As the UN’s Summit of the Future commences in September 2024, the question of how to represent future generations in policy is taking centre stage in discussions about global governance.

The Summit aims to “bring world leaders together to forge a new international consensus on how we deliver a better present and safeguard the future,” referencing the ‘atmosphere of mistrust’ and ‘outdated structures’ that currently present a barrier to effective governance on key existential issues such as climate change. Ahead of the Summit, the UN has released the Declaration on Future Generations – a commitment to govern in the present on behalf of those who are not yet alive to advocate for themselves.

The concept of ‘future generations’ has emerged as a potent narrative tool promising to transcend traditional political divides and imbue questions of longterm governance with a renewed sense of moral urgency, empathy, and intergenerational solidarity. Governing with our future descendants in mind has become a necessity, many now believe, because so many of our problems do not merely transcend borders and sovereignties but stretch far into the future as well. Chief among these problems is climate change, the consequences of which will be felt the hardest by those not yet alive.

“Climate change is, of course, a collective action problem, but it’s also a problem of transition – of how to make intertemporal trade-offs between generations,” says Thomas Hale, Professor of Political Science at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University.

Hale’s recently published book, Long Problems: Climate Change and the Challenges of Governing Across Time, argues that just as globalisation has shown us how geographically ‘wide’ modern political problems are, the ‘length’ of problems has also extended across time. Climate change, Hale’s instructive example, will unfold past the lifespan of anyone alive today, and whereas we were once reliant on real-time observation, we now have advanced computer simulations that help us model developments into the future.

Hale argues that this transformation in our understanding of long problems calls for equally transformative changes to governance, while nevertheless acknowledging that this is easier said than done. He points to three significant barriers: the ‘early action paradox’, ‘institutional lag’, and ‘shadow interests’. The first term highlights the difficulty of taking ‘early action’ by establishing preventive measures for problems whose effects are not yet felt. For Hale, this is the hardest for two reasons. The first is uncertainty: we can never know exactly what the effects are going to be if no action is taken, which fosters conformist, short-term thinking. The second is a lack of salience. “People have a thousand other things higher on the agenda because they happen today or tomorrow,” as Hale puts it.

Climate change, to reuse that example, has a determined length to it. “Most of the carbon that was burnt in the first locomotives and steam engines is still up there, and it’s absorbed very slowly by oceans and trees and the natural cycles. So that creates a fundamental time component to this problem that we can’t change no matter what we do.”

To Hale, the key point here is that the early action paradox means we focus only on the things we see and feel, such as forest fires, rising sea levels, or droughts that are often experienced as short-term events.

The second barrier, ‘institutional lag’, refers to the rigidity of existing institutions and the kind of solutions they produce. Hale elaborates: “Whenever we want to address a political challenge, typically we have a policy, a regulation, a law, a new agency, maybe an international organisation. Institutions are how we structure interactions and problem solving across society, yet they need to be durable to be effective – they need to be ‘sticky’.”

“Of course, as time goes on, this stickiness can become dysfunctional because it creates a gap between the nature of the problem, which can evolve in all sorts of unexpected ways, and the institutions we set up,” Hale says.

One example of such dysfunctional stickiness is the UN Security Council, whose veto-holding nations reflect the geopolitical situation in the aftermath of the Second World War, rather than the present. This hinders its ability to effectively maintain international peace and security, as evident in the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. It’s a situation that, as Hale argues, exemplifies institutional dysfunction that is exceedingly difficult to reform.

Finally, ‘shadow interests’. These are the interests of unborn, unrepresented future generations. As Hale puts it, “In politics, lots of solutions, or ‘changes’, occur because a group of people with grievances force it through. Even people who don’t have much power at all are important in driving policy change. If you do not exist yet, you can’t do that, meaning that the interests of those people are only shadows in our politics.”

This is what the UN’s Declaration, and indeed many of the principles of the Summit, are expected in part to address. Although the climate crisis has imbued the issue of future generations with a pressing relevance, the meeting will be a culmination of developments stretching back decades.

“The term ‘future generations’ was referenced directly in the Brundtland definition of sustainable development in 1987 – defined as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’,” says Daniella Tilbury, Professor and Chair of the Network for Institutions and Leaders for Future Generations.

She explains how this was further reinforced by the UNESCO Declaration on the Responsibility of the Present Generations Towards Future Generations, adopted in 1997, requiring that present generations should preserve the cultural diversity of humankind and have the responsibility to identify, protect, and safeguard tangible (and intangible) cultural heritage, and to transmit this common heritage to future generations.

Yet despite these early developments, governing for future generations hasn’t really been a part of the mainstream political conversation, says Tilbury. “Ten years ago, the term ‘future generations’ was not part of any political narrative. It was primarily used by social actors and activists seeking to bring indigenous thinking and the Seventh Generation Principle into the mainstream. It’s been on the fringes for a very long time,” she explains. This principle, which has become a touchstone for much of the discussion around future generations, is based on the native American Iroquois philosophy that decisions taken today should benefit descendants far into the future.

