“Political participation and the construction of the future become a form of belonging and a way of gaining legitimacy to identify the interconnections between future imaginaries and conceptions of nature based on ancestral and current practices and knowledge.” (Pinzon 2024)
How we participate in this construction of the future and which visions of the future guide our actions depend on many different factors, both individual and social. The fact is that major global events like COP30 often serve to project all the hopes and desires for a better world. All preparations reflect this and the underlying political and economic power relations. Thus, in the run-up to the current COP30, the crisis of multilateralism can be seen in the strong involvement of the private sector in problem-solving. As a result, there is often a tendency toward technical solutions that don't even address the issue of lifestyle changes.
In this majority context, what is already being done in terms of innovation in the territories and peripheries of global societies is often overlooked—this is the case with the social groups that we, as the Heinrich Böll Foundation, support as partners in over 40 countries around the world. We are taking advantage of this climate conference to begin identifying relevant projects and bringing them together on a platform specifically designed to bring people together to build positive futures. Our goal is to develop utopias for the future based on the many creative and innovative examples of established projects that work and dream of a positive future in various thematic areas and regions of the world. We hope you join us on this journey toward positive futures, follow our project, and perhaps even participate in it by contributing to positive utopias!
Additionally, on this page you will find important analyses, especially from the perspective of the Global South, as well as short critical articles analyzing what is happening during the COP.