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Paper short abstract

This paper proposes a “foreclosed futures” framework to advance L and D epistemically and politically. This framework shifts the core question from “what was lost?” to “what can now never be?” recentring analysis on biographical life plans and extinct possible futures.

Paper long abstract

This paper argues that institutionalised Loss and Damage (L and D) mechanisms reproduce epistemic injustice by privileging technocratic, retrospective accounting. This approach systematically overlooks how disasters extinguish vulnerable people’s intimate hopes, aspirations, and planned futures. I propose a “foreclosed futures” framework to advance L and D epistemically and politically. This framework shifts the core question from “what was lost?” to “what can now never be?” recentring analysis on biographical life plans and extinct possible futures. Understanding foreclosed futures demands “desire-based” (Tuck 2009) biographical methods that recast climate-affected peoples as future-oriented agents and makes visible how disasters erase personal life trajectories. A foreclosed futures approach reframes the slow attrition of life plans as a form of structural temporal injustice, questioning whose futures were deemed disposable and how they were ‘disposed of’ in post-disaster contexts. Finally, by empirically documenting which futures are closed for whom it provides a targeted critique of the systems that actively cancel futures, revealing that such foreclosure is not inevitable.