Project
Strengthening the rights and interests of future generations within present-day policy-making (PhD project - Caitlin Masoliver)
Climate change, pollution, and resource depletion are fueled by past and present policy decisions, yet their impacts are long-term and will pose a burden on generations yet to be born. To protect future generations’ rights and interests, governments need to take timely action on sustainability crises like climate change, while balancing immediate policy demands and ongoing crises. This project explores how political and legal institutions have been designed to represent future generations, and their role in policymaking on climate change.
Description
Although governments recognise the intergenerational nature of climate and its long-term risks, existing research contends that representative democracies are subject to external and internal pressures that encourage short-sighted views, at the jeopardy of longer-term, uncertain crises like climate change. To address this, different institutional mechanisms representing future generations have been proposed and implemented to intervene in the policy process. Significant research documents these, but there is less understanding of what impact these have on shaping more forward-looking policies.
This project analyses the contribution of different institutional mechanisms to shaping more forward-looking climate mitigation policies, through the lens of public administration and law. It looks at 1) the codification of future generations’ rights and 2) the representation of their interests by Future Commissioners, in a cross-comparative study in the Netherlands, Wales, and Finland.