While calls for critical, engaged and change-oriented scholarship in environmental communication (EC) abound, few articles discuss what this may practically entail. With this article, we aim to contribute to a discussion in EC about the methodological implications of such scholarship. Based on our combined experience in EC research and drawing from a variety of academic fields, we describe six methodological dilemmas that we encounter in our research practice and that we believe are inherent to such scholarship. These dilemmas are (1) grasping communication; (2) representing others; (3) involving people in research; (4) co-producing knowledge; (5) engaging critically; and (6) relating to conflict. This article does not offer solutions to these complex dilemmas. Rather, our dilemma descriptions are meant to help researchers think through methodological issues in critical, engaged and change-oriented EC research. The article also helps to translate the dilemmas to the reality of research projects through a set of questions, aimed to support a sensitivity to, and understanding of, the dilemmas in context.

Despite increasing recognition of climate risks, there is a lack of adequate adaptation responses, which we argue is partly due to how governance actors imagine the future. In this article, we contend that ‘imaginaries’—collective visions of desirable futures—shape governance regimes and their approaches to climate adaptation. This framework allows us to explore the various goals and political dynamics integral to climate adaptation governance, revealing the processes through which desired futures are constructed, promulgated, and contested. Using an abductive, qualitative content analysis method, we study academic and grey literature to map and understand globally-influential climate adaptation imaginaries. We identify six distinct imaginaries: Eco-Modern State, Just Adaptation, Promethean (Green) Growth, High-Tech Society, Human Stewardship, and Knowledge Society. These adaptation imaginaries, rooted in deep-seated ethical and ontological beliefs, each present a unique vision of the future, complete with preferred adaptation strategies and key stakeholders. We contribute to the literature by showing how the globally dominant climate adaptation imaginaries reproduce existing power relations and business-as-usual approaches. Our analysis thereby provides political impetus for questioning business-as-usual approaches to climate change, enabling us to go beyond taken-for-granted assumptions of what future societies and economies might look like, and critically examining the interplay between different sociopolitical actors in adaptation governance.

Calls for transformational adaptation are increasing. Government authorities, expected to lead adaptation, are in the difficult situation of changing a governance system from within. This demands a capacity for critical reflection among civil servants involved. Adopting a Social Practice Theory approach, we argue this capacity must be understood as emerging in practice, not simply held by individuals. Empirically, we focus on a central network of government authorities in Sweden’s adaptation governance, and identify assumptions and routines guiding their meaning making process. We focus on how situations of contestation are dealt with to explore the practice’s capacity to facilitate critical reflection. We show how a focus on efficient information transmission and an assumption of incremental adaptation as sufficient leads their practice to play down the consequences of the climate crisis. A practice approach suggests interventions to the group level in order to create joint critical reflection, necessary for enabling transformational adaptation.

The climate crisis calls for transformative responses, including transforming the governance and practices of adaptation and the purposes of adaptation actions. This thesis contributes to understanding the inertia that marks adaptation and provides empirically grounded reflections on how to move towards transformative adaptation. Combining Critical Future Studies, using imaginaries, with Social Practice Theory, this study explores meaning-making processes shaping adaptation governance, its purpose, boundaries, and how it is performed. This is done through an overview of globally circulating and competing climate adaptation imaginaries, and a layered case study of regional imaginaries and situated practices of adaptation governance in the Swedish public sector. The study finds that the dominant imaginaries and practices in the Swedish public sector assume that the future is predictable and controllable. These assumptions are intertwined with (often) unspoken ideals of economic growth, technological innovations and expert-led planning. This promotes proactive, but incremental adaptation strategies, where transboundary risks are ignored while transboundary benefits are assumed to remain. Consequentially, long-term perspectives, uncertainty, and plausible high-risk scenarios, are downplayed. Transforming society through transformative adaptation is a slow process, fraught with overcoming unequal power dynamics. From a practice perspective, it will begin through making space for joint critical reflection on the assumptions and ends that guide routine responses of ‘doing’ adaptation. This must be combined with explicitly debating and imagining desirable futures that accommodate the uncertainty generated by recognizing transboundary risks and long-term perspectives.