Send message to Author

Short abstract

This paper theorises "romantic listening" — a governance mechanism through which Indigenous imaginaries in Amazon mission policy are received with moral warmth yet institutionally deactivated, absorbing alternative futures within hopeful inclusion without disturbing hegemonic direction-setting.

Long abstract

This paper responds directly to the panel's call to unpack what happens to alternative futures when they enter hegemonic policy arenas. It examines the governance of Amazon+10, a Brazilian mission-oriented innovation policy framed around a "sustainable Amazonian bioeconomy," through Critical Discourse Analysis of verbatim transcripts from four panels convened at the 78th United Nations General Assembly in September 2023.

Iterative abductive coding identifies three competing sociotechnical imaginaries: a techno-scientific imaginary centred on satellite monitoring; a bioeconomy-led green-growth imaginary that codes the forest as financial assets; and an Indigenous-led imaginary grounded in Bem Viver, territorial self-determination, and claims to colonial debt. Fine-grained analysis of lexical choice, transitivity, modality, and intertextuality reveals how the first two imaginaries form a hegemonic bloc through five structural mechanisms: compositional exclusion, genre architecture incompatible with genocide claims or ontological refusals of property relations, lexical hegemony, moderator genre-guarding, and "there is no alternative" structure modality.

The paper's central conceptual contribution is the concept of "romantic listening," named by an Indigenous leader in the corpus and theorised here as a specific governance mechanism. Romantic listening designates the practice of receiving Indigenous speech with visible moral acknowledgement and genuine warmth, while redirecting substantive governance claims into implementation detail and absorbing them within a legitimating frame of hopeful inclusion, leaving the hegemonic direction-setting architecture undisturbed.

This speaks directly to the panel's concern that invocations of alternative futures risk a romanticised relationship with communities assumed to think otherwise, while leaving the institutional conditions that determine what is thinkable entirely intact.