I’ve a new paper with Marc Hudson titled A Caution on Climate Hope in the journal Environmental Politics.
It is available open access here:
https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2026.2721047
In the paper, we challenge the assumption that hope is always necessary or helpful for progressive climate action. In other words, the idea that if hope is lost, the future is too.
We instead call for:
- Attention to the diagnosis of false hopes: expectations or beliefs that something is possible despite evidence to the contrary.
This means asking how false hopes are created and sustained, how challenges to them are resisted or legitimised, how ignorance is cultivated around them, what imaginaries they galvanise around, who benefits from them, and how hope’s privileged status in climate discourse allows them to evade scrutiny. - An exploration of pessimism and hopelessness’ potential in rejecting false hopes and opening space for radical responses.
- An ambivalent and contingent understanding of the link between particular emotional dispositions and climate progress.
“Only by embracing the complex, non-prescriptive links between these emotional,
affective and discursive registers can the climate movement move beyond hope
and consider what genuine possibilities for change remain”
Our argument that we need to move beyond hope is not a rejection of hope, nor a claim that hopelessness or pessimism is a silver bullet instead. Rather, it is a caution that progress does not depend on hope, that false hopes can hinder meaningful change, and that action can occur in hope’s absence.
We hope it is of interest.