Shaping a future worth living by giving future generations a voice
A conversation with Sophie Howe, former Future Generation Commissioner of Wales, on intergenerational knowledge in practice.
GIZ’s Knowledge and Learning Team regularly invites diverse voices to explore issues of Knowledge, Power and Diversity in the field of development cooperation. This is an edited summary transcript of our session with Sophie Howe, former Future Generation Commissioner of Wales on “Intergenerational Knowledge in Practice”.
Katharina: You’ve been described by The Guardian as the world’s first minister of the unborn. You’ve held the post of Future Generations Commissioner in Wales for seven years. Wales might be a small country, but it keeps making huge waves with ingenious and successful approaches of handling the current multiple crises and sparking transformation. Your role was one of those “big waves”. Today, you are a sustainability futures and well-being advisor, carrying, I guess, some of what you did in your government role into a consultancy function. Welcome, Sophie.
Sophie: Shwmae — that means hello in Welsh — and will probably be the only Welsh word you will hear today.
Katharina: So, what is a future generations commissioner and what does she do?
Sophie: That’s a really good question. And It’s a reasonable one to ask, because at the time, I was the only future generations commissioner in the world. It’s an entirely new role that has been created, but that is currently gaining considerable traction and interest in other parts of the world. In 2015, Wales passed the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act, which came into force in 2016. The role of the future generations’ commissioner set out in law is to be the guardian of the interests of the future generations of Wales. That sounds quite grand, like something out of a Marvel film, doesn’t it? I can’t promise I was anywhere near that heroic. Essentially, my job was to both advise and support the Welsh government and about 45 other public institutions who were covered by the Future Generations Act on how they met the long-term goals set out in the Future Generations Act and how they were considering the interests of future generations, and then to monitor and assess progress.
Katharina: Being the conscience of future generations?
Sophie: Often, it was about intervening and calling out some of the madness of short-term decision-making, really being that voice for future generations and questioning current policymakers and current decision-makers on how they’ve taken their interests into account.
Katharina: How did the Future Generations Act acutally come about?
Sophie: Wales has had quite a long history of sustainable development. When power was devolved to Wales following a referendum in 1999, the Act of Parliament had a clause in it which said, “Sustainable development should be a central organising principle of the government.” That sounded great — in reality, however, it meant absolutely nothing. It meant that the environment minister could present a report once a year, but she couldn’t gain traction with any of the other ministries, such as economy or housing. There was one environment minister who was particularly frustrated by this and seized a political opportunity. There’s no magic formula to progressive policy. It’s usually about the right person being in the right place at the right time. This particular minister was in place when Westminster took the decision to abolish a non-statutory Sustainable Development Commission. Wales has always likes doing things a bit differently from Westminster, and this decision gave her the political leverage to argue not only to not abolish the non-statutory Sustainable Development Commissioner of Wales, but to give it a statutory footing. And she managed to get that commitment. But nobody really knew what they’d actually agreed to, what legislating for sustainable development really meant.
And that’s when someone had the genius idea that, if we don’t know what it means, we should ask the people of Wales. That was significant. The government held, via an NGO, a national conversation called The Wales We Want, where we posed the question to citizens, what is the Wales you want to leave behind to your children, your grandchildren, and future generations to come?
And our citizens told us. You have different conversations if you’re asking a future-focused question, rather than what’s bothering you right now. What’s bothering us now is traffic jams, and that I can’t get a doctor’s appointment etc. When you pose a question of what matters in terms of what you want your legacy to be, people start talking about the importance of protecting our natural environment, our culture, our heritage, passing our language on etc. They spoke about wanting Wales to be fairer in the future. They were talking about the importance of connected and cohesive communities. And what the citizens of Wales told us was then shaped into seven long-term wellbeing goals that were set out in law. They don’t change from one election to the next, and all of our public bodies have duties to maximize their contribution to all seven of those goals in everything that they do.
Katharina: So, it started with an exercise in public imagination? And the seven goals, they’re wonderful. A prosperous, resilient, healthy, more equal Wales, of more cohesive communities, of vibrant culture and thriving Welsh language, a globally responsible Wales. I assume it gets trickier when you start thinking about what it takes to attain that?
