Reframing the Crisis: Beyond Climate to Civilisational Breakdown

The transformative approach proposed in this study recognises that the current crisis is multidimensional, with environmental degradation, social injustice, and global inequality constituting interconnected expressions of the same systemic logic. Framing it solely as a ‘climate crisis’ is insufficient unless the structural roots of the capitalist, extractivist, and patriarchal model are critically examined. The climate emergency affects territories and populations unevenly, disproportionately impacting women and girls in impoverished regions (Ihobe, 2018), and compound disasters, as documented during Hurricane Katrina and the COVID-19 pandemic, consistently intensify pre-existing inequalities based on race, gender, and class, determining who can recover and who is excluded from rebuilding (Phillips et al., 2020; Hartmann et al., 2015; Seneviratne et al., 2021).

From this perspective, the crisis is not a mere dysfunction of the system but a structural consequence of the Capitalocene (Arons, 2023): a historical regime that, since European colonial expansion, has exploited human labour and cheapened natural resources for capital accumulation. Leff (2004) interprets it as a ‘collapse of Western rationality’; Escobar (2012) as a ‘civilisational crisis’ of the industrial, patriarchal, and market-based Western model manifesting in climatic, energy, food, and social forms; and Riechmann (2016) as the ‘century of the great trial’, demanding a civilisational ‘swerve’ to prevent collapse.

Redefining the crisis in these terms is a precondition for any ecosocial transition. Unless the logic of unlimited growth and the commodification of life is reversed, climate and environmental action will remain insufficient, as the repeated failures of the Millennium Development Goals, the 2030 Agenda, and the Paris Agreements demonstrate.

Defining the Ecosocial Transition

This section addresses RQ1: What is the ‘ecosocial transition’, and from which epistemologies does it draw? The concept draws on disciplines as diverse as environmental sciences, political ecology, ecological and critical economics, philosophy, environmental humanities, and decolonial studies, forming an integrative framework to understand the interrelations between ecological, economic, social, and cultural dimensions of the crisis and its pathways of transformation. This approach conceives transition not as a linear process but as a plural, multidimensional shift that challenges the material, cultural, and epistemological foundations of the dominant system (Escobar, 2012).

In academic literature, these transformations take different names depending on linguistic and cultural contexts. In the Spanish-speaking world, the terms ‘transición ecosocial’ and ‘transiciones ecosociales’ are widely used, with contributions from Riechmann et al. (2018), Chaparro Escudero et al. (2020), Acosta et al. (2023), and Herrero (2024) addressing ecosocial pathways, justice, and ethical principles for communication and media. Kothari et al. (2019) and Demaria et al. (2021) further develop the notion of the ‘Pluriverse’ in Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary, gathering over a hundred post-development practices as horizons of transformation against the homogenising forces of development. In the English-speaking world, Brand and Wissen (2013; 2017) develop ‘socio-ecological transformation’ through their analysis of the ‘imperial mode of living’, arguing that overcoming Global North consumption patterns requires not only technological innovation but also democratic governance, social experimentation, and equitable redistribution. Both notions thus converge towards a shared horizon: rethinking social and economic organisation beyond capitalist models, within planetary limits and in pursuit of social and environmental justice (Braun, 2015; Laurent & Pochet, 2015; Larocque, 2023; Egmose et al., 2022).

As illustrated in Figure 1, the ecosocial transition rests on four interrelated pillars: political, economic, environmental, and socio-cultural, interacting across micro and macro levels of change (Larocque, 2023; Laurent & Pochet, 2015). Within this framework, Egmose et al. (2022) identify four action research dimensions:

• Problem-seeking, which makes ecosocial relations visible and asks How are we related?

• Aspirational, which expands the social imagination and questions How do we want to live and relate?

• Organisational, which focuses on how ecosocial transformation can be collectively structured and governed.

• Know-how, which emphasises learning through practice and asks How do practices transform our relations?

Figure 1: Pillars, dimensions, and post-development practices for ecosocial transition. Author’s own elaboration based on (1) Egmose et al. (2022), (2) Larocque (2023), and (3) Kothari et al. (2019).

