Minister of the Future: the attempt to make politicians think long-term

It’s objective to say that politicians think in the short term. The fault lies with the system itself: given the promises and interests, they have to focus on the short term, on the plans they could do between elections. Can you think of a politician willing to risk not being re-elected for a better future from which he cannot benefit? This was the reflection of the Swedish Government in 2015 and the result was the creation of a Ministry of the Future.

The person chosen to head this much-needed Ministry was Kristina Persson, a Swedish social democratic politician linked to the trade union movement in the 1980s (Swedish Trade Union Confederation, Secretariat for International Trade Union Development, Secretariat of the Confederation of Nordic Trade Unions…) and then a member of the European Parliament, County Governor and Deputy Governor of the Swedish Central Bank. In 2007 she created the Global Utmaning initiative, a big think tank to generate dialogues, spread knowledge and foster critical thinking around the changes brought by globalization, especially in the fields of employment, welfare, democracy and the environment.

This last step in her career made her the ideal candidate for this Ministry of the Future. Motherboard gave her a really interesting interview from which I have extracted key fragments:

The ministry is organized in three strategic groups. The first is concerned with the future of work, the second with the green transition and competitiveness, while the third one is what we call “global cooperation.” Each strategic group brings together people with different backgrounds. Some come from the business community, others from civil society, trade unions, and academia. This variety is of the uttermost importance as the questions we are trying to address are complex, and finding solutions needs the cooperation of all of society’s stakeholders. No one [can be] excluded.

We live in a world that is transforming at an unprecedented speed, a world that is constantly challenging and disrupting the old ways we are used to do things. Given the context, I believe that if politics wants to remain relevant and be useful to citizens, it needs to change its approach. It needs to experiment with new ways and new solutions. This is what we are doing at the ministry and it’s quite ground breaking. A lot of colleagues from other countries have expressed interest in my work and I hope a similar institution will soon be developed in other parts of the world.

If you think about it, most ministries have a top-down approach. By this I mean they decide on a specific policy and then, given they have a budget and political leverage, they have the power to implement it. This is a vertical approach, the opposite of the horizontal one we promote here at the ministry. Rather than going top-down, we promote inter-ministerial collaboration and force decision makers to confront the long-term issues despite the fact this is harder to do sometimes. The product of our efforts are suggestions, never impositions, and I think this is very democratic. Also, whatever policy we might suggest has to be embraced other ministries in order to become a reality since we don’t have a budget and the political capital to push it through parliament.

I find the approach fascinating. In fact, it’s how I believe innovation in large companies must work. The word “future” could be replaced by “innovation” and “government” by “corporation” and it would be a perfect simile. It was a shame to read on the website of the Swedish Government that this Ministry concluded in April 2016, when the final report was presented… I haven’t been able to find the reasons for the “closing with the delivery of a report”, the future is something that never arrives and you have to be thinking about it constantly, but I can imagine it. Meanwhile, there are other governments that are betting on the same idea like the United Arab Emirates.

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