The starting point of my project is the difficulty to imagine political alternatives to the status quo in times of climate catastrophe and related feelings of political despair in western industrialised societies. While I’m asking how radical social transformation can be imagined under these circumstances, I’ m sceptical towards demands of inventing the future and the hegemonic narrative of sustainable development as they are informed by Eurocentric notions of history and thus perpetuate colonial imaginaries. Looking at the recent wave of climate protests that mobilised around a growing concern for the future with the post- and decolonial critique of progress and historicism in the back of my mind, I’m wondering: Are there ways of imagining liberation that don’t depend on the certainty of a better future? Can we think about progressive politics beyond the master narrative of historical progress? Could a pluralised understanding of time and history help us out of an imaginative impasse that increasingly structures public debates: the binary of fatalistic doomism on one hand and of cruel eco-optimism on the other? As multiple interlinked crises continue to escalate, I believe that these questions are relevant not only for climate activists but that imaginative resilience – the capacity to imagine the possibility of radical transformation despite uncertainty and precarious futures – is a crucial aspect yet often overlooked in critical theory and debates about climate change. My hypothesis is that the hegemonic and progress-oriented western environmental imagination can learn from a dialogue with traditions ‘at the margins’ in this regard – e.g. indigenous cosmologies, queer theory and the Black radical tradition – especially when it comes to the role of non-linear and non-teleological temporalities for alternative concepts of liberation.