Making ripples or waves? A critical analysis of a Dutch youth water vision

As the climate crisis continues, the question of who gets to shape the future, and how, has become increasingly urgent. Visions of the future are the building blocks of the futural public sphere; spaces where futures are imagined, deliberated and pursued. Desirable, alternative futures and pathways for their realisation reveal whom a group considers to be important social actors and what they believe are the necessary political levers for enacting change. Youth, although often marginalised in futural and environmental politics, are no different. In this paper, we ask how a future vision created by a Dutch youth environmental advocacy group seeks to intervene in the futural public sphere of water governance in the Netherlands. We employ techniques of close reading, thematic content and critical discourse analysis, and concepts of protagonists, antagonists and victims and of the future. Our findings reveal that the vision primarily extends existing governance frameworks into the future, reflecting dominant beliefs in Dutch political culture about pursuing change, and point to a potential gap between the politics of participation and politics of imagination in this instance of participatory futuring.