Climate Change as a Crisis of Recognition: Alternative Climate Imaginaries for Food Sovereignty in Brazil

Abstract

Despite growing consensus that today’s socio-ecological crisis demands transformative change, institutional responses remain largely focused on technology-based incremental improvements within existing systems. Such an approach fails to address the systemic causes of climate change and their structural consequences. Recent literature frames the lack of transformative action as a “crisis of imagination,” yet often limits imagination to individual or expert domains, neglecting its socio-political dimensions. Arguing that the crisis of imagination is also a crisis of recognition, this chapter highlights that Indigenous peoples, local communities, and grassroots organisations have long envisioned and enacted alternative socio-ecological imaginaries. Drawing from the concepts of climate imaginaries and prefigurative politics, the chapter explores the transformative potential of alternative imaginaries from a political ontology perspective. The empirical context of the study is the “Teia dos Povos” (freely translated as Web of Peoples), a network of communities, territories, peoples and political organisations across rural and urban Brazil, with the aim of formulating paths to collective emancipation through food sovereignty. Through a grounded theoretical analysis of primary source material produced by Teia dos Povos, the chapter demonstrates how alternative climate imaginaries disrupt dominant ontologies, opening space through prefigurative politics for more just and ecological practices here and now.