How should we best address substantial long-term problems for people and the environment? We are facing some major challenges that we already know will be with us for decades, centuries, and even longer. Problems such as climate change, environmental pollution, nuclear waste disposal, or unsustainable production and consumption patterns have one thing in common: they will inevitably accompany us for a long time. The reasons for this are manifold, stemming, for instance, from the complex nature of these problems, their potentially severe consequences, the predictably challenging, time-consuming, and uncertain way of solving these problems, or the need to adequately deal with heterogeneous and changing societal demands and values (including those of future generations).

Effectively addressing these long-term problems requires a governance approach that goes beyond short-sighted orientations and decision-making processes. Governance from a long-term perspective – or long-term governance – is therefore the most far-sighted and appropriate political management of large-scale, targeted change processes. It requires long-term, integrated, adaptive-anticipatory, and comprehensive efforts to implement socio-technical change processes through direct and indirect modes of governance.

The ITAS focus project “Conceptual and empirical development of long-term governance” is carrying out fundamental work on understanding this political-societal approach to long-term problems.

This includes generic work on a “framework concept of long-term governance”. In this framework, questions on the basic architecture of long-term governance in the relationship between politics, society, and technology are addressed and considered from the perspective of technology assessment and systems analysis: institutional learning, the role of science, ethics, and technology, anticipation and foresight in political decision-making processes, or interactions between the short and the long term are important aspects that are examined in more detail here.

In addition, in-depth case studies will be conducted on selected aspects of long-term governance. These include, for example, a systematic literature analysis on long-term governance within risk research and sustainability-oriented transformation research (transition studies, earth system governance, etc.). The concept of comparative transformation pathways is developed as a heuristic and analytical approach (“pathway approach”). The interaction of pathway dependencies and necessary disruptions will also be explored using case studies on exnovations.

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