Events

The Club of Rome EU-Chapter is pleased to invite its Members and other interested professionals on environmental sustainability from EU institutions, academia, private sector and civil society, to the 105th edition of its Aurelio Peccei Lectures & Dialogues.
The book ‘Captured Futures’ by Maarten A. Hajer and Jeroen Oomen argue that environmental politics will fail without new stories. It analyses environmental politics as a theatre play, in which people are caught in roles they need to perform with scripts they need to follow. The authors suggest dramaturgical tools to break out of environmental politics' narrow capture. “The concept of a ‘captured future’ shows brilliantly how environmental politics has become trapped in ways that both reproduce its own failure and restrict people’s ability to imagine alternatives” (book review in Nature).
Maarten Hajer is former director-general of The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) and a former member of the UN’s International Resource Panel. Jeroen Oomen is assistant professor at the Urban Futures Studio of Utrecht University.
This provocative book will be analysed and discussed with the authors, with two discussants, and with members of the Club of Rome EU-Chapter and other professionals from EU institutions, academia and societal organisations.

Prof. Maarten Hajer will introduce the new book "Captured Futures: Rethinking the Drama of Environmental Politics" he wrote with Jeroen Oomen. He argues that “It is time to admit environmental politics 'as we know it' cannot deliver. It is time for a new, more cultural approach to environmental politics which could have more leverage on the societal imagination.”
This provocative statement will be analysed and discussed by members of the Club of Rome EU-Chapter and other professionals, from EU institutions, academia and societal organisations. After the introduction of the book, an interactive discussion will be moderated by Karl Falkenberg, President Club of Rome EU-Chapter.