2008). A performative epistemology challenges the “gravitational pull toward strong theories of economic behavior and unidirectional change” and serves to cultivate a new economic subject (Gibson-Graham 2014, 147). Gibson-Graham's work widely influences geographical scholarship and has generated a proliferation of experiments in diverse economies. Building on their work, scholars have explored multiple ways of performing and assembling economies that center ethical concerns and a politics of possibility (see, for instance, Cameron 2015; Turker and Murphy 2021; Werner 2015), including on a more-than-human economic ethics in response to climate change that foregrounds environmental dynamics in thinking about economic futures (Roelvink 2015; St. Martin et al. 2015). Emerging scholarship on how post-capitalist possibilities flourish within capitalism further highlights the role of ontological and epistemological openness in political-ecological work (Harris and Mullenite 2024).

This mode of theorizing informs critique in political ecology in three ways. First, it might inspire (some) political ecologists to consider the explanatory potential of a political ecology focused on the role of diverse economies already recorded within the field without subsuming them to capitalist logics (Burke and Shear 2014; Moore and Robbins 2015). Second, Gibson-Graham's performative epistemology provides one—of many possible—approaches to foster a more proactive approach to political ecology. Third, a deeper consideration of the ontological politics underlying research, paying critical attention to not only why we do research but how our research can—and does—have rippling impacts in the communities where we work (Blaser 2009; de la Cadena 2015), has the potential to reframe critique's role in nature–society scholarship.

Feminist scholars of science: epistemic locations and alternative vantage points

Feminist perspectives on science have repeatedly debunked claims regarding scientific objectivity and have rejected claims to a universal nature. These arguments foreground epistemic location; from Donna Haraway's “situated knowledge” (1988) to Sandra Harding's “standpoint theory” (1991), these perspectives seek to position all knowledge as being grounded in, and departing from, particular vantage points. Importantly, these perspectives gesture beyond mere critique. For example, while Haraway's reframing of objectivity involves “contestation [and] deconstruction,” it also involves “passionate construction, webbed connections, and hope for transformation of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing” (1988, 585). For Harding (1991), efforts to design research and inquiry from explicitly marginalized perspectives is a step toward “reinventing ourselves,” allowing alternative ways of seeing and understanding the world to proliferate.

Isabelle Stengers similarly offers numerous productive insights for re-thinking the role of critique, and for moving beyond it, to cultivate generative epistemic sensibilities. While she acknowledges the significance and urgency of current socioecological crises, she nevertheless argues that dwelling on the “probability of the ‘end of the world’ does not provoke thought, but rather mesmerizes it and makes it collapse into apocalyptic pathos” (Stengers 2021, 73). Instead, this is an occasion to pave the way for something deeper, both in our outlooks and ultimately ourselves. A critical initial step toward generating new registers of consciousness is acknowledging the plurality of possible worlds and more diverse modes of knowledge production (Barad 2007; Bell 2017; Stengers 2005, 995). Such expanded perceptual sensibilities are necessary because grappling with future precarity means that “there is no standing place outside of the alternative” (Stengers 2021, 89).

Cultivating these sensibilities requires honing speculative and experimental practices. For Stengers, speculation constitutes “a mode of thought which endeavours to activate what might be possible against the safety of probability” (Savransky and Stengers 2018, 133–134). Activating these multifarious possibilities involves a form of experimentation that would require allowing ourselves “to be touched by what the present presents in the form of a test, and allowing what touches us the power to modify the relation we entertain to our own reasons” (Stengers 2021, 73). This change is about how we see and make sense of ourselves, and our presents and our futures, to (re)consider the epistemic postures, logics and modes of reasoning that we have typically deployed (e.g., critique) and instead opt for expanded imaginative receptivities. Extending these insights into more experimental and speculative political ecology research and praxis might then lead to other narratives about the socioecological futures that we collectively want (Stengers 2021), ones in which our role in shaping the future and its possibilities is made anew.

