SQ Transp 2048

Jonathan Boston - Governing for the long term

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Governing for the long-term: how to temper the presentist bias in democratic decision-making and enhance intergenerational justice

Protecting the long-term common good is one of the primary responsibilities of the state. Yet many policy problems generate intertemporal trade-offs and require non-simultaneous exchanges in order to alleviate – that is, voters must bear costs over the short-to-medium term in order to secure long-term benefits or minimize future risks. But non-simultaneous exchanges are often politically challenging. Hence, governments may delay taking action or adopt half-hearted solutions. Alternatively, they may make the necessary ‘hard calls’ to protect long-term interests but find their decisions difficult to sustain politically. As a result, near-term interests may trump the long-term common good. Protecting long-term environmental interests is particularly challenging. This talk explores the options for reducing the risk of a presentist bias in democratic decision-making and enhancing intergenerational justice

Jonathan Boston is Professor of Public Policy in the School of Government at Victoria University. He has published widely on a range of matters including public management, social policy (especially child poverty), climate change policy, tertiary education policy, and comparative government. He was a member of the New Zealand Political Change Project (1995-2002), which explored the behavioural, institutional, and policy implications of proportional representation. More recently he served as Director of the Institute of Policy Studies (2008-11), Director of the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies (2012-14), and Co-Chair of the Expert Advisory Group on Solutions to Child Poverty. He was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship in early 2014 to undertake research on ‘Governing for the Future: Bringing Long-Term Policy Issues into Short-Term Political Focus’. A book based on this research will be published later in 2016 by Emerald.

When
November 8th, 2016 from  5:30 PM to  7:30 PM