Ecological self-awareness and environmental imagination in (post)authoritarian contexts
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3846/bm.2026.2523Abstract
This article examines how authoritarian and post-authoritarian regimes reshape human–nature relations by constraining ecological self-awareness through narrowed environmental imagination. Its central theoretical contribution is the governance–imagination–subjectivity (G–I–S) spiral, a framework that explains how techniques of measurement, standardization, securitization, and visual staging narrow the field of environmental meaning and thereby condition subject formation. In this article, ecological self-awareness denotes reflexive recognition of human embeddedness in socio-ecological interdependence, while environmental imagination denotes the representational and affective repertoire through which nature is made visible, audible, and politically meaningful. The article conceptualizes authoritarian environmentalism as a sensory-institutional lock-in in which administrative legibility, aesthetic singularization, and obedient subjectification reinforce one another. Combining philosophical inquiry, critical discourse analysis, visual-aesthetic reading, and comparative historical cases (Soviet transformation of nature and the Aral Sea; Maoist“ man conquers nature”; post-apartheid constitutional environmental rights and the Working for Water programme), the article shows how hydrosocial complexity is simplified and slow violence accumulates under high-modernist mobilization. Yet counter-representations, local knowledge, and participatory monitoring can reopen plural environmental imagination and reactivate ecological self-awareness. Sustainability, the article argues, depends not only on metrics, but also on aesthetic plurality, memory, democratic participation, and justice-oriented institutions.
Keywords:
political ecology, authoritarian environmentalism, ecological self-awareness, environmental imagination, slow violenceHow to Cite
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