Institutions For Future Generations

In times of climate change and public debt, a concern for intergenerational justice should lead us to have a closer look at theories of intergenerational justice. It should also press us to provide institutional design proposals to change the decision-making world that surrounds us. This book provides an exhaustive overview of the most important institutional proposals as well as a systematic and theoretical discussion of their respective features and advantages. It focuses on institutional proposals aimed at taking the interests of future generations more seriously, and does so from the perspective of applied political philosophy, being explicit about the underlying normative choices and the latest developments in the social sciences. It provides citizens, activists, firms, charities, public authorities, policy-analysts, students, and academics with the body of knowledge necessary to understand what our institutional options are and what they entail if we are concerned about today's excessive short-termism.

1 - Designing Institutions for Future Generations: An Introduction
3 - Intergenerational Justice: a Primer
4 - Measuring Intergenerational Fairness
5 - Can We Represent Future Generations?
6 - Generational Sovereignty
7 - The Ombudsman for Future Generations: Legitimate and Effective?
8 - Political Institutions for the Future: A Five-Fold Package
9 - A World Climate Bank
10 - Constitutionalising Intergenerational Provisions
11 - Democratic Trusteeship: Institutions to Protect the Future of the Democratic Process
12 - A Common Heritage Fund for Future Generations
13 - Electoral Design, Sub-Majority Rules and Representation for Future Generations
14 - Philanthropy and Intergenerational Justice
15 - The Deliberative Democratic Inclusion of Future Generations
16 - Youth Quotas, Diversity, and Long-Termism: Can Young People Act as Proxies for Future Generations?
17 - A General-Purpose, Randomly Selected Chamber
18 - Pilotage Responsibility and Intergenerational Justice
19 - The People's Endowment
20 - Democratic Firms: Assets for the Long-Term
21 - Archiving for the Future: the Party Constitution
22 - Alumni Involvement and Long-Termist University Governance
23 - Pension Funds, Future Generations, and Fiduciary Duty
24 - Family Planning is Not (Necessarily) the Priority Institution for Reducing Fertility

Iñigo González-Ricoy is Assistant Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. He has been postdoctoral fellow at the University of Louvain and Pompeu Fabra University and visiting fellow at Columbia University and Goethe University in Frankfurt. His research is in democratic and constitutional theory, and has been published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, Social Theory and Practice, and Ratio Juris. Axel Gosseries is a Maitre de recherches at the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique, Professor at the University of Louvain, Franz Weyr Fellow of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Institute for Future Studies, Stockholm. He is the author of Penser la justice entre les générations (2004) and the co-editor of Intergenerational Justice (OUP, 2009, with Lukas Meyer). He has published numerous papers in philosophy, law, and economics journals, including the Journal of Political Philosophy, Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review, New York University Environmental Law Journal, International Economic Review, Economics & Philosophy, and the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.