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Short abstract

This paper examines how farmers in Thessaly, Greece imagine resilience amid climate and economic disruption, and how their situated futures clash with top-down policy visions, producing fragmented and unjust outcomes conceptualized as patchwork restorative justice.

Long abstract

Agrifood systems are increasingly defined through policy narratives of resilience and sustainability, yet the futures these narratives represent remain contested on the ground. This paper examines how rural communities in Thessaly, Greece, imagine viable futures under conditions of climatic disruption, economic volatility, and institutional uncertainty. It addresses two questions: how farmers envision resilience in their everyday practices and how these situated imaginaries interact with and become contentious against institutionalized transition pathways promoted by initiatives such as the EU Farm to Fork strategy, regional development plans, and NGO interventions. Drawing on fieldwork with farming communities, the paper shows that farmers rarely articulate resilience as systemic transformation. Instead, they imagine survival-oriented and regionally grounded futures based on pragmatic adjustments: cost reduction strategies in the plains and quality-oriented adaptation in more climate-vulnerable areas. Policy proposals, by contrast, largely advance techno-infrastructural futures centered on technological fixes and productivity transitions. These competing imaginaries rarely align. Policy visions overlook distributive, recognition, and procedural injustices experienced by farmers, generating fragmented and contested outcomes (Cifuentes et al., 2026; Flodin et al., 2025). We conceptualize this dynamic as patchwork restorative justice—a fragmented landscape of partial remedies that stabilizes the present instead of enabling alternative futures. By examining how agrifood futures are imagined, negotiated, and constrained, the paper contributes to STS debates on the plurality of futures (Stirling, 2019) and the conditions under which "alternatives" emerge in practice. The paper draws on thematic and discourse analysis of policy reports, interviews, focus groups, and a co-creation workshop with farming communities.