Sophie: You’re absolutely right. We also established what we call the five ways of working: five ways by which our government and all our public institutions must demonstrate that they’re working to reach those seven well-being goals. They need to show that they considered the long-term impact of the things that they do are planning, seeking to prevent problems from occurring or getting worse, integrating their actions, so making sure that they’re recognizing the knock-on consequences between different policy areas. For instance, you get a local authority closing down leisure centres because of budget cuts, while the health department is trying to improve people’s health and address physical inactivity. Those things don’t go together. They need to collaborate. The big issues that we need to address can only be dealt with in collaboration. And then there’s that really important principle of involving citizens. Not consultation or engagement — actual involvement in the sense of co-producing policy, service design with citizens.
I’m actually certain, if our public bodies and our institutions truly demonstrated that they were using those five ways of working, the seven well-being goals would be reached just in any case. Because they’re all long term. They’re all connected. They’re all about what citizens want for the future.
Other countries are trying to do things like put in place quality of life indexes or do well-being budgeting or well-being metrics and frameworks. They think that just by having a metrics in their system, that’s going to drive change. But the problem is the system doesn’t work beneath it. The system needs to reform to force it to think to the long term, to force it to work out intervention points to prevent problems, and to force it to work together and involve citizens. In Wales, we have legal duties to require that.
Katharina: What does the actual workday of a future generations’ commissioner look like? How do you fill such a role so it’s more than window dressing?
Sophie: The first thing to say is that the law didn’t give me the powers to force anyone to do anything or to stop anyone doing anything. There’s a rub there. I’m a non-elected public appointment with a constituent of people who don’t speak to me, can’t tell me what they want because they’re not born yet. And then there’s this body of democratically elected politicians. There’s a tension there — should you have a position where an unelected person is able to supersede the will of elected politicians?
The toughest of my powers were what were called Section 20 review powers. I could go into a public institution and intervene in a particular issue where I thought the institution wasn’t applying the Future Generations Act correctly. I could review them, and they would have to cooperate with me. Then I would make recommendations, which they would have to respond to publicly. If they were not going to follow my recommendations, they would have to set out the reasons why they were not following my recommendations and what they were doing instead.
The first big test of the role of a commissioner was when the government planned to spend their entire borrowing capacity building a 13-mile stretch of road to deal with the problem of congestion on one of our major motorways. When we have a problem with congestion, generally the answer is we need to build a bigger road. That’s a short-sighted solution, not least because probably within the next decade, if we’ve not actually driven mobile shift, that road will be just as full as the original road was. I intervened in that issue. The government was planning to take a decision which was not right in terms of meeting the wellbeing goals, and they were asking our future generations to pay for it. I asked the government to explain to me, can you tell me how you’ve considered the goal of a prosperous Wales?
When we talk about prosperity in our Future Generations Act, we’re not talking about GDP or economic growth. We’re talking about the definition in law as a productive, innovative, low-carbon society, one which uses resources efficiently and proportionately, including acting on climate change, and one which develops a well-educated population with access to decent work.
And then while you’re at it, you’re going to have to explain to me how you’ve considered the goal of a resilient Wales, which is about enhancing and maintaining our ecosystems because the road was going to go through a nature reserve. You’re also going to have to explain to me how you’ve considered the goal of a healthier Wales because we have illegal levels of air pollution. And also, explain to me how it’s in line with the goal of a more equal Wales when 25% of the lowest income families in this region don’t own a car because they can’t afford to own one. So, are you going to spend the entire of the government’s borrowing capacity on a programme, which benefits the already better off?
Now, was a public debate. And the government struggled to justify. They couldn’t justify their approach against their own legislation. As a result, even though it was widely considered that it was a done deal and there were a lot of vested interests, the government changed their mind following that intervention. They cancelled the road building scheme and set up a commission with the terms of reference based around the Future Generations Act. That commission has reported that the money should be spent on increasing public transport, new train stations, active travel routes, and so on. From that, we’ve transformed the transport strategy in Wales so that it now focuses and prioritises active travel, so walking and cycling at the top of what we call the transport hierarchy for investment.
