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With this collection, we highlight fertile ground for the refinement of a shared understanding of the long term, building on decades of diplomacy that have successfully made long-term flourishing a key motivation for international cooperation. It reminds us of the recency of international institutions, their hopeful vision and the work that remains to be done to secure long-term survival and flourishing.

Our motivation for writing this post comes from observing an increasing number of calls for preparedness which require institutional paradigm shifts of the kind that is observed mostly on centennial scales. Many of the risks that humanity is currently facing seem more urgent. We hope to contribute to accelerating the adoption of a new preparedness paradigm by reviewing what we know about policy change.

In conducting this research, we make choices about the questions we ask, modelling assumptions we make, which literature to rely on, etc. In this short piece, we make explicit the underlying beliefs that inform these decisions. By doing so, we hope to explain our approach, invite constructive criticism and live up to our standard of reasoning transparency.

At SI, we support international policy actors in dealing with uncertainty, complexity, time-pressure and global catastrophic risks. Below is a compilation of fields and resources we draw from and that might be valuable for others.

If humanity survives the next few centuries, there is a fair chance that the vast majority of human life, culture, science, technology, and happiness lies ahead, rather than behind us.

Summary The Simon Institute for Longterm Governance (SI) aims to increase the longterm impact of policymaking processes. In its first 2…

Together with the Geneva Science-Policy Interface, SI contributes “Behavioral Solutions for Evidence-based Decision-making” to the UN High…

Context Given the difficulty of measuring effects on policy networks, we anchor our strategy in a detailed theory of change. While…

On April 1st at 2 pm CET, we co-hosted the event “Towards 2030: Navigating complexity and information overload in decision-making” as part…