Clash of Visions: Analysing Practices of Politicizing the Future

Abstract

Clashes between visions of the future politicize the future of urgent societal transformations. In the political economy, visions and their promises become resources and their implementation turns into capacities that serve to increase value. Our paper argues that visions as political-economic means influence the transformation processes responding to grand challenges, guide them in certain directions, promote or even hinder them. To shed light on this correlation, we adopt the vision assessment approach of technology assessment (TA), and substantiate and suggest modifications of its analytical perspective to make it suitable for analysing interactions between multiple visions as formative elements in societal transformations on the one hand and as political-economic resources and capacities on the other. Our hypothesis is that the relationship between visions, political economies and transformation can only be examined by looking at power constellations that change through clashes and interactions of multiple and competing visionary practices.