This article employs the framework of 'climate imaginaries' to analyze the competing visions shaping Indonesia's response to the climate crisis. Building on and extending the established typology of climate imaginaries, we introduce a sixth imaginary: the indigenous imaginary grounded in the customary knowledge (adat) and relational cosmologies of masyarakat adat. Through Cultural Political Economy, we map how the dominant techno-market and anthropocentric imaginaries align with historical structures of extractive power to marginalize alternative futures. In contrast, the emerging scientific, sustainable lifestyle, climate apocalypse, and indigenous imaginaries offer divergent pathways, with the indigenous vision presenting a foundational challenge to the coloniality embedded in mainstream climate policy. The findings demonstrate that the contest over which imaginary becomes hegemonic is not merely discursive but is mediated through the structural, agential, and technological selectivities that govern energy systems and land use. A just climate transition in Indonesia requires an epistemic decolonization that centers the indigenous imaginary, thereby recognizing climate change as a struggle over whose knowledge and whose future is allowed to shape socio-ecological relations.
The United Nations' (UN) Global Digital Compact (GDC) is presented as a necessaryresponse to a fragmented global AI governance landscape. Conducting a poststructuralist discourse analysis of UN policy texts (2019-2024) and 177 public consultation submissions, this paper examines how the UN constructs the normative foundations of global AI governance through policy disocurse. It shows how the UN constructs a neoliberal 'economic-developmentalist' governance imaginary that frames AI as a driver of digital transformation towards the global 'common good.' This discourse produces an 'illusion of necessity' around AI adoption-oriented governance - centered on multistakeholderism, cross-border dta flows, and capacity-building - while reinforcing dependencies on Global North digital infrastructure. Although counter hegemonic positions, particularly around data sovereignty, emerge during UN consultation processes, they are largley excluded from the final GDC. Ultimatley, the paper demonstrates how international organizations exercise discursive power by delimiting legitimate policy horizons in the emerging global AI governance regime.
Educational innovation has gained significant traction in the global education reform movement in recent years, with international organizations actively pursuing it. This paper examines the role of the discourse of a network in advancing educational innovation reforms in a Southern European context. Specifically, we explore how the New School 21 network (in Catalan, Escola Nova 21, EN21) has promoted these reforms in Catalonia (Spain). EN21 operated in Catalonia between 2016 and 2019, with two objectives: advising schools and lobbying regional administrations to pursue innovation-oriented educational reforms. Our analysis, grounded in Critical Discourse Analysis, reveals that EN21 propagated discourses of educational crisis, positioning educational innovation as a self-evident policy solution, both in classroom learning practices and school-level organizational arrangements. We conclude by examining the political implications of philanthropic governance within Southern European contexts, focusing on educational reforms, privatization 'of' and 'in' education, and the broader issues of participation and democracy.
The complexity of today's policy challenges and their tendency toward conflict require a repertoire to help policy actors overcome conflict-driven paralysis. This paper advocates for actionable, transformative DPA 2.0 by emphasizing the importance of a pragmatic, relational approach. Instead of aiming for consensus, this approach highlights the value of using conflict dynamics as a starting point for collaborative analysis and action. It highlights the importance of collaborative framing-reflection among involved actors to unravel the dynamics of policy conflict caused by differences in frames. A practical, framing-reflective approach in which actors identify and discuss their different frames that influence the dynamics of conflict-induced paralysis, particularly for policy actors who become stuck in collaboration on policy challenges marked by significant uncertainty. Assessment of the proposed approach - the Preconstruction Clinic - reveals a crucial but often overlooked link between uncertainty, vulnerability, and trust, along with the importance of creating an actionable environment where actors can engage in collaborative sensemaking and anticipate small, practical steps forward.