Speculating post-capitalist possibility through fiction

Speculative fiction has long been a source of imagining, visioning, and enacting transdisciplinary possibilities (Ghosh 2018). It has been well documented, for example, that Octavia Butler, famed Black feminist author of The Parable of the Sower (1993), conducted years of research on climate change, which informs the book's eerily prophetic nature regarding the current climate crisis (Collins 2022; Streeby 2018). Mark Carey et al. (2016: 1) articulate “a feminist glaciology framework” for studying global environmental change by first critiquing the way the field of glaciology has developed, largely without input from—or because of the forced, often violent exclusion of, other forms of knowledge—particularly those of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), queer people, and women. Then, in an act of affirmative critique, the authors pivot toward the speculative writing of authors like Ursula K. Le Guin (1969) and Uzma Aslam Khan (2010) as alternative representations of glaciological and climate science. Donna J. Haraway (2016, 133) writes of ways to “stay with the trouble,” using speculative “fabulation” as a means of being “attached to ongoing pasts” and bringing “each other forward in thick presents and still possible futures.” She leans into speculative fiction to address what she terms The Great Dithering, a term borrowed from writer Kim Stanley Robinson's (2012) book 2312 to describe a “time of ineffective and widespread anxiety about environmental destruction … violent climate change, social disintegration … and vast migrations of human and nonhuman refugees without refuges” (2016, 144–145). Blending insights from speculative fiction with feminist philosophies of science, Haraway's work shows how future-facing critique can better inform the present by anticipating potentially destructive scenarios and aiming to avoid them.

If, as Brent Ryan Bellamy (2018, 417) points out, “the climate crisis forces a cognitive transformation,” then “the political challenge of overcoming the relentless drive of an ecologically and socially devastating fossil-fueled capitalism is just as much an imaginative project as it is a practical one.” He (2018, 418) writes, “Science fiction that engages the climate crisis offers more than catastrophism,” and that speculative fiction is a reminder that “crisis is only ever one possible outcome of the present.” Critically, there are other pathways forward, other than crisis, and these may be illuminated through speculation. In the same way that Sedgwick and Latour raise questions about the performativity of critique by noting how it can foreclose political possibilities, it is imperative to follow Haraway's (2019, 565) call that it “matters what stories tell stories.” Stories of a foregone future may very well lead to a grim future (Jackson 2015). Moreover, stories of the apocalypse foreclose “the future as a site of creatively reimagining the social relations that led to the Anthropocene” (Erickson 2020, 111), which, according to Kyle Whyte (2018), only serves to facilitate a settler colonial vision of possibility, where all the inequalities of the past and present are projected into the future. Engaging with other forms of storytelling, of speculative fictions, is both an act of affirmative critique, offering new visions of the future, and an act of survival (Wynter and McKittrick 2015).

Black geographies of the future

When confronted with possible breast cancer, Black lesbian poet Audre Lorde (2012, 42) writes, “For to survive in the mouth of this dragon … we have to learn the first and most vital lesson—that we were never meant to survive.” She initially delivered this paper in 1977 at the Modern Language Association's Lesbians and Literature Panel, speaking to how Black women's voices have historically been distorted, silenced through the “depersonalization of racism.” And yet, she concludes, “The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilises us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken” (2012: 44). At the heart of Black geographies is the breaking of silences, the opening of spatial matters to conceive of how, and in what ways, Black life has not only always existed, despite the often-violent elisions created by the legibility politics of the academy (Sharpe 2016), but also expands the political possibilities of spatial production (Hawthorne 2019). Katherine McKittrick (2013, 14) notes, “black perspectives … reveal spaces of absolute otherness, so often occupied by the racially and economically condemned, [that] are geographies of survival, resistance, creativity, and the struggle against death.”

Further, beyond highlighting geographies of survival and resistance (Moulton 2024), and relevant to our engagement with experimental and speculative thought, Black geographies provide an important corrective to the academy's fixation on self-defeating critique and point to a viable future where Black life thrives (Brand 2023). In their book The Undercommons: Fugitivity and Black Study, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013: 38) ask, “To distance oneself professionally through critique, is this not the most active consent to privatize the social individual?” They conceptualize the undercommons as a means of countering the destructive nature of capitalist development and write that it “might by contrast be understood as wary of critique, weary of it, and at the same time dedicated to the collectivity of its future, the collectivity that may come to be its future” (2013, 38). Writing specifically about the possibilities of an abolitionist future, Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2022, 407) states, “The magnitude of imprisonment suggests the magnitude of possibility.” We draw inspiration from Gilmore's work to conceive of ways in which political ecology specifically, and academia broadly, can, in Lorde's (2012, 40) words, “transform silence into language and action.”