Ecosocial transitions must be multiple and situated, shaped by diverse epistemological traditions that converge towards justice, care, and sustainability, in sharp contrast to a capitalist development model that presents itself as universal while disregarding local cultures and political systems. In Latin America, this has given rise to interdisciplinary perspectives articulating critical, decolonial, and territorial readings of the crisis (Ferreira et al., 2006; Segato, 2007; Mardones Barrera, 2016; Truchet-Aznar et al., 2025), encompassing Marxist materialism, constructivist theories, political ecology, and decolonial feminism. The following exemplify the most significant currents within the ‘Pluriverse’ (Kothari et al., 2019).

Ecosocialism, particularly Riechmann et al.’s (2018) ‘Barefoot Ecosocialism’, advocates post-fossil, low-tech societies guided by austerity and the fulfilment of basic needs within planetary boundaries. Ecofeminism links the domination of women and the exploitation of nature as interconnected outcomes of patriarchal and capitalist systems, urging a revaluation of care and relational practices (Mies & Shiva, 1993). The climate and environmental justice frames climate change as a justice issue, warning that without equity, mitigation strategies risk deepening inequalities through energy costs, forced displacement, and exclusion from decision-making (Resnik, 2022). Degrowth proposes a planned reduction of energy and resource use, rejecting infinite growth in favour of equity, sustainability, and collective well-being, particularly addressing North-South asymmetries (Hickel, 2020). Indigenous and traditional knowledges, such as the Andean ‘Buen Vivir’, embody centuries of co-evolution with nature through holistic ecological, technological, and cosmological worldviews (Gavilán Pinto, 2012). Finally, food and energy sovereignty challenge dependence on privatised global markets, asserting communities’ rights to manage land, seeds, water, and energy as commons (Del Bene et al., 2019; Gutiérrez Escobar, 2019). Together, these currents form an integrative framework that bridges critical reflection, collective imagination, and transformative action towards socially and environmentally just futures.

Communicating for the Ecosocial Transition

In this sense, communication plays a crucial role in advancing ecosocial transition processes by shaping collective imaginaries and enabling social transformation. While related traditions such as participatory communication and communication for social change, exemplified by the Latin American ‘educomunicación’ legacy, have conceived communication as a liberating, community-based practice oriented towards empowerment and the common good (Kaplún, 1987), ecosocial communication extends this foundation in three significant ways. First, it situates communication within a civilisational and systemic diagnosis rather than a sectoral one, addressing not isolated environmental or social problems but the structural logic that generates them. Second, it draws on plural epistemologies, particularly from the Global South, as constitutive of the framework itself instead of mere case studies. Third, it proposes communication as an ontological praxis (Escobar & Chaparro, 2020): not merely a tool for dissemination but as the very act of co-constructing alternative worlds. In this way, ecosocial communication moves beyond frameworks that work within existing development paradigms, explicitly rejecting the growth model and the commodification of life that underpins it.

It has the essential task of counteracting the prevailing storyline that there is no future beyond capitalism, that collapse is inevitable, and that individual action is futile. Against these paralysing imaginaries, its purpose is to foster awareness, civic engagement, and resistance to extractivist pressures that threaten territories and communities. As Herrero (2024) argues, imagination plays a vital role in collective transition processes, as it allows societies to envision fair and sustainable futures within the ecological limits of the planet. Therefore, this section addresses RQ2: What roles can communication play in advancing ecosocial transition processes? It proposes that the role of communication for ecosocial transition is to recover the narrative of possible ecosocial futures and to open pathways for collective transformation.

Recovering the Narrative: From Eco-dystopian Imaginaries to Ecosocial Transitions

Narratives, as a fundamental component of human communication, play a crucial role in conveying meaning around environmental issues. Through them, people communicate experiences, beliefs, and cultural worldviews, providing a framework for decision-making but also shaping collective identities, perpetuating stereotypes, and restricting perspectives (Perrino, 2023). This imaginative capacity is nourished by the discourses, symbols, and narratives embedded in media culture, which Kellner (2020) identifies as systems of ideological production capable of shaping identities, values, and norms through contemporary platforms.

