Necessarily unprepared: Climate imaginaries, market embeddedness and the limits of transformation in rural Luxembourg

This article examines a systematic tension within rural economic actors’ accounts of climate change: farmers who relativize climate change as a personal or immediate concern simultaneously describe substantial adaptation measures already underway. We argue that this tension is not a problem of knowledge deficit or attitudinal lag, but a structurally necessary form of ideation: climate imaginaries hold contradictions in suspension precisely because acknowledging their depth would destabilize the identities, market dependencies, and broader intergenerational obligations on which rural economies frequently depend. Drawing on qualitative interviews with farmers in rural Luxembourg and applying a dialectical analytical framework, the article traces how climate imaginaries differ with forms of market embeddedness, as do the capacities to make transformation thinkable. The findings are developed in conversation with innovation studies in geography, specifying the ideational conditions under which structural opportunity translates, or fails to translate, into transformative action. The article contributes to debates on climate change, sustainability transformation and the growth-critical debate in economic geography, arguing, as a theoretical interpretation of these patterns, that the persistent shortcomings of market-oriented climate adaptation point to structural rather than merely contingent limits, and that making those limits analytically visible is a precondition for moving beyond them.