The cause of future generations has made it to the world stage – what’s next?

Sophie Howe made headlines in 2016 as the world’s first Future Generations Commissioner, when she was charged with the task of protecting the interests of future generations of Wales as part of an independent advisory board.

Today, the concept of protecting the rights of future generations has gone global. In September this year, 193 countries signed the landmark Pact of the Future, which has been termed by the United Nations as the “the most wide-ranging international agreement” in years.

The pact includes the Global Digital Compact, which has received much attention for providing a comprehensive global framework for digital cooperation and AI governance. A little under the radar, though, is the Declaration on Future Generations, which sets out a goal to safeguard future generations more actively during decision-making.

The inclusion of the Declaration points to the longer horizon of decision-making that government officials are increasingly pressed to consider, in light of long-term challenges such as the climate crisis and the emergence of AI.

But it also points to the success of initiatives such as Wales’ Future Generations Act, that have successfully elevated the concept of “future generations” to the global stage. To learn more about what’s next, GovInsider spoke to Howe.

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How Wales championed future generations

During her seven-year term as Commissioner, she intervened in a Welsh project that sought to build a 13-mile (21 km) stretch of motorways. Instead, the team successfully supported a revision of the transport strategy to emphasise active travel and public transport, in line with Wales’ long-term well-being goals.

“When you apply a more holistic well-being lens to those decisions, which tend to play out as just economy versus environment, you get a completely different set of answers,” she says.

She shares that her team understood early on that Wales “had something quite unique to share,” and began engaging at the UN level, particularly with Office of the Secretary-General's Envoy on Youth, to raise awareness of the future generations concept.

“When we talk about future generations, we're not just talking about the young people of today. We're also talking about those people who are not yet born,” she notes.

Howe and her team wanted to show other countries that it is possible “for an entire country to take this approach to long term governments and policy making,” she explains, and have genuine impact, rather than creating more red tape.

Embedding foresight in government

The UN Declaration on Future Generations includes commitments to leverage science, data, and strategic foresight to ensure policies are developed with long-term thinking and planning in mind.

“It’s requiring public policy to think and act in the long-term, which public policy is generally really bad in doing… it talks about the need to apply a test of intergenerational fairness when we’re considering policies, so it’s really quite comprehensive,” says Howe.

According to her, the three key elements to ensure genuinely impactful long-term thinking are to involve citizens, train civil servants across departments in strategic foresight methodology, and have leaders committed to the cause of future generations.

For instance, Kenya’s Senator Olekina Ledama founded a bi-partisan Futures Caucus in the Senate to introduce long-term principles into decision-making earlier this year, she explains.

She highlights that many countries have already built foresight capabilities in government, though not every agency may be aware.

This is why she has worked with the School of International Futures (SOIF) to publish an implementation handbook, which provides a view of maturity levels across governments and provides next steps.

The first reporting period for the Declaration will be in 2028, and Howe hopes that the international community will be able to show real impact on long-term concerns, such as the climate crisis, AI governance, and financial intergenerational fairness.

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What’s next

She shares that the next step for the conversation is “embedding [futures-thinking] in a transformative way, rather than a performative way”, moving beyond long-term reports and wellbeing indicators towards robust mechanisms for implementation.

She is working with SOIF and the Wellbeing Economics Alliance to support countries in developing local hubs for strategic foresight and translating best practices at the local level to multilateral institutions.

“We need that local infrastructure, because what implementation is in Cameroon is very different from what it looks like in Finland. But there are also learnings that can be shared across different countries and regions,” she says.

These teams are also working on establishing a global support hub which can catalogue best practices across countries and promote international dialogue.

“There’s a number of conversations with different funders ongoing at the moment, and we’ve got pilots already entering in Spain, Portugal, Ireland and Finland, funded by the European Climate Center, to really start testing this model.”

As the conversation drew to a close, it was hard to resist asking: is there a chance Howe herself might be the first UN Special Envoy for Future Generations?

To this, she says: “I don’t know! You never know. It’s a bit of a mystery how the process works… My own view is that it does need to be someone who really understands the system and can get underneath the skin of the performative stuff, and not turn this into a bureaucratic exercise. We want it to be exciting, but we also want it to be challenging and genuine in its implementation.”