The solution to many public dilemmas requires long-term effort by successive generations. Such situation arises whenever the solution to a public dilemma cannot be implemented instantaneously but is dependent on the continuous effort of future governments (and their citizens). Climate change, the risk of giant asteroid impact and AI safety are archetypal examples of problems requiring cross-generational collaboration (Depledge et al., 2022; Gills et al., 2020; Reinhardt et al., 2016; Schmidt, 2018). A key difficulty with these cases is that they generate a cross-generational, collective action dilemma, in which the current generation has an incentive to ‘defect’, imposing on the future generations the costs of dealing with the risks created by the current generation. Solving this cross-temporal dilemma requires a (credible) intergenerational contract that can commit current and future governments to a collaborative course of action. The ability to credibly commit future governments to a certain collaborative action is critical for garnering the political support of the present generation: the prospect that future generations may evade their commitments for short-term benefits may undermine the motivation of the present generation to support policies that require costly sacrifices.

In this post I discuss the problem of securing intergenerational cooperation, focusing on the challenge of designing long-term commitment mechanisms. I will also reflect briefly on the tension between commitment mechanisms and the democratic ideal of citizen sovereignty (allowing each generation to make its own choices) (Vanberg, 2005).  From a functional perspective I will focus on the question of how to design extra-constitutional commitment devices. Although theoretically attractive, constitutional entrenchment suffers from several weaknesses: (a) its realization depends on scarce political capital; (b) it does not provide foolproof protection against future changes; (c) because it is embedded in domestic law, it does not provide an optimal response to problems that transcend national borders; (d) it may be unsuitable for controlling risks situated in the digital universe, such as AI risks (Bostrom et al., 2018; Kovac, 2022; Marino, 2020; Noy et al., 2022).

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