Within a space of two years, because I continued to challenge the government on how they were spending their money in line with the Future Generations Act, we saw a decrease of spending in our infrastructure investment budget for roads by two thirds. I intervened in 55 already approved road building schemes. The majority have been cancelled. We are seeing a massive transformation in transport policy in Wales in line with the Future Generations Act. The key role of the commissioner was holding a mirror up to the government and saying: this is your legislation. Publicly explain to me how you’ve applied it. Publicly explain to me how you’ve declared a climate emergency, and then you’re going to build a road. Publicly explain to me how you claim to be a government of social justice, and you’re going to spend the entire of the borrowing capacity on something which doesn’t benefit the poorest in our society. That’s quite a challenge for the government do.
Katharina: Since the element of debates being public seems key to the role — could you be certain to have the citizens of Wales behind you? I am asking because it can be difficult to get the public to accept that some things will have to change if we want to secure sustainable, healthy, wellbeing futures for generations that aren’t yet born. It’s one thing to wish for a prosperous, equal and green society, but an entirely different thing to make the collective changes needed to get there.
Sophie: We have those tensions. Of course. That’s why it was critically important that we held that national dialogue. The people of Wales were involved in setting these goals, and they therefore provide the framework of the vision of the Wales that we want to leave behind. We are working towards that vision. Of course, people prioritize the climate emergency until it comes to the fact that their road is going to be cancelled. That’s still not easy, but it is easier when you have a countrywide agreed framework of where we’re trying to go.
The other issue is, my job is to speak for future generations. It is a voice in the system that hasn’t existed before and almost fulfils the role of being the conscience for future generations. That is really important because generally nobody is playing that role. You get people coming in from a particular environmental perspective or a poverty perspective etc. My role took a helicopter view over the entire system and was sense-checking throughout the entire system how things were impacting on future generations. It does require political bravery. It’s not without its challenges because progress is always difficult. It also means that we’ve got to do really unpopular things. Sadly, because of the climate emergency, we’re all going to have to do really unpopular things in a very short space of time because none of us have taken a long-term view previously.
Katharina: I really like that you started from a positive narrative, of a Wales we want. I feel that this is often missing from the debates about the future.
Sophie: Absolutely. When you bring these goals together holistically, you can prioritize differently. So, instead of spending that money on building a road, for example, I mean, actually, a much better investment is across the well-being goals is public transport and active travel. It improves health. It makes communities more cohesive and more connected. Public transport is much more accessible in terms of people on low incomes. Of course, it still reduces our carbon emissions and air pollution and so on. When you apply that lens, you’re getting these multiple benefits.
In another iteration, the Act helps you decide what to do and then how to do it. Let’s take the example of homes. The government set a manifesto commitment to build 20,000 affordable homes, which is great. However, they shouldn’t just be 20,000 affordable homes. They need to be 20,000 affordable low-carbon homes. We need to be having a long-term plan in terms of the skills pipeline of the people who are going to build those homes. We need to target that skills pipeline to those furthest from the labour market, women, Black, Asian, minority, ethnic people who don’t tend to come into those jobs and have those skills to take advantage of those good jobs and so on. And when we’re doing that, we need to think about how could we be further enhancing nature in the way in which we might be regenerating communities and so on. It’s always a double test of what you do and how you do it.
Katharina: There are a few questions from the audience that I’d like to ask you. The first one from Aisha. Is there any plan for your position to become an elected one to give your voice more strength and oblige the government further to the question, would remind them who would vote?
Sophie: I think that’s an interesting question because the future generations can’t vote yet. There are no plans to do that. My view is that it’s probably better as it is. Everyone would like to think, wouldn’t they, that they’re going to keep doing the right thing. I don’t think politicians go into being politicians because they want to do the wrong thing and they want to mess things up for future generations. But it’s just the pull of everything in the system, and particularly the electoral system, which means that they keep having to respond to popularism. So having someone that doesn’t have that pull back and has complete freedom in a way to speak on behalf of future generations is important. With the caveat that obviously, I can’t possibly know exactly what future generations want. But I have a pretty good idea that they’re going to want a planet to live on and they’re going to want to be healthy and they’re going to want to have human things like connection and so on.
Katharina: In a way, you are in a role that makes it easier for the people that have to respond to their electorate, to have somebody else to help them in not doing the wrong thing.
