Conflicted climate futures: Climate justice imaginaries as tools for policy evaluation in cities

Abstract

Cities are moving to implement just urban transitions, but we lack consensus on how policy evaluation practices can center justice and create accountability toward desired climate futures. Here, we introduce climate justice imaginaries as a novel tool to root policy evaluation in local understandings of the just city. We use an original mixed-methods research design that combines participant observation, interviews, and systematic content analysis to identify climate justice imaginaries held by city officials and community advocates with respect to the implementation of a Building Performance Standard in Boston, U.S. This methodological approach enabled us to directly identify and experience the emergence of climate justice imaginaries in real time during policy implementation, while allowing us to triangulate and confirm the imaginaries shared by different actors in retrospect. By offering new “possibilities of policy evaluation” that emerge from climate justice imaginaries in Boston, we showcase how visions of the just and unjust city can serve as governing devices to transform policy evaluation practices and advance more just climate futures.