Queer theory—political ecology's “then” and “there”

Queer theory has long been a critical framework for deconstructing the hetero-patriarchal nature of a globalized society produced through capitalist development (Halberstam 2020; Sedgwick 2008). However, embedded within queer theory's criticism is an understanding that, for many, the present world is not only hostile toward, but built in opposition to queer existence (Luciano and Chen 2015). As a result, the knowledge produced from queer critique is arguably inherently affirmative in that it celebrates modes of living and subjectivities that have always existed and persisted, despite, and in spite of, social normativities. This reading of queer theory is especially salient in writings on queer futurity. José Esteban Muñoz (2019: 1) writes, “The future is queerness's domain. Queerness is a structuring and educating mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now's totalizing rendering of reality to think and feel a then and there.” Embedded within Muñoz's conceptualization of a then and there is an implicit sense of hope, one that is qualified by not being attached to a future that is prescriptively better, but to a future that is, at least, different from the present, one where queer life has the possibility to flourish.

With regards to a more experimental and speculative political ecology, Muñoz's (2015, 209) writing on what he terms “the sense of brownness” offers a rich lens through which to view socioecological possibility while also critiquing the structures that threaten it. He writes (2015, 209–210) that “Brownness is meant to be an expansive category that stretches outside the confines of any one group formation and, furthermore, outside the limits of the human and the organic,” introducing a mode of thought that is “about casting a picture of arduous modes of relationality that persist in the world despite stratifying demarcations and taxonomies of being, classifications that are bent on the siloing of particularity and on the denigrating of any expansive idea of the common and commonism.” This mode of thought provides insight into how to conceive of a future built through intentional and radical relationality, a framework that can be seen in recent writing that addresses intersections of queer theory and infrastructural studies (Lesutis 2023) and environmental management (Hazard 2022). The latter, specifically, highlights how expanding political ecological thought on more-than-human subjectivities can lead to a more generative vision of what Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg (2015) consider “abundant futures,” which informs our next iteration.

More-than-human political ecologies and abundant futures

The popularity of books like Anna L. Tsing's (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World, which examines the globalized interrelationships of mushrooms and people, indicates a growing interest in multispecies ethnography, an evolving theoretical and empirical intervention to nature–society relations (Ameli 2022). To conduct a multispecies ethnography is to study “the host of organisms whose lives and deaths are linked to human social worlds,” and to focus on “how a multitude of organisms’ livelihoods shape and are shaped by political, economic, and cultural forces” (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010: 545). Ogden, Hall, and Tanita (2013, 16–17) develop multispecies ethnography further, suggesting it is “a mode of attunement to the power of nonhuman subjects to shape the world and to the ways in which the human becomes through relations with other beings.” This attunement lends itself to what they consider an analytical approach to “speculative wonder,” a practice that can “help us to begin to imagine how we can evoke life as a shifting register of multiple intensities, as an assemblage” (Ogden, Hall, and Tanita 2013, 17). A critical awareness to other modes of being, as both human and non-human, deconstructs the nature–society binary, pointing toward socioecological possibilities that may have otherwise never been considered (Bellacasa 2017).

Importantly, Kirksey, Shapiro, and Brodine (2013) write about ways that multispecies awareness can attune us to a world where life persists despite troubling conditions. They discuss how non-human life has found ways to not only live, but to thrive, in what they term blasted landscapes, spaces that have been ruined and/or neglected by cycles of capitalist development. Vincent Zonca's research on lichens presents a nearly alternative universe where life, as most of us understand it, is porous and interconnected in ways that scientists have only begun to study. Rather than relying solely on modes of knowledge production that privilege Western epistemologies, of using critique as a means in and of itself, multispecies ethnography outlines pathways for political ecologists to think, research, and act more expansively and creatively (Chao et al. 2022).

Though this is not an exhaustive list of all possible ways to extend the contours of critique within political ecology, we believe these six iterations of affirmative critique are useful starting places for considering possible pathways for political ecology scholarship that reimagine critique less as scholarly norm and more as a point of departure for new ideas, collaborations, and applications. We now turn toward explicitly outlining what we see as experimental and speculative political ecology, taking cues from the fields mentioned above and noting specifically how political ecology already is experimental in its theorization and methodologies.

