Representing Future Generations and Seeking Re-Election? A Performance Evaluation of the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Sustainable Development in the German Bundestag

Modern representative democracies are inflicted with presentism. They have a deep-seated tendency to neglect future risks for immediate gratification of existing constituencies. Always under the pressure of upcoming electoral deadlines, parliaments are often seen as a weak link in the politics of sustainability. Against this background, political theorists have increasingly set forth new means of representing future generations as a necessary condition of making democratic polities more future-regarding, e.g. an independent ombudsperson or expert commissions. One German institutional innovation has repeatedly caught the attention of scholars reviewing precedents and possibilities for such extended representation: The Parliamentary Advisory Council for Sustainable Development (PBnE) in the German Bundestag. But surprisingly little is known about the effectiveness of such a parliament-based strategy to enhance sustainability and representation of future generations. Therefore, this paper asks: What is the PBnE’s track record in German sustainability politics and what does that tell us about the practicality of representing future generations through parliamentary bodies? To evaluate the PBnE’s track record on sustainability, we rely on two unique sets of data. We have coded all parliamentary activities related to the PBnE since its inception in January 2004 till the end of September 2019 (N=2103). As a second data source, we draw on the self-evaluation of members of the PBnE through semi-structured interviews (N=5). We find that sustainability politics in the context of the PBnE is much broader than only dealing with ecological concerns. In fact, German sustainability politics crosses over almost all policy fields and types of parliamentary activities. This cross-cutting character, however, hinders representation of future generations more than re-election incentives or partisan disagreement do as it leads to intra-party power struggles with existing committees. We conclude that representation may not be the only way to think about future generations and democracy, but we need to consider institutional power maintenance in parliamentary settings.