These imaginaries influence how societies envision the future. Numerous Hollywood productions of recent decades, such as Don’t Look Up (2021), Snowpiercer (2013), and The Day After Tomorrow (2004), reinforce apocalyptic imaginaries in which catastrophe appears inevitable, and humanity faces near extinction as a result of environmental collapse and political inaction. More recently, these narratives have merged with dystopian explorations of artificial intelligence and techno-authoritarianism, as in Ex Machina (2014), Her (2013), and Interstellar (2014), where algorithmic control and planetary escape emerge as symbols of civilisation’s failure to coexist with the living world. Inspirational or utopian narratives envisioning ecosocial futures remain far less common, revealing the difficulty of collectively imagining hopeful horizons amid ecological crisis.

The cultural impact of such dystopian productions is significant yet ambivalent. While they can attract attention and raise awareness, they may equally foster fear, distrust, or disengagement among audiences already saturated with catastrophic messages (Leiserowitz, 2004). In a media environment saturated with conflicting narratives, alarmist framings risk provoking a boomerang effect, deepening cynicism and social paralysis rather than motivating action. Several authors, therefore, highlight the importance of coupling alarming content with messages of efficacy and credible pathways for change (Leiserowitz, 2004; Nisbet, 2011).

This points to a deeper problem: the contemporary civilisational narrative is itself in crisis. As Mark Fisher contends, ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism […] the widespread idea that capitalism is not only the only viable economic system, but that it is impossible even to imagine an alternative to it’ (Fisher, 2009, p. 13). This framework permeates media culture, where cinema, advertising, and music portray the market as a natural state of affairs rather than an ideology. Even representations of ecological collapse reproduce this logic, aestheticising catastrophe as spectacle or opportunity, as in Wall-E (2008), where capital re-emerges as capable of restoring life (Fisher, 2009, p. 32). Popular culture’s apparent critiques of capitalism frequently operate as what Fisher calls ‘interpassive anti-capitalism’, allowing audiences to experience dissent without enacting change, absorbing protest and reconfiguring it as entertainment while reinforcing resignation and consumerist despair.

Reframing the Future: From Individual Escape to Collective Transformation

In Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, Rushkoff (2022) argues that economic elites respond to ecosocial collapse not with collective solutions but with individualist escape strategies: luxury bunkers, private enclaves in places like New Zealand or Hawai’i, and fantasies of digital immortality. Examples include Mark Zuckerberg’s bunker in Hawai’i, Peter Thiel’s plans in New Zealand, and the extravagant shelters of influencers such as the Tate brothers and MrBeast (Baxter, 2025). Transcending this elitist worldview requires, he concludes, rediscovering community, mutual aid, and human interdependence as the only real path to survival.

Recovering the narrative is the central task of communication for the ecosocial transition. This requires what Escobar and Chaparro (2020) describe as an ‘ontological praxis in communication’, restoring the original sense of communicare: to share, to relate, and to build community. Communication thus becomes a living, relational practice that transcends media enterprises or digital platforms, creating spaces of collective imagination and the co-creation of alternative imaginaries grounded in care, coexistence, and the common good. It also assumes a narrative function, making visible transformative worldviews and linking the ecosocial crisis to lived experiences through action-based storytelling (Meyer et al., 2020).

New narrative frameworks such as Gómez’s Collective Journey (2019) move beyond the individualistic Hero’s Journey towards collective, participatory storytelling in which the protagonist is a community, the antagonist is structural, and change emerges from solidarity rather than exceptional individuals, generating affective bonds, shared meaning, and processes of social self-organisation.

In line with Jenkins et al.’s (2020) concept of civic imagination, the role of communication ultimately lies in making ongoing transitions visible, from renewable energy cooperatives to sustainable transport and responsible consumption networks, demonstrating that change is neither utopian nor deferred but an active and tangible process already underway (Chaparro Escudero et al., 2020).

