Temporal strategies for long-term governance

Governments are expected to steer many transitions towards more sustainable societies and to enable more resilient societies: societies that are able to deal with all sorts of acute and more creeping crises and that can adapt to new circumstances after periods of turbulence. Policies of the European Union also have formulated long-term ambitions such as to become climate neutral in 2050 as part of the EU climate law. Governments can find it difficult to combine short-term election and budget cycles with long-term objectives and transitions. To be able to steer transitions and decide upon long-term policies and investments, governments will need to take into account the long lifespan of certain (infrastructural) solutions) and the long lead-time of many policy and implementation processes before solutions have been implemented in practice. Furthermore, governments will also need to find ways to continuously adapt to new circumstances. Therefore, this paper develops five temporal strategies that can strengthen long-termism within present-day governments, can help to adapt to turbulent circumstances and that can help governments to steer societal transitions. These strategies are: extending time horizons via long-term visions; cyclical adaptive steering through experimentation, monitoring and evaluation; using timing of political events, crises and planned long-term investments; synchronizing multi-level and multi-domain policy objectives; and investing time for dialogue and participation. The paper applies this to two illustrative cases with different temporal dynamics and objectives: of climate adaptation and housing. The paper then also discusses the role of individuals and institutions in enabling the temporal strategies.