Sophie: I think that’s an interesting view. I hadn’t thought of it like that before. But you know what? I’ve actually had those conversations with ministers who are really grappling with the system pulling them back to the short term. Some of them have actually said to me, it would be really helpful to hear your voice in this and challenge us.
Katharina: The next question from the audience: Did you complement the public confrontations and explanations with any private behind-the-scene negotiations?
Sophie: Yes, of course. There are multiple ways in which these things can work. I always took an approach of having direct conversations with government initially, advising them on the approach that would be the best approach in applying the Future Generations Act. If they don’t, then it goes into a public dialogue. But even as that is going on, you still need political will in government to change things.
I’ve spent a long time working in the public sector and politics. I know quite well how the system works and the different points of intervention to get it moving.
Katharina: A question from David in Ethiopia. You say you anticipate, would you say you anticipate the demands of the future or rather intervene in the worsening of the status quo?
Sophie: I would say it’s both, but probably more the latter — intervening in the worsening of the status quo. I think a lot of people thought our future generations commissioner will be producing lots of reports around the potential impact of AI and what should we be thinking about in terms of big existential threats and so on and so on. And these things are also important. The problem that I see, however, is that even the things that we are pretty certain about, like climate change, like an aging population, like work is changing, like we’ve got increasing preventable health conditions and so on, we are not taking the action now on the things that we know are massive problems coming at us.
My position was always to start on the basis of the stuff that has the highest likelihood of happening and the highest impact if it does happen and work within the system to try and move people on as quickly as possible. The other thing is the really important factor of us having a set of positive goals. It’s less about what we have to stop happening, and more about what we have to make happen.
Katharina: Here’s a question from Sam in Ethiopia. He’s asking: “Aside from climate change and the associated adverse impacts, what would you say are the other top three challenges for future generations?
Sophie: In terms of the big threats, I think that obviously the climate and nature emergency, and I think the fact that the nature emergency, the ecological emergency is not being given the same sort of priority as reaching net zero is a real problem. Then, obviously issues around AI, we don’t know exactly how that’s going to play out, but I don’t think we are anywhere near prepared for the sorts of ethics. I think there are massive issues in terms of the polarization of society and the sort of linked issue between AI and misinformation and disinformation and the destabilizing effects it has on society. The real concern is how these things are interlinked.
For example, polarization, misinformation and disinformation are having a real impact on the ability of governments to pursue progressive decarbonization and nature and climate emergency policies because all these conspiracy theories and so on are spreading.
The linked challenge is that the way in which we’re educating our children and young people is not fit for the future. We need them to be creative. We need them to be empathetic. We need them to be thinking about their own health, physical and mental health, and the health of, you know, their community.
Katharina: And another question in the chat: What are the arguments that can be used to protect the interests and the rights of future generations from a legal perspective?
Sophie: The Future Generations Act hasn’t been properly tested in the courts. But there are other legal systems across the world where constitutional for future generations are being played out in the courts. I think that it needs a tightening of rights of future generations, but that is just the bare minimum. What we’re trying to do in Wales is to flip it on its head and take us towards an aspirational thing and changing and transforming the system, rather than just taking the system to court when they’re not doing it.
Katharina: Teodora wants to know: “How do you prioritize when and where to intervene?”
Sophie: I held a big national dialogue myself when I started office and the new commissioner is doing that now. The question that I posed was, what are the policy areas that if we got them right, would make the biggest contribution to each of the wellbeing goals for current and future generations? I came out of that dialogue with clear priority areas: infrastructure, housing, planning and transport, jobs and skills for the future, better ways of keeping people well, e.g. preventative health and the wider determinants of health, and tackling adverse childhood experiences. What I did then was to prioritise my interventions in those six areas. I know that decisions were happening every day that weren’t in line with the Future Generations Act. And I didn’t have the capacity to intervene in all of them. But in those areas where we were able to intervene and there was really significant progress we caused a ripple effect into other policy areas and into other institutions.
Katharina: There are two questions asking how to make the voice of young people or the unborn heard and one from a colleague in Niger asking, whether you run a youth parliament or future generation citizens fora as a steering structure for MPs.