Practices of Communication for Ecosocial Transition

Across diverse contexts, these four cases illustrate how communication for ecosocial transition operates as a relational, participatory, and transformative practice. The study of Serna et al. (2024) exemplifies the community transition dimension of ecosocial communication, showing how everyday communicative practices sustain collective imagination and structural change. The study examines community-based initiatives in Spain: the processes of neo-ruralisation and natural wine production (Western Sierra of Madrid and Southern Sierra de Gredos), the agroecological supply systems (Catalonia), and the community urban gardens integrated into a Municipal Program (Madrid). These initiatives promote alternative ways of inhabiting, producing, and consuming. Crucially, transformation arises from within everyday communicative acts embedded in collective practice: weekly assemblies negotiating food prices between producers and consumers, WhatsApp networks that reorganised agroecological supply chains during the COVID-19 lockdowns, festivals linking agroecological products to cultural identity, and soil care workshops that produce new shared temporalities and ethical sensibilities. These communicative practices are analytically significant because they do not merely ‘spread information’ about ecosocial transition; they enact it by co-constructing alternative ontologies of nature-society relations from within daily life. At the same time, the study documents important limits: these initiatives are embedded in capitalist market logics they cannot fully escape; institutional support remains fragile and discontinuous; and participation tends to reproduce class and cultural biases despite aspirations to inclusivity – tensions that ecosocial communication must engage transparently rather than idealise.

In Ecuador, Alli Kawsaipak Jampikuna/Medicine for Good Living (Tornay Márquez, 2020) embodies an educommunicative approach that integrates local wisdom, spirituality, and environmental justice, turning communication into a space of healing, learning, and cultural autonomy. The intervention trained Indigenous women healers from the Corporación de Taitas y Mamas del Chimborazo to produce a pilot radio programme broadcast on the Kichwa-language community station Escuelas Radiofónicas Populares del Ecuador (ERPE) in Riobamba. The communicative form chosen (participatory radio in the Indigenous language, produced by and for the community, grounded in ancestral healing knowledge) is itself an ecosocial communicative act: it restores epistemic authority to knowledges historically inferiorised by colonial science and patriarchal power, and it enacts Buen Vivir not as an abstract concept but as a programme about plant medicine and community care. The experience also revealed structural obstacles such as patriarchal barriers to women’s public speech, discriminatory institutional logics, and precarious access to technology. These logics underscore the material conditions ecosocial communication must contend with. At the level of communication practice, this case demonstrates that the medium, the language, the speaker, and the knowledge system are all dimensions of the communicative form, and it matters who has access to telling stories, from what frameworks of thought, and on what platforms and channels.

Similarly, community-supported agriculture initiatives such as La Vía Campesina (The Peasant Way) connect international networks for food sovereignty across Latin America, Europe, and Africa and illustrate how food sovereignty operates as an explicitly communicative project. Rosset and Martínez-Torres (2013) document how LVC’s peasant-to-peasant methodology functions as a horizontal knowledge-exchange practice that simultaneously transmits agroecological techniques and produces counter-hegemonic ideological consensus against corporate food regimes and agrarian power relations. Communication here is the constitutive practice through which peasant subjectivity and solidarity are produced and reproduced. LVC’s use of community media, international solidarity networks, and narrative reframing, contrasting ‘the green deserts’ of industrial monoculture with the image of diverse campesino agroecology, represents ecosocial communication in its most explicitly counter-hegemonic mode. These initiatives act as spaces of politicisation and resistance, using community media, newsletters, markets, and festivals to link sustainability with cultural and structural transformation. Yet this communicative model faces structural limits. Horizontal knowledge exchange depends on sustained organisational infrastructure, and when funding cycles end, gains tend to revert. Moreover, as agroecology gains visibility, its communicative framing risks co-optation by greenwashing strategies that strip it of its political and territorial content (Rosset and Martínez-Torres, 2013).

