Excerto : «(...) Locking in the long view
It is only right to acknowledge the debt this wave of experimentation owes to fiction writers, who have regularly grappled with the future as a political project. In 2005 the author Kurt Vonnegut lamented that there had never been a Cabinet Secretary for the Future, while Kim Stanley Robinson’s book The Ministry for the Future follows an international organisation of that name tasked with addressing climate change. But writers such as Vonnegut and Robinson have been joined in such imaginings by a host of real-world agitators seeking to tilt the balance in favour of future generations.
One approach gaining ground is the strategy of creating a body or a role (not unlike our own minister) with responsibility for future-facing action. In 2015, Sweden tasked a minister with temporary responsibility for future challenges, while Finland has long had a Parliamentary Committee for the Future. Back in the UK, the Welsh government appointed their own future generations commissioner in 2016.
Elsewhere, the judicial system has been the site of efforts to counteract the short-termism of parliaments, often to safeguard the environment. In 2021, Germany’s highest court issued a ruling asserting that the country’s climate change laws violated fundamental freedoms by shifting the burden of curbing emissions to the young.
There have been novel moves to “measure” the intergenerational fairness of policies. The School of International Futures recently developed a framework to help civil servants test whether policies are fair to future generations, which has since been adopted by the Portuguese president Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
At Westminster the question of intergenerational fairness has been taken up by crossbench peer John Bird, who has been championing a Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill for the UK. Among other duties, the bill seeks to establish a Joint Parliamentary Committee on Future Generations and would require public bodies to publish future generations impact assessments.
There will never be a panacea for chronic short-termism, given the strength of the institutional and cognitive biases which underpin it. Yet this patchwork of experiments does hint at a sea change in attitudes, as well as a growing appetite to think more systematically and ambitiously about governing in line with a nation’s future interests.
To these experiments we add our own Minister for the Future; a blank canvas upon which more ambitious ideas or projects can be projected. The very act of creating permission for sucthinking in mainstream policy discourse helps to shift the Overton window—or the policy “possibility space”—which has become gradually more restrictive as successive crises fatigue us.(...)».
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