Deciding About the Future? Embedding the Long Term in Today’s Governance

Abstract

Governments often need to pay attention to the very long term when they develop new policies or take crucial decisions. This attention for the long term becomes especially prominent in the field of climate change and sustainability transitions. But also in other fields, policies may have consequences over multiple generations, like housing, infrastructure or welfare state reform. Meanwhile, governments face several barriers that make it difficult to anticipate the long term; barriers such as poor political leadership and weak political incentives to invest in the long-term (Bonfiglioli & Gancia, 2013; Hovi, Sprinz, & Underdal, 2009), inconsistent valuing of the future compared to the present including the obstacle of discount rates (Mazmanian et al., 2013), limited long-term strategic planning, and institutional fragmentation (Van de Meene, Brown, & Farrelly, 2011). This panel aims to contribute to the section about Knowledge and Governance because it focuses on the important governance challenge of nòt knowing; of dealing with future uncertainties, and deciding about long-term challenges in today’s policies and investments. Different long-term challenges arise when temporal scales need to be bridged. Literature discusses, among others, the challenge of assessing the long-term consequences of policies (Sprinz 2009), the accountability challenge of paying attention to the long-term versus responding to short-term needs (Goetz 2014), the long lead-time of certain solutions (Meuleman and in ’t Veld 2010), the unknown future circumstances and issues (Abbott 2005), and the long lifespan of solutions (Herder and Wijnia 2012). Responses are also different and include designing new institutions (Tonn 1996), improving strategic foresight capacities (Boston 2017), improving scenario-based decision support tools (Rickards et al. 2014), embedding learning processes within organizations (Neuvonen and Ache 2014), or insulating policies from day-to-day democratic politics by installing separate programs with different time horizons (Dewulf and Termeer 2015). But it remains clear that future uncertainties cannot and should not be ruled out. This calls for more adaptive policy processes, governmental organizations, and institutions (Tschakert et al. 2016; Nair and Howlett 2017). The panel discusses both theoretical as well as empirically tested approaches for enabling long-term governance. Specific questions that the panel will address are: What type of leadership do we need for addressing long-term problems and taking forward-looking decisions?; What institutional and policy reform proposals are feasible, effective and desirable to safeguard long-term interests in modern democracy?; How can policy pilots be designed to assist long-term policy making?; How to credibly commit to intergenerational welfare sharing?; What strategies do public managers use to anticipate the long term?; What is the potential of prospective sensemaking for forward-looking decisions? The panel format will ensure a lively discussion to benefit from the interaction between well-known experts in long-term governance from different parts of the world, including Jon Hovi (University of Oslo), Detlef Sprinz (Yale University/Potsdam), Sreeja Nair (Nanyang Technological University Singapore), Jonathan Boston (Victoria University of Wellington), and Martijn van der Steen (Erasmus University Rotterdam). Disciplines and domains covered by the panel, include democratic politics, public policy and management, psychology, sovereign wealth funds, climate change, water management, and agriculture.