Introduction

The study and practice of future-regarding governance is in its infancy. Most of us are aware that our individual and collective decisions will affect the future in various ways, but our political institutions were not designed to deal with future issues or the long-term consequences of our decisions. Our political systems and practices are playing catch-up with our developing understanding of ourselves as temporal actors (i.e., beings that act both within our own times and across time when our actions have long-term consequences).

This book takes a wide view of the challenges and possibilities of future-regarding governance in democratic systems. It deals with conceptual challenges and possibilities, research methodologies and institutional design. The book also takes a deep dive into the practical politics of Finland's governmental foresight system, which is the most advanced and institutionalised system of its kind. Much of the existing literature on future-regarding governance looks at supplementary institutions that could be added to our existing democratic systems to make them more future-regarding. The scholars who have contributed to this book have tried to think more expansively about the future-regarding possibilities in our existing institutions, and how those might be leveraged on their own, or integrated with supplementary institutions, to make our democratic systems more future-regarding.

It is our hope that this book – and this concluding chapter – will inspire others to work in the challenging field of future-regarding governance. There is a lot of conceptual, methodological, practical and political work that needs to be done. In this concluding chapter, we outline some of our thoughts on the study and practice of future-regarding governance. In the next section, we identify four tensions that need to be (continually) navigated if we are going to have some chance of achieving our shared long-term objectives. In the last section of the chapter, we outline a research agenda that would help to advance the study of future-regarding governance. We invite other scholars to take on these research projects. There is more than enough work to go around.