Briefly Noted: "Captured Futures: Rethinking the Drama of Environmental Politics"

Captured Futures: Rethinking the Drama of Environmental Politics, by Maarten A. Hajer and Jeroen Oomen (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2025), 352 pp., cloth $130, eBook $129.99.

Contemporary environmental politics are struggling to deliver. Goals to limit warming to 1.5°C, promises to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050, and the aspirational conversations at the annual UN Climate Change Conference sit uneasily alongside relentless global GDP growth, increasing consumerism, and ever-expanding energy use. In Captured Futures: Rethinking the Drama of Environmental Politics, Maarten Hajer and Jeroen Oomen argue that the ecological crisis is a cultural crisis. They describe an imaginative “capture,” through which there is a cultural and political inability to envision and enact alternative futures that diverge from an increasingly dangerous status quo (p. 2).

As a remedy, the authors’ key objective is to liberate environmental politics from its contemporary confines. They conduct this task through the lens of dramaturgy, analyzing the norms, conventions, and scripts that structure the field. Currently, environmental politics is framed as a realm of objectivity and neutrality, presenting scientific models of emissions or data on biodiversity loss at multilateral conferences in the hope of persuading politicians to “follow the science.” Normative and value-based claims remain in the background. As the authors argue, environmental politics has been “co-opted into a dramaturgical regime that narrowly circumscribes what is up for political debate” and reproduces a narrow range of imaginable futures (p. 134). Ecological modernization, based on an assumption that technological advances and market-based solutions can save us, stands at the heart of this dramaturgical regime.

However, Hajer and Oomen argue that “environmental politics today is deeply unjust” (p. 20). Despite the Global North’s historic emissions and the asymmetric resource consumption by the wealthiest 1 percent, the cultural capture of environmental politics enforces a separation of “objective” science from cultural, social, and ethical questions. Rather than centering questions of human flourishing and normative questions of ethics, environmental politics is limited to supposedly neutral, unbiased measurements. The dramaturgical regime emphasizes innovation and efficiency but eschews questions of sufficiency and justice (p. 99). The authors highlight “net-zero by 2050” as an example, arguing that net-zero is a false, and inherently unjust, promise (p. 131). Net-zero commitments ensure the maintenance of environmentally destructive lifestyles, with an unwavering faith in carbon capture and future speculative technologies. Environmental politics pretends to “follow the science” and aspires for a “just transition,” yet wealthier countries always shirk their historical and future responsibilities in favor of maintaining the status quo.

In the final part of the book, Hajer and Oomen consider how environmental politics may be reinvented and explore alternative futures. While radical alternatives may seem preposterous, the authors argue that mentalities and aspirations canchange. Discursive projects of degrowth, buen vivir in Ecuador, and ecoconservatism all attempt to redefine our imaginings of the future, to varying degrees of success. Rather than prescribing a singular alternative, the authors demonstrate the cracks in the existing dramaturgical regime and the capacity for imagining socioecological alternatives. By making visible the prevailing scripts and assumptions that govern environmental politics, they aim to embolden environmental movements to imagine and articulate new possibilities and futures.

To move from a politics of captured futures to one of captivating futures is a bold undertaking. Captured Futures offers a compelling contribution to the subject, urging the environmental community to expand its imagination, center moral questions, and engage more deeply with new socioecological futures.