Democracy and future generations have a thorny relationship. On the one hand, democratic countries provide better for the well-being of future generations than autocracies do in policy domains such as forest preservation, fiscal sustainability, and early childhood education. Indeed, according to the Intergenerational Solidarity Index, democracy and intergenerational solidarity strongly correlate.

On the other hand, however, democracy has a built-in bias toward the short term. Many policy choices democratic governments make today will importantly affect future generations, including children and people yet unborn. Yet because future generations cannot vote today, democracies often neglect their interests, prioritizing policies with immediate payoffs over those whose benefits are located in the long run. The upshot, many argue, is an unfair allocation of burdens and benefits across generations, when not the outright trespassing of future generations’ basic rights.

In response, many have championed institutional mechanisms to mitigate short-termism in policymaking and more suitably represent future people in present decisions. Ursula von der Leyen’s recent appointment of a commissioner for intergenerational fairness or the UN Secretary-General’s proposal for a special envoy for future generations get the headlines. But international organizations, advocacy groups, and scholars have long proposed a range of responses along similar lines, including parliamentary committees for future generations, intergenerational trust funds, deliberative mini-publics, climate banks, and ombudspersons for future generations—some of which polities like Finland, Wales, Singapore, and Uruguay have attempted in recent decades.

For partisans of these institutions, the case for their adoption is rather straightforward. They often justify them for their ability to protect future people’s rights and contribute to a fairer distribution of costs and benefits across generations. And they also justify them procedurally, as a correction for the legitimacy deficit that neglecting future people whose basic interests will be affected by current decisions prompts. For many, these grounds are often enough to render the case for these institutions closed, and to turn to more practical issues such as their political feasibility, citizen support, and legal fit.

But things are more complicated, philosophers predictably claim. It is unclear, they claim, whether future generations can be politically represented today, given that they cannot appoint their representatives or hold them to account. And it is likewise unclear whether future generations can be assigned rights to begin with, at least when it comes to persons who do not yet exist. None of these difficulties is intractable. But we do little favor to the cause of rendering democracy more hospitable for future generations by dismissing them out of hand.

Start with whether unborn generations can have rights today. One challenge is their non-existence, which is not particularly worrisome nonetheless. Though future generations cannot have rights today, they will have rights in the future, when they are born. These generate correlative responsibilities on us not to encroach on such rights today.

More worrisome is the non-identity challenge, which stems from the fact that present decisions to laze on climate change mitigation, amass public debt, or deplete natural resources, say, will affect not just the conditions under which future persons will live but also who gets born in the future. Arguably, this makes it impossible to claim that such policies make them worse off than otherwise or infringe their rights. For without such policies they would not have been born in the first place. Philosophers have endlessly debated this challenge. But it is probably safe to say that most believe that it can be overcome. One possible way out, for example, is to distinguish between persons as types (human beings as a class) and as tokens (particular human beings) and assign rights to future persons as types, not tokens, regardless of their particular identity.

Representing future generations in present policymaking also faces challenges. One is that, insofar as representation requires attribution—in the sense that we attribute the actions of parliaments and elected governments, if all goes well, to their constituencies—it requires that representatives be authorized by and accountable to those they represent. For obvious reasons, however, future generations can neither authorize nor hold to account those they claim to represent them today, as ombudspersons and commissioners for future generations sometimes do.

Another challenge is that, even if those holding such offices were to represent not future persons themselves but rather their interests, there are serious limitations to our knowledge about such interests’ content, which are also likely to be plural. Future generations do not form a single, unified group with identical interests. Each generation is likely to have varying priorities when it comes to, say, climate and fiscal policies. And, within any given generation, diverse and potentially conflicting interests are also to be expected.

These challenges are not insurmountable, however. Even though the traditional notion of representation, which requires authorization and accountability, is unfit for future generations, recent work on representation has highlighted alternative ways in which future individuals can be represented. Political theorists suggest, for example, that representation can occur when a representative is acknowledged as such not by those they represent, but by a relevant audience—like a court or international organization—to whom the representation is directed, as offices for future generations typically are. Another view holds that surrogate representation can arise from shared interests between the representative and the represented. This might be the case between the younger cohorts of those alive today and unborn generations. And yet others argue that representation may be indicative, occurring when the representative, through independence and expertise, acts as the represented would under similar circumstances. Depending on their composition, this might be true of independent offices for future generations.

In sum, none of the challenges just discussed is intractable. But some are serious. Anja Karnein worries, for example, that in the absence of direct accountability mechanisms, and given the uncertainty and diversity of future interests, representatives of future generations may find speaking on behalf of such generations a convenient way to further their own agenda, rather than the interests of future people, who can’t contradict them. Amid growing public and philosophical debate about how to future-proof our democracies, we have reason to be conscious of the difficulties—not just legal and political, but philosophical, too—that seeking to protect and represent future generations involves.

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