From Policy Making to Planetary Survival: Charting Speculative Pathways to Combat Climate Crisis in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future

Abstract

Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020) is a deeply speculative fiction that reimagines climate policies to mitigate escalating environmental crisis and climate change. The focus of this paper is to analyse the implementation of radical policy interventions such as-the carbon coin and large-scale geoengineering as strategies to help mitigate climate crisis analysed through the framework of United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) particularly SDG 13(Climate Action), SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) and SDG 17 (partnership for the Goals). Robinson’s narrative envisions a fictional UN-convened ministry tasked to combat planetary-scale issues like global warming, deforestation, carbon emission and restoration of natural. The novel conceptualizes the planet as a global village which advocates equality for all beings - both humans and non-humans. Drawing on the theories of environmental criticism, climate governance and environmental economics this paper explores how speculative fiction can act a blueprint for radical and plausible climate reforms. The novels employment of carbon coin and geoengineering strategies to reconstruct a dying planet offers an alternative framework that challenges market – driven economic stagnation. Hence, the novel The Ministry for the Future not only acts as a literary parameter to analyse climate crisis but also serves as a literary tool to reimagine and reinterpret SDGs in an era of environmental degradation.