Finally, the Kichwa community of Sarayaku in Ecuador exemplifies a comprehensive communicative strategy that integrates ontological assertion, legal advocacy, and Indigenous audiovisual production to defend their territory from extractivism. The Kawsak Sacha declaration, defining the Amazon rainforest as a living, thinking, and conscious being with rights, functions simultaneously as a cosmological claim, a legal-political instrument, and a communicative framework that anchors all of Sarayaku’s public action. What makes this case analytically distinctive for ecosocial communication is the way this declaration challenges the anthropocentrism underpinning both extractivist propaganda and conventional environmental communication, insisting instead on an ontology in which non-human entities are communicative agents rather than mute resources. Sarayaku’s appropriation of audiovisual technology through Eriberto Gualinga’s Selvas Producciones, the institutional communication body Waktachi, and digital platforms constitutes what Vanegas-Toala (2020) terms ‘ecoterritorial communicative praxis’: the use of contemporary media tools to assert a biocentric ontology irreducible to Western environmentalism. The community’s experience equally documents the material conditions of communicative vulnerability, including the need for institutional infrastructure built incrementally since the Caso Sarayaku, the risks of co-optation by NGOs and carbon market intermediaries, and the persistent tension between accessing global media visibility and maintaining communicative autonomy from narratives that frame oil exploitation as development (Ruales Flores, 2024).

Together, these experiences reveal that communication for ecosocial transition operates as a relational, participatory, and transformative practice: one that co-constructs alternative ontologies of nature-society relations (Serna et al., 2024), restores epistemic authority to historically inferiorised knowledges (Tornay Márquez, 2020), produces counter-hegemonic subjectivities and solidarities (Rosset and Martínez-Torres, 2013), and asserts the communicative agency of non-human entities as a condition of territorial and political struggle (Vanegas-Toala, 2020). Across all four cases, communication is not merely a vehicle for disseminating ecosocial imaginaries but the very practice through which they are enacted.

It is therefore possible to affirm that the ecosocial approach expands the boundaries of the field precisely because communication is understood not only as a vehicle for spreading ideas but also as the practice through which alternative worlds are enacted. It moves beyond media-centred or risk-based framings towards transformative, participatory, and community-driven modes of communication that reimagine the relationship between humans, technology, and the living world. However, communication for the ecosocial transition faces challenges that extend far beyond the complex task of imagining futures beyond capitalism. These challenges are deeply intertwined with the dynamics of the contemporary media ecosystem, an environment dominated by platformisation, the attention economy, disinformation, and data extraction, which privileges the most sensationalist and negative content.

In a communicative landscape where users spend an average of six hours per day on digital devices (Kemp, 2023) and algorithms determine cultural visibility, data have become the central commodity of an economy driven by targeted advertising and platform optimisation (Bergemann & Bonatti, 2024). As a result, both media organisations and independent creators operate within systems where visibility is increasingly governed by opaque algorithmic logics and commercial agreements rather than by the social relevance or quality of content (Bartlett et al., 2023; Duffy et al., 2019).

This dependence on digital platforms contributes to a broader process of civic atomisation, transforming citizens into spectators within what Sampedro (2018) describes as a form of ‘digital capitalism’, a model sustained by hyperconnectivity, data extractivism, and an overabundance of trivial information that distracts from issues of real social consequence. The growing influence of technological oligopolies on global politics and public discourse, as illustrated by Elon Musk’s interference in the 2024 US elections, underscores how these corporations act as powerful mediators of collective imaginaries.

Within such environments, comment sections and social interactions often function as echo chambers rather than spaces for deliberation or correction, reinforcing polarisation and amplifying denialist narratives, such as the persistence of climate change denial in countries where scientific consensus is strongest (Walter et al., 2018). Ultimately, as Rhodes (2022) warns, social-media platforms have become the primary gateways for misinformation, where algorithmic filter bubbles intensify falsehoods and obstruct the emergence of informed, transformative dialogue essential for an ecosocial transition. Taken together, these reflections address RQ3: What contributions and challenges does this perspective pose for the field and practice of environmental communication?