Assembling the experimental and speculative project in political ecology

In recent years, several contributions to the field of political ecology have developed experimental and speculative elements. Yet, what the experimental and speculative entail and their potential to generate new forms of political ecological research have not been fully articulated, and these efforts have largely remained disconnected (Harris and Santos 2023). We thus assemble different strands of experimentation and speculation and reflect on their explanatory and emancipatory potential. We note two prominent directions of the field: (i) an overt engagement with experimental thought and experimentation and (ii) an increased attention to affirmative and future-oriented modes of analysis.

Experimental political ecologies: an overt engagement with experimental thought and experimentation

Experimental political ecology has been broadly conceptualized as a “new critical—or perhaps post-critical—practice,” which emerged in response to the call within the field for more “‘inventive,’ ‘affirmative,’ ‘creative,’ and ‘playful’ engagements with the socioecological worlds in which we live” (Braun 2015a, 103). In this review, we identify three interrelated propositions that have emerged from and characterize the experimental turn. The first concerns the ambition to challenge, rather than “just” analyze, systemic oppression, structural inequalities, and environmental injustices. There is a rich history of political ecologists using participatory action research methods, working alongside and for communities as embedded actors (Bixler et al. 2015; Rocheleau 2008; Rocheleau and Nirmal 2014). Building upon and expanding these approaches, experimental approaches are characterized by what Harris (2021, 332) considers an “intentional intervention with emergent results.” Whereas engaged scholars may work alongside communities, a more experimental approach also involves performing an intervention, to create results and to study their outcomes. This work is grounded in a performative epistemology for worldmaking, as similarly developed by Gibson-Graham and other diverse/community economy scholars.

The second proposition concerns methodological experimentation. A central ambition of the experimental turn is to overcome the limitations of conventional theoretical and methodological approaches, moving beyond current practices of knowledge production (Last 2012; Rusca 2024). In line with the aspirations of fostering a more proactive role for the researcher in addressing emerging socioecological challenges and generating new forms of knowledge, experimental political ecologies have significantly reconfigured the research process. Experimental approaches shift the analytical focus on emerging rather than past events as a necessary step for the researcher to play a more active role in their unfolding. Further, they forge new alliances and collaborations required to engage with environmental challenges more proactively.

The public engagement experiment on flood risk management set up by Sarah Whatmore, Stuart Lane et al. (2011, 2013, 2011) in Yorkshire (UK) exemplifies an experimental political ecology that both stages an intervention with communities and reconfigures the research process. First, the project addressed an emerging flood controversy between residents, the local government, and scientists, rather than simply studying and critiquing it (Landström et al. 2011). Research showed a widespread lack of trust in the scientific community which was perceived to separate scientific knowledge and its production from local actors. Concurrently, floods in the area enhanced residents’ motivation to be involved. Second, addressing this emerging challenge involved the “invention of a research apparatus” consisting of Competency Groups (CG) composed of volunteer residents (5–8) affected by floods and a team of researchers from the social and natural sciences (5–7) (Whatmore and Landström 2011, 582). These CGs served to both challenge knowledge produced by experts, and to redistribute expertise across local actors and academic participants (Whatmore and Landström 2011). Lane et al. (2011) note that residents had an in-depth understanding of flood hydrology, based on their experiences of living alongside the flooding. This was critical to generate alternative flood management solutions which were ultimately enforced by the local government. The flood risk management controversy was transformed into a “generative event in which expert reasoning was forced to ‘slow down’ and a space for reasoning differently opened up, involving those affected in new political opportunities and associations” (Whatmore and Landström 2011, 604).

Inspired by this approach, Harris (2021) facilitated experimental storytelling workshops in two communities in Appalachia, a region in the USA whose residents are both deeply impacted by and deeply skeptical of climate change and the scientific premise behind it. Like Lane et al. (2011), he was interested in using an environmental controversy to generate collaborative knowledge. He worked alongside storytellers to host workshops that became sites of intervention, experimenting with storytelling as a method for bridging insights between scientists and community members. In his workshop designs, he was careful not to over-determine the parameters of the experiment, instead allowing shared knowledge to coalesce organically, which created results that were both unexpected and still useful (e.g., participants in the workshop noted shifts in how they think about climate change).