Over the last decade, Tilbury has observed the growth and spread of the representational agenda for ‘shadow interests’, moving from activist circles to the halls of government. Countries like Wales, with their Wellbeing of Future Generations Act, and Hungary, with a Parliamentary Commissioner for Future Generations, have pioneered how governing for future generations can be articulated in practice. The UK and Scotland, among other European nations, are establishing cross-party parliamentary groups to ensure future generations are represented in government decision-making. Tilbury herself served as the Future Generations Commissioner in Gibraltar, working to embed this concept in government actions.

She sees climate and environmental litigation, where activists seek to obtain long-term environmental protections through legal precedents, as the newest outgrowth that might eventually find its way into mainstream politics. “In Colombia, we see Future Generations v. the Ministry of the Environment attempting to protect the Amazon rainforest. In Germany, litigation against car manufacturers aims to protect not just current air quality but also the impact of climate change on those yet to be born,” she says.

While the last few years have seen progress in turning ideals into achievements, Tilbury levels that “those translating these concepts into practical decision-making are still experimenting.”

What new forms these experiments will take in coming years remains to be seen. But both Tilbury and Hale believe that they will need to include forms of more deliberative democracy. “The participation of citizens in defining the future and informing and shape decision-making,” as Tilbury puts it, may have potential for influencing the development of more future-facing modes of governance. Hale proposes organising representative groups of citizens in deliberative spaces, tasking them with addressing long-term issues and providing input for proposals to the legislature.

“We should not necessarily give away decision-making power, but maybe proposal power. It is not a stretch from what we do already, which is our juries deciding on questions of innocence or guilt of criminals,” Hale says, before continuing: “Fundamentally, human brains are conflicted. You can save for the future, or you can spend it all on a big night out. We have both tendencies, and so it is therefore incumbent on our institutions to find ways to cultivate the long-term thinking that exists in all of us.”

With regards to the Summit of the Future, Hale is optimistic. He believes it has the potential to fix some of the flaws in the multilateral system. “The summit won’t magically erase geopolitical competition, reshape global finance, or offer profound lessons overnight. Instead, it represents an ongoing effort, with the hope that each gathering, including this one, contributes meaningfully to that broader project.”

Hale believes that the Declaration on Future Generations, and the implementations it requires (such as an envoy for future generations, and an ongoing forum for member states to share best practices) can be a catalyst for change on the domestic level. There are parliamentary groups and communities for the future and future generations in about 40 countries. Hale sees no reason why that couldn’t be 190 countries in 10 years.

Examples from the history of multilateral cooperation might paint a picture of what’s to come. With the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a single document grew into an apparatus of human rights institutions operating at national, international, and regional levels. Although the underlying issue of human rights violations persists, Hale argues the Declaration has contributed to a decrease in abuses over time. Same with the environment. Before the 1971 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, few countries had environmental protection agencies. It was this international summit that put the topic on the agenda, and from there on onto the front burner for many countries.

Tilbury is perhaps less enthusiastic that governance for future generations can follow a similar trajectory of success. In assessing the potential outcomes of the Summit, she strikes a cautious tone, tempered by an acknowledgement of the complexities involved. “I don’t have much hope,” she admits. “We are living in a very fragile state and need leaders who can see beyond the immediate.” One of her concerns is that the language of the future, and in turn advocacy for future generations, will be “watered down by tying the notion to a lot of existing issues.” She brings up the failures of the UN’s SDGs, or Sustainable Development Goals, as an example. Despite having generated significant engagement among NGOs, educational institutions, and local levels of government, Tilbury doesn’t believe enough progress has been made in embedding the SDGs deeply in governance, despite decades of effort.

“The future generations agenda is in its infancy compared to sustainable development. We need to acknowledge this and scaffold societal changes towards this ambition,” she says.

Although the space for future generations may be small in our current systems of governance, the next steps towards expanding their role are clear, Tilbury argues. They will involve appointing special envoys, commissioners, and parliamentary representatives dedicated to future generations, who can consistently remind decision-makers of this critical agenda. And, in Europe at least, it looks like these next steps will soon be taken. In July 2024, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced the appointment of a commissioner whose responsibilities will include ‘ensuring intergenerational fairness’. Regardless of the specifics on what form intergenerational fairness will take, the clearest possible insight is that institutions of governance will need reform to adequately look after the interests of future humans. As Tilbury puts it, “What we need is a high-level discussion about an alternative form of governance. Looking at the problems that exist and how we’re going to address them, we actually need to stand back and say, the problems we have at the moment have been a result of the current form of governance.”

Hale ends on a similar acknowledgement: “It is change or be changed. We could do this proactively, or we could wait and see what the consequences of the turbulence in the world – climate change, technological change, demographic change – will mean to our societies and our institutions.”

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