Derek Walker’s latest report runs to 147 pages. As the Welsh Future Generations Commissioner, Walker publishes one every year, covering climate targets, biodiversity, NHS spending, the Welsh language, food policy, procurement rules, and the mental health of young people. The 2025 edition also commissions original artwork. He fields around 800 requests for advice a year. Back in 2019 his predecessor, Sophie Howe, used the role to help scupper a proposed M4 relief road. Public bodies across Wales take his framework seriously.
That the office exists at all is no small thing. Israel had a Commission for Future Generations from 2001, with powers to intervene in legislation. Its first commissioner’s term expired in 2006, no replacement was ever appointed, and the Knesset formally abolished the institution in 2010, citing “unjustified budgetary burden”. Hungary set up an independent Ombudsman for Future Generations in 2008, whose office intervened in hundreds of environmental cases a year. In 2011 the Viktor Orbán government’s new constitution folded the ombudsman into a junior deputy role. Sándor Fülöp, the first commissioner, resigned the following year.
The pattern is not subtle. Futures bodies that are toothless tend to survive. Futures bodies with teeth tend to get abolished, demoted or restructured. Wales has lasted a decade partly because its commissioner advises and challenges but cannot decide. There is no veto, no constitutional weight. A judge once described the underlying Act as “vague, general and aspirational”. The limits that make the office survivable are the same limits that blunt its force.
The seed-corn problem
The problem these institutions are set up to address is not a shortage of imagination, but a structural asymmetry in how accountability works. Politicians bear the cost of long-term investments during their careers and collect none of the credit. Civil servants are judged on this year’s budget execution, not outcomes in 2050. Prevention spending is universally agreed to be cheaper than cure, and universally crowded out when money tightens.
The Welsh NHS now absorbs 49 per cent of the Welsh government’s budget, up from 34 per cent when devolution began in 1999. Almost none of that goes on the early-years programmes or mental-health interventions that would reduce demand in a generation. Everyone agrees this is mad. Nobody can find the political space to move the money.
A commissioner can publish a glossy report naming the problem. A commissioner cannot change where the savings land or who feels the political pain. Bolting a long-term advocate onto a short-term machine does not alter the machine.
Bridging the Reinvention Gap
Corporate life has been down this road. Blue-sky departments had a good decade. Bell Labs, the template, gave the world the transistor, the laser, information theory, Unix and nine Nobel Prizes. It could do so because AT&T was a regulated monopoly whose customer base could not be competed away, and whose utility rates allowed a pittance to be tucked into every American’s phone bill. Once the 1984 breakup exposed the company to actual competition, Bell Labs’ funding collapsed. Its successor, Lucent, was a husk within a decade. The research went. The Nobel Prizes stopped.
The same story has played out in sector after sector since. Xerox PARC invented the mouse and gave it to Apple. Area 120, Google’s internal incubator, was gutted in early 2023. X, Alphabet’s ‘moonshot factory’, began spinning projects out to outside venture capital in 2024, after the parent’s chief financial officer decided moonshots needed to pay for themselves; ‘unrestrained invention’ is no longer the pitch. Johnson & Johnson, Allianz and a gallery of chief innovation officers and corporate futurists have gone the same way. McKinsey’s ‘three horizons’ model, everywhere in 2015, is rarely cited in earnings calls these days.
The Federal Foresight Advocacy Alliance, an American pressure group, surveyed US government foresight offices last year and found that 73 per cent had suffered declines in funding, staffing or influence since 2024. Fifteen per cent had been eliminated outright. One practitioner put it plainly: “Survival takes up all the space and energy.”
Measuring what matters
Which does not mean long-term thinking is hopeless. It means the institutions that try to insert the long term as an add-on keep being out-engineered by the underlying incentives. The interesting reforms are less visible.
Finland’s Committee for the Future, a parliamentary body of 17 MPs established in 1993 and made permanent in 2000, has survived for more than three decades because it is wired into how the Eduskunta processes legislation, rather than bolted on beside it. New Zealand, Scotland and Iceland have been experimenting with wellbeing budgets that change what governments publish and track. Derek Walker’s own current campaign in Wales is less about expanding his remit than about ring-fencing prevention spending in each departmental budget. None of these is dramatic. All are attempts to change the plumbing rather than install a new thermostat.
The same logic applies in business. The firms that manage long horizons well tend to have ownership structures that insulate them from quarterly pressure. Roche runs drug pipelines across decades because its founding families retain voting control. Denmark’s pension funds think in 40-year increments because that is what their liabilities look like. Germany’s Mittelstand, Japan’s cross-shareholdings, the family holding companies that still dominate chunks of southern European industry: long-termism emerges from governance, not from organigrams. When a listed company appoints a chief futurist, the useful question is not what the futurist will say, but what happens to the futurist’s budget when the share price drops.
Central and Eastern European governments and companies flirting with foresight shops (the Emirati model is admired in the region, as are the Scottish and Finnish examples) should draw the obvious moral. A ministry of tomorrow, a commissioner for posterity: these are cheap to set up and easy to applaud. Whether they matter at all depends entirely on what happens, once the press release has yellowed, to spending flows, accounting rules and ownership structures.
Edmund Burke thought society a partnership between the dead, the living and the unborn. Governments honour the dead with statues. They honour the unborn with glossy reports and the occasional commissioner, when budgets permit. The more interesting question is not who speaks for tomorrow. It is who pays for it today, and who is allowed to pretend they are not.
Photo: Dreamstime.