Other experiments have leveraged the power of speculative imagination (Haraway 2016) and creative and art-based methods for envisioning more equitable socioecological futures. These methodological experiments extend participatory action research methods developed by political ecology scholarship by centering desirable or aspirational futures to challenge and transform development pathways. For instance, Aalders et al. (2020) set up a workshop to create a comic strip representing hopes, fears, and desired futures of residents affected by the Kenyan Lamu Port-South Sudan-Ethiopia-Transport (LAPSSET) project. Like the work of Black Geographies (McKittrick 2013), the aim was to make marginal futures, which are often concealed by hegemonic imaginaries, visible. This work brought together a range of different actors and communities that were generally disconnected. The comic workshop, for example, involved a human geographer, two illustrators, one comic author, and a playwright, all working collaboratively with impacted communities to reconfigure future imaginaries. Ultimately, this intervention developed an approach to future imaginaries that centers personal stories, memories, and emotions, thereby revealing the importance of “backsight” in fostering future imaginaries (Aalders et al. 2020, 428).

Similarly, to transform urban adaptation futures in the face of intensifying climate change, Pelling et al. (2023) have developed a research agenda around normative future visioning (NFV). This approach combines aspirational futures of urban communities affected by climate change with an in-depth understanding of context-specific urban planning regulations, trends and climate data to generate long-term adaptation plans that proliferate possibilities for alternative values and planning priorities. This approach thereby generates “moments when creativity can meet the power to act required for critical, including transformative, adaptation” (Pelling et al. 2023, 1). Creative methods and stakeholder-led policy making are also central to the community voice method (CVM) developed by Cumming et al. (2022). The CVM aims to foster meaningful and place-based policy responses to a range of environmental challenges by employing documentary filmmaking to present interview data and ground public engagement processes in careful listening and debates.

In another experiment, Rémi Willemin and Norman Backhaus (2021) used photographs of Swiss waterscapes to elicit farmers to explore their relationship with the landscape and desired futures of agricultural production and sustainability. Through this experiment, researchers and farmers transformed their relationship with the future by transitioning from imaginaries that see it as inevitably dystopic and colorless to ones that are desirable and vital. This experiment, Willemin and Backhaus (2021) argue, also generated hope and a commitment to actively work toward those desired futures.

Inter- and trans-disciplinary collaborations beyond established academic alliances can also work as a form of experimentation when they explore research questions that cannot be addressed within disciplinary boundaries (Rusca 2024). Damian White (2020), for instance, discusses the role of design in planning for a “Green New Deal.” He argues that an engagement with the field of design, as a discipline that proactively shapes these futures through its “creative labour […] and inventive praxis,” would be beneficial to nature–society scholars engaged in fostering just transitions (White 2020, 20). Similarly, to develop a future-oriented political ecology, Maria Rusca (2024) set up two experiments with colleagues from climatology and hydrology, fields that routinely deploy future-oriented methods. The experiments involved the development of novel methodologies that repurposed and repoliticized scenario-based approaches and system dynamics modeling to critique and reimagine climate futures. Both experiments departed from persisting logics of colonial violence and racial capitalism and from the assumption of intensifying climate change to examine competing visions of climate futures (Rusca et al. 2023a, 2023b). The first experiment provided a future-facing critique of current socioecological configurations by illuminating how they might unfold under intensifying climate change. The second developed a system dynamic model that speculatively brings about better socioecological configurations in response to climate change. These experiments thereby “animated potentialities latent in critique” and laid the foundation for a political ecology of possibility (Rusca 2024, 8).

A third approach, which builds on Gibson-Graham's writings on alternative economies (2006, 2008), shifts the focus from the analysis of logics that perpetuate notions of capitalism as the only possible socioeconomic paradigm to already existing experiments of alternative worlds and socioeconomic relations. These experiments articulate what Brian J. Burke and Boone Shear (2014, 127) have termed a “non-capitalocentric political ecology.” Specifically, they seek to proactively bring about socioecological transformations by engaging with already existing alternative (economic) relations that proliferate possibilities. Holly J. Buck (2015) illuminates fragments of a more charming Anthropocene by exploring lived experiments grounded on altruism, creativity, and practices of care. By focusing on these experiments, she decenters disenchanted imaginaries of capital hegemony and proliferates possibilities of a more enchanting vision of the future. Similarly, Elisa Schramm (2023) focuses on experiments stemming from eco-communities located in France and Spain. She highlights how they are dealing with and overcoming multiple threats, such as invasive cacti species, through operationalizing degrowth ethics to reimagine resource use. Like multispecies ethnographers, Schramm discusses how non-human communities intersect with and inform a more holistic and creative approach to environmental governance. Importantly, she argues that experiments either evade or are co-opted by capitalism, providing insights for building sustainable post-capitalist futures.

