Here come the Time Rebels! Japan's "Future Design" movement shows how to factor future generations into our politics

Future Design in action in Yahaba, Japan. Photo Credit: Masaaki Takahashi and Ritsuji Yoshioka

We are supporters of the philosopher Roman Krznaric’s work on “future generations” - the fact that we don’t think much about the impact of our current actions on them. Developing feeling and instincts for being “Good ancestors” (the title of his recent book), thinking long-term in a short-term world, is his admirable ambition.

We profiled an earlier version of his thesis here - and in it, Roman briefly mentioned the Japanese movement known as “Future Design”. In a recent blog for the public participation charity Involve, Roman expanded further on the quirky yet effective practice:

Japan’s Future Design movement is directly inspired by the principle of seventh-generation decision-making practised in many Native American communities. This offers a unique and powerful model for revitalising democracy as we emerge from the Covid-19 crisis.

So how does it work? Local residents are invited to public meetings to discuss and draw up plans for the towns and cities where they live. They begin by discussing issues from the perspective of a current resident. They are then given ceremonial yellow robes to wear and told to imagine themselves as residents from 2060.

Future Design in action in Yahaba, Japan. Photo Credit:  Masaaki Takahashi and Ritsuji Yoshioka

This imaginative step of picturing themselves living – at their current age – several decades into the future, has an extraordinary effect. Multiple studies have revealed that they systematically favour much more transformative plans, whether discussing issues such as health care, the future impacts of AI or ecological threats.

In effect, they begin imagining how their decisions today will impact on the lives of future generations – especially their children or grandchildren – and this shifts their priorities and choices. In technical terms, their ‘discount rate’ diminishes: they start putting more weight on the welfare of future citizens, whose interests would normally have relatively little impact on their decision-making calculus.

Part of the appeal of Future Design is that it is a grass-roots participatory form of decision-making that taps into the emerging citizens’ assembly movement

Future Design was founded by the Japanese economist Tatsuyoshi Saijo, director of the Research Institute for Future Design at Kochi University of Technology. It has been highly successful since its first experiments in the small town of Yahaba, which began in 2015.

In 2019, Yahaba’s mayor opened a Future Strategy Office, which coordinates the use of Future Design across multiple areas of local decision-making. It has been used, for instance, to discuss long-term investment in the town’s decaying water infrastructure and resulted in an agreement to raise water tax rates by 6%.

Future Design has now spread to major cities such as Kyoto and Suita, and is being used in policy planning by the Japanese Ministry of Finance. In the city of Uji, local citizens have formed their own Future Design group and held online sessions with city officials to discuss the impacts of Covid-19.

In its original incarnation, Future Design participants were split into two groups: one group from the present and the other representing 2060. While this approach yielded positive results in terms of encouraging long-term vision, it generated a certain degree of tension in debates between the two sides.

So more recently Future Design has been based on a model where everyone imagines themselves both in the present and then subsequently in the future (and sometimes also in the past). Still, the results are similar: a marked tendency to extend time horizons beyond present-day concerns.

Part of the appeal of Future Design is that it is a grass-roots participatory form of decision-making that taps into the emerging citizens’ assembly movement, which has become a prominent part of the democratic landscape in Ireland, Belgium and other countries.

In Britain, for instance, the approach was used for Climate Assembly UK and has been adopted for Scotland’s Climate Assembly, which is due to report to the Scottish Parliament in 2021. A more radical vision is at the heart of a new Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill.

There is a growing body of research demonstrating that such deliberative citizen-based bodies have a greater capacity to take the long view than traditional politicians who are typically caught in short-term cycles and attitudes. They simultaneously serve to restore public faith in democratic processes at a time when the rise of far-right populism threatens democratic rights worldwide.

More here. And generally on the definition of Time Rebel: “The good news is that there is a growing global political movement of people committed to intergenerational justice and injecting long-term thinking into the DNA of democratic decision-making. I think of these pioneers as Time Rebels.”