Narrative Framework
We need decisions now to unlock a hopeful, resilient present that also keeps the future open.
CONTENTS
Narrative Spine
Start in the Present
Policymakers are managing overlapping “now” pressures and fast-moving risks
Name the opportunity
A Future Generations lens builds resilience in the present and leaves a positive legacy: improving life now while keeping the future open and adaptable
Don’t lose the human scale
Protecting the choices of our children and great-grandchildren is the emotional core of the message. Building on the idea of being a ‘good ancestor’ and keeping it personal really helps the message hit home. This can also include protecting the places and species we love, and taking action to see them thrive beyond our present lifetimes, especially where people have already felt the pain of seeing animals or landscapes from their childhoods erode/go extinct.
Offer a method
A clear set of practical pillars and tools that can be applied across policy. Keep pressure on the UN to appoint the Special Envoy for Future Generations in order to provide continuity, coordination, and accountability beyond electoral and political cycles. Support institutions and leaders for Future Generations where they exist around the world and spread their experiences and learning.
Name the measurement gap
The dominant yardstick of progress, GDP, was designed to measure production. It is very good at what it was built to do, but has by design become one of the most powerful lock-ins created. GDP is a decision made by one generation in one geographical region that has since shaped every government budget, every development loan, and every policy trade-off. A Future Generations mindset asks leaders to widen the criteria beyond productivity and count wellbeing, resilience, and fairness across time and across the global community. It supports the development of measures that work alongside GDP to offer a more vivid, panoramic picture of ourselves and our planet which widens the range of choices we are able to take now and those we can pass on to future generations. The Pact for the Future has given that argument a universal mandate. Use it.
Keep language open
A Future Generations lens is a both/and way of thinking. The language we use must emphasise that this is not a trade-off or zero sum game between current and future generations. Widening time horizons improves choices across every portfolio
End with legitimacy
this is about responsible intergenerational leadership and renewing the social contract across generations by securing the present without narrowing the future. International law is crystallising around duties to consider future generations’ interests.
WHY WE SAY
‘keep the future open’
"Keep the future open" is not suggesting that all potential futures are equal, or that we should be neutral about what the world becomes. It is a call to preserve the widest possible range of choices for the people who will inherit tomorrow what we build, value, measure, care and legislate for today.
Roman Krznaric, in his book The Good Ancestor, describes how when Joseph Bazalgette built London's sewers in the 1860s, he doubled the diameter of every pipe because, in his own words, "we're only going to do this once and there's always the unforeseen." That system still serves a city four times the size he built it for. The Montreal Protocol, the most universally ratified treaty in UN history, was designed from the outset to be amended as science evolved, and the ozone layer is now recovering as a result. What these decisions share is not simply long-term thinking. It is humility built into the design: solutions that expanded future choices rather than closing them down.
The decisions that became burdens rather than legacy share the opposite quality. The Green Revolution saved an estimated billion lives as it acted in the belief that the legislation would put an end to poverty, but it locked in monoculture farming, seed dependency, and groundwater depletion that future generations are now left to reckon with. Once again present and future generations’ lives and livelihoods are threatened. The Treaty of Versailles was designed by people who genuinely believed their actions would prevent future conflict; by placing sole blame for the war on Germany and imposing reparations so punishing that by 1923 ordinary families were carrying wheelbarrows of worthless banknotes to buy bread, they created the economic desperation and national humiliation that helped produce the very catastrophe they were trying to prevent. In both cases, the intention was made with desire to create a present and future where war and hunger were absent. What was missing was the humility to leave alternative paths open and the ability to acknowledge unequal power relations between geographical regions.
A Future Generations mindset learns from both sides of that record. It does not ask us to predict the future or define it for those who come after us. It asks us to think long-term, to celebrate and use our tools for foresight and horizon scanning, and to build with the same instinct Bazalgette had: for the unforeseen, for the margin we cannot yet see the need for, for the choices we want our children and their children to still be able to make. "Keep the future open" is therefore a request for long-term thinking and care that extends across generations, paired with a humility that trusts in those who will follow us. If we can pass on a world still full of possibility, we will have passed on enough wisdom, humility and care for our planet, for future generations to make choices we would be proud to have made possible.
Narrative & Key Messages
Decisions taken by leaders now must meet the present challenges and keep the future open for those to come.
Narrative as a Key Message
We need decisions now that unlock a hopeful and resilient present and keep the future open
Narrative as a Key Message
Invest in health care for the long-term with prevention now and resilience for what comes next.
Narrative as a Key Message
Build the regenerative and inclusive economies we need to secure resilience now and strengthen the foundations of a thriving future. Set the rules, incentives, and investment to deliver global social and ecological outcomes so wellbeing, resilience and fairness are achieved by design.