While there is no one single version of experimental political ecologies, the scholarship outlined here highlights the generative capacity of research as an agent of change, the possibilities inherent in radical academic inter- and trans-disciplinarity, and the explicit effort to imagine, and build, post-capitalist worlds through our work. If experimentation is how these worlds come into view, we argue speculation is needed to bring them closer to fruition.

Speculative political ecologies: affirmative and future-oriented modes of analysis

Speculative fiction and thought have been an important source for political ecology scholarship seeking to imagine and vision desirable alternative worlds. For scholars trained in critique, engaging with and contributing to affirmative and future-oriented modes of analysis is a challenging endeavor that involves developing renewed affective and ethical dispositions toward the possible (Braun 2015a; Gibson-Graham 2006). This task also drives much Black Geography scholarship, which can be seen as beacons for conceiving of and extending the possible. Recently, affirmative and future-oriented modes of analysis have begun to flourish in critical geographies responding to apocalyptic and dystopic imaginaries of the future, which are argued to be overrepresented in film, media, and climate scenarios (Buck 2015; Cork et al. 2023; Rusca et al. 2023a). The constant messaging that the future is impossible creates conditions that contribute to its foreclosure (Jackson 2015). As Bruce Erickson (2020) argues, discourses of environmental collapse preclude visions of just futures and reify histories of settler colonial violence. Rather than emphasizing collapse, he suggests that theories of the Anthropocene could help critical nature–society scholars pivot toward perspectives that can transform socioecological relations and make room for reparative critique and alternative futures. Similarly, Tuomo Alhojärvi and Heikki Sirviö (2018: 1) have called for an affirmative political ecology grounded on “unfolding forgotten counter-histories of survival, cooperation and flourishing; exploring opportunities in the present to crack open spaces for agency; working unapologetically for liveable, abundant, heterogeneous futures.” Moulton et al. (2021, 686) have articulated ways that political ecology can focus less on trauma and violence and more on hope, suggesting a scholarly orientation that operates from an ethical sense of relationality, positionality, and potentiality (e.g., “conducting research with people as opposed to research about them”). Hope in this work is qualified as not being about a future that is prescriptively better by some set of normative criteria, but, like queer theorizations of hope, in something that is at least different (Muñoz 2015, 2019). Shifting the focus of research away from what is often immediately attention-grabbing, such as violent land dispossession and its discontents, does not necessarily make the work less critical. Instead, it is an opportunity to re-align the sights of criticality, away from trauma and toward communal knowledge production and repair (see also Bruno et al. 2023). We identify two significant ways in which this work contributes to de-centering capitalist logics and makes room for possible futures.

A first line of inquiry focuses on reimagining futures through reworlding the Anthropocene (Escobar 2018; Kothari et al. 2019). Part of this effort consists of considering what research strategies and questions are needed to extend political ecological imagination. In this vein, Paul Robbins (2020) asks, “What does a good Anthropocene look like, and what is the role of political ecology in charting the way there?” Taking his examinations of degrowth and modernist ecosocialism, which he describes as “visionary political ecologies,” as an example, he argues for a political ecology that engages with and critically examines alternative visions of socioecological relations to reflect on the extent and ways in which these projects can ensure more equitable and sustainable futures. Another core aspect of this line of inquiry is conceptualizing imagination as a necessary element of reparative critique. Kathryn Yusoff and Jennifer Gabrys (2011) consider how climate inaction can be tied to a lack of imagination about what's possible, noting ways that critical imaginative work is necessary for envisioning and building just futures (see also Ritts and Bakker 2022). Similarly, Buck (2019, 162) calls for developing a “social imagination to match our technological imagination” of futuristic technologies of climate change. Rather than only critiquing unwanted futures of geoengineering, she proactively engages with this likely possibility by speculating about how undesirable futuristic solutions might, if taken out of the circuits of capital appropriation, work to generate socioecological transformations and, potentially, an economy of care. She calls for activists and researchers to better understand and control the means of producing geoengineering to avoid elite capture. We believe Buck's ideas are especially salient when considering the recent proliferation of—and struggles against—carbon capture and storage technologies as a socioecological fix to climate-strangled capitalist development (McCarthy 2015; Russell 2023). Lastly, Dan Santos (2023) examines efforts to democratize biotechnological innovation in community science labs. These spaces offer the resources and community for the broader public to engage with science and biotechnology, and support projects and practices (e.g., the Open Insulin project) that imagine, like many speculative fiction authors (Robinson 2012), and enact non-capitalist biotechnological futures.