Sophie: We have lots of different interventions and programmes with youth. Some of them started before the Future Generations Act. There are mandatory school councils in every school and eco-councils who have a decision-making function within the school. We have a youth parliament for Wales, which has elections every two years. We’ve lowered the voting age to 16 in Wales, which is a step in the right direction. And then every local authority has their own kind of youth parliament. My office did lots of different work with young people. We have a children’s commissioner in Wales as well who my office worked with closely. But one of the best programmes we set up was something called a Future Leaders Academy. We worked with the public, private and third sector to identify future leaders between 18 and 30 from a whole range of different sectors. We had engineers, artists, community activists, young entrepreneurs and so on. We put them through an intensive programme on what is the Future Generations Act — asking, what does it look like if we’re leading through the lens of those five ways of working and so on? They all came together, a really diverse cohort. They had to undertake a particular transformation programme in their own organisational sector or community. But the best thing that we did was a reverse mentoring programme. We paired each cohort, 30 young leaders with 30 existing leaders, chief executives and so on in Wales for those young leaders to mentor these existing leaders.
Usually, you get it the other way around where us older people want to impart all of our wisdom on these young people who know nothing. But that’s the wrong way around because we need the wisdom of our younger people because we are not digital natives. We have never experienced climate anxiety in the same way. We haven’t been grappling with gender and identity in the same way in the rises in terms of mental health and so on and so on. So we, in terms of taking decisions now, which are going to impact the future, need to do that with an ear out to our young and our future generations.
Our young leaders mentored the head of the Welsh Government Civil Service, the chief executive of the local authority of our capital city and the chief executive of our football association and so on. There’s real power of having a young mentor in a one to one relationship, eyeballing current leaders. “How are you acting in my interest? Why are you doing that? What are you going to do?” It’s also interesting because it reverses the sort of idea of a direction of learning that we’ve all been born and raised with.
Katharina: A colleague from El Salvador is asking: What would you suggest to youth in non-Eurocentric systems with less conducive structures to get their voices heard?
Sophie: This is not my area of expertise particularly. Wales is a tiny country of 3.3 million people. And we’ve been doing this work with the UN. It resulted in the UN Secretary General saying that there should be a future generations declaration at a UN level. This year, there will be the appointment of a UN Special Envoy for Future Generations, which is like a UN equivalent of my role. That has the potential to have a trickle-down effect across all nations. I think there’s a real bit of leverage there in different countries who might want to sort of present a kind of progressive position globally to seize that opportunity and to say, this is about positioning us well on a global stage. That’s worked particularly well in Wales as a small nation, and I think it could work well elsewhere.
I think it is about aligning that with building up from the grassroots, some of those kind of youth advocacy programmes. If you were to set up a reverse mentoring scheme. Politicians don’t usually like to say no to young people, they might go into it just being lip service initially, but you can build from that. And the power of those one-to-one relationships and the way in which our young people are able to convince and persuade politicians in those relationships is really interesting.
Katharina: Considering that Wales has a devolved administration and a Westminster government that’s perhaps not invested in the agenda. What are the lessons from your experience of how we scale up from local or regional policy and action? It often feels that we’re waiting for national governments to act, but your work is showing that we don’t need to wait.
Sophie: I’m engaged with lots of different countries, from actors and institutions in the US to I’ve just spent some time in Australia doing some things with their government and a range of NGOs there. It’s different in each context. The scalability is different, and the starting points could be different. In Australia, for example, some of the states and territories are far more advanced than the government. But I absolutely don’t think that you have to wait for central government. There’s no reason why you can’t model this out on a much smaller scale. In fact, model it out, make it work and scale it up and build excitement about it.
Katharina: Thank you Sophie for this conversation and the great insights.
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Sophie Howe is Described by The Guardian as ‘the World’s First Minister of the Unborn’ Sophie Howe held the post of Future Generations’ Commissioner for seven years, and with it a legal mandate to be the ‘guardian of the interests of the future generations of Wales.’ In this role she has led high profile interventions to promote future-fit transport planning and education policies. She has served as an Adviser to two of Wales’s First Ministers, as an adviser to the UN Secretary General on governance for intergenerational equity and has influenced the development of similar legislation in Scotland and Ireland and a UK Future Generations Bill.