Narrative as a Key Message
Treat housing as long-term infrastructure: deliver affordability now, and build stable neighbourhoods that last.
Narrative as a Key Message
Guarantee young people the means to thrive today and embed intergenerational fairness by giving youth real agency to help shape our common future.
Narrative as a Key Message
A stable planet is a precondition for any thriving society. We need to build clean, affordable energy systems now, and work to halt and reverse nature loss. These actions help protect against climate impacts now, enabling communities to stay safe and bills to stay down. We need the living systems we belong to and depend on to thrive now so we can keep future options open.
Narrative as a Key Message
Secure affordable, nutritious diets today while strengthening the soils, water and resilience that tomorrow’s food system relies on.
Narrative as a Key Message
Treat nature as a living system we belong to, and restore biodiversity that strengthens health and resilience for all life today and tomorrow.
Narrative as a Key Message
Future generations thinking is essential when planning strategic defence and security: it helps leaders decide how to preserve strategic freedom for the future by reducing fragile dependencies, building resilience to climate and technological disruption, and upholding international law in practice.
Narrative as a Key Message
Steer fast-moving technology with foresight and accountability so progress serves the public interest today and protects future generations from unnecessary harm.
Narrative as a Key Message
Make clean energy our legacy by securing our energy infrastructure today and empowering future generations with sustainable choices and freedom from fossil fuels
Narrative as a Key Message
Guarantee every person a fully accessible, high-quality education today, one that builds resilience by teaching how to learn, fosters curiosity and adaptability, and leaves them equipped in a rapidly changing environment. We educate for life, not just for work.
Narrative as a Key Message
Poverty is not a legacy we will leave behind. Act with urgency and foresight to guarantee basic security and fair chances today, and build education, housing, and fair work pathways that lift families out of poverty for good, ensuring disadvantage is never inherited.
Narrative as a Key Message
Culture is the way we make sense of the world, of one another and of ourselves. Heritage illustrates how this has been changing over time. Policy should facilitate asking who we want to become as human beings in the long term, and what legacies we should leave behind for the benefit of future generations.
Narrative as a Key Message
The conditions that shape human movement, from climate to conflict to economic opportunity, are the product of long-term choices. Future Generations leadership means addressing those conditions at their roots with care and compassion, while building the community resilience that makes societies adaptable and cohesive across time.
Narrative as a Key Message
Every person deserves the conditions to live fully and with dignity. A Future Generations mindset builds accessibility and inclusion into the foundations of policy, so that the systems we pass on expand possibilities for all people.
Narrative as a Key Message
Change now scales faster than the habits and institutions built to govern it.
Future Generations thinking keeps pace with that change by embedding foresight, long-term tests, and participation into decision-making, so we act decisively without creating avoidable lock-ins.
Acting for future generations means stewarding possibility: honouring what we inherited, meeting today’s needs, and building the flexibility for societies to grow and adapt.
Future Generations governance counts-in tomorrow through incentives, budgets, and metrics that reward prevention, resilience, and long-term capability alongside immediate results.
An economy that has future generations in mind measures success through wellbeing, resilience and fairness now. It produces future opportunities, and rewards long relationships and circular values so prosperity endures.
Comms Tips
How we talk about future generations matters. Practitioners and advocates can use the phrase ‘future generations’ confidently
The term ‘future generations’ is just starting to gain traction in policy spaces that we cannot afford to lose. The debates and discussions around what future generations means can cause hesitation in using the term. We don’t need to dance around it.
In our messaging, our documents and advocacy it is essential to associate future generations thinking and decision-making with generating possibilities and meaningful choice
Considering future generations is about ensuring they have meaningful choices - it’s not about defining what those meaningful choices should be. Our role today is to create the conditions for choice today and into the future.
We don’t have to use loaded words, nor do we have to always align with the language of other movements
Words like ‘wellbeing’ or ‘sustainability’ have meaning to certain movements. The future generations agenda, while rooted in ancient wisdom and the time honoured teachings of Indigenous communities, is new in the policy arena right now. It doesn’t have to be tied to words that may have baggage. We are free to define the space for this. Use words that resonate across spaces - words like ‘choice’, ‘fairness’ and ‘resilience’.
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What is Future Generations Thinking?
Future Generations thinking is a leadership mindset that enables decision makers to meet today’s needs, restores hope and keeps tomorrow’s options open. It treats future generations as real stakeholders in decisions that matter for people today, including on health, homes, ecosystems, trust, and resilient institutions. It matters now because crises and rapid change can push leaders into making short-term choices that create long-term costs, fragility, or irreversible lock-ins that remove choices from future people.