Scholars have leveraged different forms of knowledge to extend political ecological imagination. Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg (2015) Manifesto of Abundant Futures draws from development pathways promoted by peasant movements and Indigenous thought to generate aspirational futures of multispecies abundance and conservation. Giorgos Kallis and Hug March (2015) develop a speculative approach, taking cues from science fiction literature, to imagine a degrowth world, where value and progress are not tied to infinite economic growth narratives. Specifically, they are inspired by Le Guin's (1969) novel The Dispossessed—a “unique case of a territorialized degrowth” (Kallis and March 2015, 361)—to explore how to move beyond capitalist determinism to envision a world governed by non-capitalist logistics. Whyte (2018) describes Indigenous science fiction as a dialogue with ancestors to understand and find the agency to overcome ongoing settler colonial violence. This dialogue combines the fiction of “philosophizing counterfactually through narratives of spiral time” and the science of Indigenous knowledge (Whyte 2018, 230). This form of meaning-making simultaneously critiques Western-centric narratives of dystopic climate futures, which erase populations for whom environmental apocalypse and the destruction has already occurred, and offers an affirmative vision of decolonial futures. Lastly, Rusca et al. (2023a) seek to proliferate possibilities of urban futures of climate change through a system dynamics model. They argue that dystopic and apocalyptic narratives lock futures into existing configurations by concealing the coproduction of nature and society. Engaging with “the power relations that produce ‘doomed’ or ‘locked-in’ futures […],” they argue, “opens the possibility of changing these relations and responding to impending futures in a way that is not merely defensive” (Rusca et al. 2023a, 581). Thus, the model decenters capitalist logics by incorporating the potential of transformative change and explores urban futures grounded on alternative economic and policy visions.

A second approach to make room for emerging and future socioeconomic alternatives involves analyzing narratives and discourses of the future and their potential to enable or disable possibilities for just outcomes. Andrew S. Mathews and Jessica Barnes (2016) argue that the future is a site of struggle, one that is constantly being made in the present through policy making and political action. Haarstad, Sareen, and Wanvik (2023) explore the potential of aspirational goals, such as Norway's Zero Growth Objective, to shape and articulate present-day climate politics. While some goals may seem lofty or even impossible, they argue that a vision of an ideal future can help prefigure more just outcomes. However, as Kasia Paprocki (2019) points out, narratives of ruined futures—of climate-related threats, such as sea-level rise along the rural coasts of Bangladesh—are powerful tools used by elites seeking to dispossess farmers of their lands. Implicit in Paprocki's work, we argue, is the affirmation that narratives of possible futures, where lives can flourish despite climate impacts, is equally as important for what we see as the promise of speculative political ecology. Along these lines, we are also inspired by the work of Black Geographies, and of abolitionist geographies specifically, which, through their critique of the carceral system and the prison-industrial complex that drives it, presents visions of a future that exists outside of the confines of the violence of racial capitalism (Gilmore 2007, 2022). Further, this scholarship revisits historical injustices—of land stolen from Black farming families, for example (Heynen 2016)—and aims to create conditions for more equitable, reparative pathways for communities impacted by destructive socioecological relations (Heynen and Ybarra 2021; Lewis 2023).

In sum, we argue that leaning into speculation is a generative means of theorizing and analyzing how past and present conditions shape the contours of the future. Here, we want to acknowledge, and reiterate, that much of political ecology's strength is in its grounded approach to empirical knowledge production. We do not see speculation as dismissive of or lacking empirical analysis. Rather, many speculative approaches described here depart from rich empirical analyses of past and present socioecological relations that shape the current environmental and climate crises and its uneven outcomes, as well as from lived experiments of more desirable socioecological configurations. Moreover, drawing from fields like queer theory and speculative fiction, we see speculation as a means of creating empirical analysis, similar to how climate model predictions are treated as empirical evidence of future climate scenarios. Speculation is a tool to engage with “important questions of potential that are often dismissed because they are not as empirically legible as typical political ecology scholarship” that tends to focus on histories of the present (Harris and Santos 2023, 3). The work of engaging directly in the politics of imagination is a critical first step toward a more critical version of speculation.

