In my view, humanity faces a serious problem of institutional design. This claim may initially seem radical. Yet it has resonance in climate circles, including occasionally among leading figures in the political establishment. For instance, Mary Robinson, United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Envoy on Climate Change, former United Nations Human Rights Commissioner and former President of Ireland, once wrote about climate change (Robinson 2008):
“The scope of these problems – and of the action required to treat them – reach beyond previous human challenges. Yet in the sixteen years since the UNFCCC was signed, global negotiations have proceeded at a glacial pace. We have collectively failed to grasp the scale and urgency of the problem. Climate change shows up countless weaknesses in our current institutional architecture.”
More bluntly, in the run up to the disastrous Copenhagen climate meeting in 2009, Connie Hedegaard, then Danish Minister for Climate and Energy, and subsequently EU commissioner on climate action, quoted in Von Bulow (2009), said:
“If the whole world comes to Copenhagen and leaves without making the needed political agreement, then I think it’s a failure that is not just about climate. Then it’s the whole global democratic system not being able to deliver results in one of the defining challenges of our century. And that … should not be a possibility.”
In essence, the problem is that currently dominant institutions do not appear well-suited for addressing serious, paradigmatically global, intergenerational and ecological problems, such as climate change.2
How do we explain these shortcomings? In my view, one of the main reasons is structural. Conventional institutions tend to be dominated by short-term concerns, to have an overly narrow focus on economic matters, and not to have been designed with global, intergenerational or ecological concerns in mind.3 Prominent examples of such institutions include market systems and national governments with three-to-five year election cycles. Notably, in many contemporary societies these institutions have mutually reinforcing effects on each other, and also play major roles in shaping the incentives facing other institutions.
To some extent, the limitations of current institutions are predictable. First, there is a historical argument. Presumably, there is a strong tendency for the members of any generation to create, maintain and shape institutions that disproportionately deal with the concerns that face them, here and now, in the present. Consequently, it would not be surprising for the set of institutions that emerges over time to reflect this, and show pula pula inflavel a tendency to highlight perspectives or problems that substantially crowd out broader intergenerational concerns. Absent deliberate, sustained intervention this would be just what one might expect, historically-speaking.
Second, there is a strategic argument. There is a clear temptation for each generation to behave badly with respect to the future. In doing so, it can secure benefits for itself and avoid bearing costs, in ways that seem morally unjustified. Consider two clear threats: the tyranny of the contemporary, and the problem of moral corruption.
The first threat is a general ethical challenge that I call the tyranny of the contemporary. To see the worry more clearly, consider a simple (and highly idealized) model. First, imagine a sequence of nonoverlapping generations. Second, suppose that each generation must make decisions about goods that are temporally dispersed. One type —‘front-loaded goods’— are such that their benefits accrue to the generation that produces them, but their costs are substantially deferred and fall on later generations. Another type —‘back-loaded goods’—are such that their costs accrue to the generation that produces them, but their benefits are substantially deferred and arise to later generations. Third, assume that each generation has preferences that are exclusively generation-relative in scope: they concern things that happen within the timeframe of its own existence (Gardiner 2015).