How Do Collectives Strategize Desirable Futures?

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ABSTRACT

How do collectives strategize desirable futures? Using a projective and immersive comparative case study approach, we follow five living labs in Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and Finland considered hot spots for the EU plan to accelerate the transition to the bioeconomy. Our process model shows how collectives progress from imagining alternative futures through different modalities of futuring (science-, market-, and place-based) through cultivating types of actorhood that scaffold specific modalities to articulating emergent collective strategies. We extend the literature on making desirable futures by inducing, defining, illustrating, and interconnecting three kinds of future work: plausibility, feasibility and intermediation. We reveal the fluid role of actorhood, explaining how typical actors are recast and atypical actors recruited into performing these complementary kinds of future work. We contribute novel theorizing on collective strategizing by showing how actors converge on prefiguring, configuring and postfiguring collective visions of desirable futures while making them.

BIOGRAPHY

Ankita Nayak (she/her) is a second-year doctoral candidate in Sustainable Business, Bioeconomy and Social Impact at LUT Business School, Finland. She is also a researcher on the EU Horizon project PRIMED: Redesigning the Primary Sector for Maximising Bioeconomy Development (https://primed-project.eu/). Her doctoral research draws on qualitative methods to explore collective practices of future-making and meaning-making prevalent during the emergence of novel collaborative ecosystems. She is also interested in exploring the tensions that accompany such emergence and how actors grapple with the same. Ankita holds a Master’s degree in Economics from Aalto University and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Delhi. Before joining the PhD programme, Ankita has worked in several roles related to business sustainability, garnering experience on corporate sustainability reporting, green energy, carbon accounting and carbon removal.