Giving Future Generations a Voice: Normative Frameworks, Institutions and Practice

This important book focuses on how newly emerging institutions for future generations can contribute to tackling large scale global environmental problems, such as threats to biodiversity and climate change. It is especially timely given the new global impetus for decarbonisation, as well as the huge growth of climate litigation and climate protest movements, often led by young people.

Global environmental crises and reactions against short-term thinking have spawned new institutions aimed at giving a voice to future generations in policy-making, such as dedicated commissioners. This book looks at why we need such institutions using approaches from ethics, human rights, sustainable development, intergenerational justice and administrative law. How to design such institutions to maximise their effectiveness, operating principles for such institutions, and case studies from around the world are canvassed. A range of reform proposals are also explored, including mainstreaming future generations’ voices in parliamentary processes, commissioners for future generations, human rights-based bodies and deliberative assemblies.

This collection brings together philosophers, political and social scientists, lawyers and practitioners. It provides both an introduction to the field and a scholarly in-depth set of studies. It will appeal to academics, policymakers and civil society.

Edited by the late Jan Linehan, formerly Adjunct Researcher, Law Faculty and Peter Lawrence, PhD, Senior Lecturer, Law Faculty, University of Tasmania, Australia