Conclusions—doing speculative and experimental political ecologies: reparative, proactive, and creative knowledges

In this paper, we have explored the potential of a political ecology that engages socioecological relations more experimentally and speculatively. We have shown that complementary theoretical frameworks—from Diverse Economies to Feminist analyses of Science, Science Fiction, Black Geographies, Queer Theory, and Multispecies Ethnographies—open up intellectual spaces to experiment with new modes of critique within political ecology scholarship. Crucially, these theoretical perspectives have the potential to generate new registers of consciousness that make room for hope, possibility, survival, resistance, and creativity. Concurrently, we have argued that some of these intellectual stands are already informing experimental and speculative political ecology.

To conclude, we highlight what we see as the potential of a political ecology that engages with experimentation and speculation by returning to our initial question on the performativity of political-ecological knowledge. Following Sedgwick's and Latour's “critique of critique,” we ask what knowledge generated through speculative and experimental approaches does. Specifically, we consider what these approaches add to understandings of socioecological relations and to political-ecological praxis. First, experimental and speculative approaches are critical for laying the foundations of a future-oriented and reparative mode of critique that illuminates emerging and future possibilities of alternative worlds. Steven Cork et al. (2023, 26) claim that actualizing fundamental transformations in socionatural relations requires enhanced abilities to “imagine pathways toward alternative, preferable futures.” Yet, they note that contemporary societies are sometimes unequipped with the cognitive and psychological skills needed to imagine different futures, particularly when it comes to “possibilities not encountered before—and the possible pathways toward achieving them.” Experimental and speculative approaches leverage the power of stories and storytelling, imagination, and creativity to “engage directly in the politics of expanding imaginative, perspectival, and political capacity” (Harris 2022; Harris and Santos 2023, 524).

Second, the quest for reparative critique is entangled with its potential to transform and carry material change. Engaging with questions about the possible, alternative, and desirable futures contributes to questioning assumptions about the inevitability of current and future socionatural configurations. Concurrently, centering research on desired futures can strengthen commitments to these futures by provoking stakeholders’ reflections on how to achieve them and, potentially, reconfigure decision-making around these aspirations (Smith and Vasudevan 2017; Heynen and Ybarra 2021; Pelling et al. 2023; Willemin and Backhaus 2021).

Third, while maintaining a strong focus on generating theory from rigorous empirical work, speculative and experimental approaches reconfigure research and praxis within political ecology. For instance, speculative political ecology scholarship proposes that the act of speculation is a form of research both because it is often grounded in rich empirical analyses of past and present socioecological configurations and because it generates data on desired futures. Speculative political ecologies, therefore, allow for new ways of pluralizing knowledge that center on desired socioecological futures, rather than “just” on past and present configurations. Similarly, performative epistemologies are grounded on a research process that also involves enacting socioecological interventions. Questions regarding how to navigate the relationship between critique and activism have always been at the center of political ecology debates (Blaikie 2012; Blomley 2008; Loftus 2015). The performative epistemologies discussed in this paper offer a range of approaches to “think critically but to also act experimentally” (Harris 2021, 332).

We acknowledge that our intervention comes with potential challenges for many academics, especially for junior faculty. One challenge we see is the legibility of speculative and experimental analyses compared to more established approaches to political ecology scholarship. The second potential challenge is that these approaches might require greater time and labor to be implemented, while also facing a greater degree of uncertainty on the possible research outcomes. However, considering how climate impacts felt in the present may only amplify in the future without intervention, we argue it is important to push the frontier, scope, impact, and potentiality of political ecology scholarship. It is our hope that this intervention inspires others to do work that is intentionally more experimental or speculative, creating conditions that could potentially lead to a more equitable society in the present with ramifications for a more just future—one that can be imagined through what Ogden (2021: 12–13) calls speculative wonder, “…an experimental approach to engaging and representing those worlds.”