Socio-techno-ecological imaginaries: A framework for understanding future-making for and with ecology

This article proposes socio-techno-ecological imaginaries (STEI) as a conceptual extension of sociotechnical imaginaries (STI). While STI has been valuable for showing how social order and technological change co-produce “desirable futures,” we argue it tends to leave implicit how visions of ecology – beliefs about what nature is and acts, how it is valued, and how humans ought to relate to it – are entangled in this process. This implicitness risks limiting STI’s explanatory power, its capacity to evaluate the desirability of imagined futures amid socio-ecological crises, and its own imaginative horizon in futures work. Drawing on literatures on socio-ecological imagination, eco-social imaginaries, and environmental and nature imaginaries, we define STEIs as institutionally embedded and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by specific understandings and valuations of society, technology and ecology. STEI rests on three premises: (1) imaginaries are co-produced across social, technical, and ecological dimensions; (2) each dimension carries specific assumptions and normative valuations that condition what futures are deemed plausible and desirable; and (3) alignment or misalignment across these assumptions and valuations can be sites of conflict, lock-in, and transformation. We demonstrate the framework’s analytical value through an empirical study of the STEIs that guide the development and use expectations of sensor technologies in the Dutch agricultural sector. The study combines interviews with a corpus of public web texts to identify two STEIs, showing how divergent visions of society, technology, and ecology co-produce distinct farming futures. STEI, we conclude, strengthens critical futures research by enabling more explicit, plural, and ecologically attuned evaluations of future-making.