How and what we choose to measure ultimately defines what we hold sacred enough to pass down to future generations and determines the amount of maneuvering room they have left to make their own consequential decisions. GDP is a technical choice made in the 1930s to measure national output, which then expanded through the decades to determine what governments optimise for, what gets funded, and whose contributions to society are counted. Considered through a Future Generations lens, it is perhaps one of the most powerful examples of the lock-in this community exists to challenge. But lock-ins can be broken, and the moment to break this one is now.
For the first time in history, every government in the world has formally committed to developing measures of progress that go beyond GDP, through Action 53 of the Pact for the Future. A UN High-Level Expert Group is building the new framework, and an intergovernmental process in 2026 and 2027 will follow that could shift how finance is allocated, how development is measured, and how progress itself is defined. The framework being developed counts in wellbeing, resilience, fairness, and sustainability across time. It can make visible the contributions of unpaid care, of nature, and of the communities whose labour holds economies together. Getting this right is Future Generations work.
Future Generational thinking therefore asks a simple legacy question: what will this decision make possible after we are gone? In practice, it uses long-term tools like strategic foresight, impact assessments, scenario planning, horizon scanning, and citizen participation to test choices against multiple plausible futures. Done effectively, it strengthens legitimacy and strategic freedom by helping societies benefit from wise decisions today while leaving future generations resilient to future shocks and the ability to act with agency and choice. Our legacy offers thriving futures they will want to inherit.
Proactive Key Messages
Future generations thinking makes decisions today smarter and more resilient; it provides stability in a time of great change and protects the freedom of choice across generations.
As policymakers face a series of overlapping “now” pressures, taking future generations into account is a way to make smarter decisions now. It helps policymakers act decisively while avoiding choices that could lock Europe into fragile, costly, or irreversible paths.
Policymakers have an opportunity now to be good ancestors - to step into a leadership role that is grounded in maturity, wisdom and foresight with a strong mandate.
Whether it’s regarding security, energy, technology, or the economy, decision makers don’t have to predict the future, but they do have a duty to ensure today’s decisions don’t narrow the choices of those who come after us.
The European Union has created a position with responsibility for intergenerational fairness, to “ensure that decisions taken today do not harm future generations and that there is increased solidarity and engagement between people of different ages”. (words of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen)
Driving and supporting new economical reform through the beyond GDP movement and Well Being economies IS future generations thinking.
Build the regenerative and inclusive economies we need to secure resilience now and strengthen the foundations of a thriving future. That starts with measuring what matters. Future Generations thinking requires setting the rules, incentives, and investment frameworks around a richer picture of progress: one that counts wellbeing, resilience, fairness, and sustainability. All UN member states have now formally committed to developing Beyond GDP measures through the Pact for the Future. Future Generations leadership means making sure that commitment has real institutional teeth.
Future generations already have legitimacy - they are mentioned in over 80 national constitutions and the term is gaining traction in policy spheres.
Moreover, intergenerational responsibility is woven into multilateral agreements and international law.
The Pact for the Future builds on the growing legitimacy of future generations thinking as a means to make better decision making today.
Legal legitimacy for future generations was strengthened in the ICJ (2025) advisory opinion on the obligations of States in respect of climate change: “Due regard for the interests of future generations…” must be taken into account when States “contemplate, decide on and implement” policies and measures. (para. 157)
People everywhere care about action that would protect the choices of their children and grandchildren, as well as the places and ecosystems they love.
Policymakers in Europe have the opportunity today to leave a powerful legacy - to redefine responsible leadership in both a global and local context.
They can renew the social contract across generations by securing the present without narrowing the future.
There are a myriad of tools, expertise and success stories out there for policymakers to draw from in order to do this which can be found in our Stories and Resources sections.
Reactive Key Messages.
How to respond to common challenges.
We need to focus on what people need now. People care about what happens at the end of the week, not the next 100 years.
People absolutely care about the end of the week: bills, rent, safety, waiting lists. A Future Generations mindset helps you fix those and avoid lock-ins that would perpetuate inequality, choice limitations and instability for generations to come.
For example, building homes that stay affordable and account for future transport, energy, and health choices makes those homes more desirable now. Designing health policies that reduce chronic costs instead of just treating emergencies will have huge benefits for people today.
We need to let young people decide, they are the future. ‘Future generations’ is really all about the youth led agenda.
Young people deserve real agency because they’ll live longest with the consequences of today’s decision making. But Future Generations isn’t only a youth agenda. It’s an intergenerational leadership and resilience agenda. It makes responsible decisions today that meet urgent needs while protecting the options, safety, and freedoms of all life that comes after us. Youth participation is essential, but responsibility can’t be delegated to one generation. We must all be good ancestors and stewards of future possibilities.
