Why focus on imagination?
Long-term governance depends on how individuals and institutions relate to the future.
Many of the most consequential risks we face today—such as climate tipping points—cannot be directly observed or predicted with certainty. They must be anticipated, interpreted, and made meaningful. This makes imagination a central, but often overlooked, component of governance.
Beyond creativity: a working definition
In CAMELOT, imagination is understood as a set of interdependent cognitive and social processes that enable people to construct possible future states of the world and interpret their implications (based on knowledge and other inputs), evaluate their desirability and risks (based on values), connect them to present-day decisions (fostering agency). This builds on earlier work defining imagination as
“interdependent cognitive and social processes that generate shared understandings of the present and visions of possible future states of the world.”
(in Milkoreit 2017, open access).
This perspective treats imagination as a core component of decision-making under uncertainty, rather than as a purely creative or speculative activity.
From individual cognition to collective futures
Imagination operates across scales. At the individual level, it involves the ability to generate mental representations of futures that are not yet real. At the collective level, it shapes shared visions that guide political processes and social change. CAMELOT builds on a theory of imagination as linked cognitive and social processes, connecting individual thinking with collective future-making.
This perspective highlights that (i) imagination is shaped by social context, institutions, and knowledge systems, (ii) shared visions of the future are contested and influenced by power, and (iii) governance depends on how such visions are formed, communicated, and acted upon.
Imagination, learning, risk, and agency
Imagination plays a critical role in three core dimensions of governance: understanding complex, long-term change, perceiving and evaluating risks, acting in the present with future consequences in mind. It is not only about envisioning futures, but about enabling action. As research on imagination and transformation shows, the ability to identify and pursue alternative futures is “an essential component” of responding to major societal challenges (Moore and Milkoreit 2020, open access).
Without such capacities, societies are more likely to experience change as reactive or imposed, rather than shaped deliberately.
Expanding the space of possible futures
A key function of imagination is to expand what is considered possible. However, imagination is also constrained. It tends to draw on existing experiences, institutions, and dominant ways of thinking—making it difficult to envision fundamentally different futures.
This is particularly visible in climate governance, where many proposed solutions remain within existing system logics. Tools such as storytelling, scenarios, and simulation can help address these limits by introducing new perspectives and experiences, making abstract futures more concrete and relatable and enabling emotional and ethical engagement with long-term change. For example, work on climate fiction suggests that narratives can
help people “see themselves… in future, imagined conditions,” making climate change more meaningful and actionable.
Implications for governance and policy
Current governance systems often struggle not only because of missing information—but because of limited ways of imagining the future.
Understanding imagination as a governance capacity opens new possibilities for policy and practice. It suggests that effective long-term governance requires not only better data, but also processes that support future-oriented thinking, methods that engage both analytical and experiential forms of understanding and institutional environments that allow alternative futures to be explored.
CAMELOT investigates how different forms of science–policy–society engagement can strengthen these capacities in practice.