It’s impossible to know what the future will be like - look how different things are now to 50 years ago. We can’t predict the future, and we don’t know what AI will do, so we can’t really plan for future generations now, we need to focus on this moment.
We don’t need perfect predictions to plan responsibly. We already plan for uncertainty all the time through insurance, stress tests, contingency planning, and safety margins.
A Future Generations lens does the same for policy: it asks, “What choices keep people safe and stable now AND keep options open as the world changes?”
That means avoiding irreversible lock-in, building resilience in core systems (energy, housing, health, food, digital), and designing policies that are robust across multiple plausible futures. Focusing only on the moment often creates quick fixes that make the next crisis worse.
My constituents don’t care what people want 100 years from now.
It is right to focus on what people need now. Future Generations thinking is about meeting present needs in ways that last such as lower bills, safer homes, more resilient communities. And it’s also about legacy: ensuring today’s decisions protect our children’s and great-grandchildren's chances of living well. It means caring for the places and wildlife we love now, so they can recover, endure and flourish in the future.
Scientists have already told us we are going to shoot through the 1.5 target. What’s the point in thinking about the future when it is doomed.
Missing the target to keep earth’s temperature below a 1.5 increase doesn’t mean the future is doomed. Every tenth of a degree still matters for food, health, security, and costs. Scientists like Johan Rockström have made clear that the window is still open for a liveable future, and with good decisions we can even reverse some of the damage that’s already been done.
The point of thinking about future generations is precisely to avoid fatalism: to focus on what we can still protect, to reduce the risks we can still prevent, and to build resilience for the impacts we can’t avoid. It’s hope as a feeling and a strategy: fewer irreversible losses, fewer compounding crises, and more options for people living through what comes next. Most people don’t give up on their children because the situation is hard and neither should we.
Future Generations is just climate policy and sustainability in disguise and this subject is too divisive at the moment.
We understand why it can look that way, because climate is one of the clearest long-term risks. But Future Generations isn’t a climate “add-on”, it’s a leadership mindset that improves decisions across security, health, housing, infrastructure, technology, fiscal resilience, and public trust. Climate fits inside it, but it doesn’t define it. The core test is simple: does this decision meet urgent needs now without locking society into higher costs, fragility, or fewer choices later?
This will slow everything down with more process, panels, and paperwork
Taking a Future Generations lens to policy should not add bureaucracy. It is designed to reduce rework, reversals and policy whiplash which often proves costly. The goal is fairer, future-proofed decisions faster by catching risks early, stress-testing assumptions up front and avoiding lock-in that leads to either costly u-turns or severely limited choices for future generations.
We have the tools and expertise to ensure that it replaces crisis management and costly fixes with a small number of high-value checks built into existing processes. Citizen engagement help remind institutions what policy feels like on the ground and help people feel that decisions concerning their present and futures are being made with them and not too them
This will be captured by NGOs / activists and become polarising. OR This will be captured by Far-right / activists and become polarising
By framing Future Generations as a bedrock of responsible and resilient leadership based on core shared values (the how) rather than as a campaign for particular outcomes (the what), we can safeguard against this weaponisation.
We tried long-term plans before. They get shelved when leadership changes
This is precisely why taking a longer-term, fair and responsible Future Generations leadership approach is essential now, in order to create stability and choice in the future.
A Future Generations mindset uses foresight and strategic long-term thinking to embed these values in how decisions are made knowing the what might change. If we are always asking “how does this improve lives now AND what legacy and choice it leaves open for future generations’ we have a stronger chance at creating stability regardless of the dominant political ideology.
GDP is a simple, comparable, internationally trusted number. These alternative metrics are complicated and contested. We can't run an economy on a dashboard.
GDP is simple and trusted precisely because it was standardised: the UN System of National Accounts created that standardisation in the early 1950s and made GDP inescapable globally. That standardisation was itself a political and design choice made by one generation on behalf of all who followed. It is exactly the kind of lock-in a Future Generations mindset is designed to interrogate.
The same institution now has a formal mandate, through the Pact for the Future, to design the standards for what comes next. The UN High-Level Expert Group is developing a complementary framework around wellbeing, equity, and sustainability, not a proposal to demolish GDP. And it already has the backing of every government on earth.
We understand complexity is challenging. However a Future Generations mindset asks a straightforward question: are we optimising for a number that tells us whether people's lives are actually getting better, whether the planet can sustain what we are asking of it, and whether we are leaving future generations more options or fewer? If not, we owe it to those who come after us to find one that does.