21/09/2026
It will soon be three years since The Good Lobby launched the Future Generations Initiative alongside a coalition of civil society organisations. Our ask was simple and, at the time, ambitious: the creation of a Commissioner responsible for intergenerational fairness, the development of a Future Generations Impact Assessment, assessing the long-term impact of EU policymaking, and an EU interinstitutional agreement aimed at getting other EU institutions commit to the rights of future generations. A new progress check published this month, Future Generations in Global Governance: A 2026 Progress Check by Prof Daniella Tilbury confirms something we’ve often been saying. The EU has moved further and faster than the UN – but future generations continue to lack the protection they deserve.
The EU has a starting point: the first strategy on the topic
The 2026 Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness contains a part on Fair Policymaking (foresight, impact assessment, the Youth Check), it reaches into Fair Opportunities – housing, employment, wealth distribution and inheritance taxation – and Fair Places, the geographic inequality between thriving cities and declining regions.
As we argued when the Strategy landed, this strategy provides strong political narrative but not yet strong policy instrument. The Strategy leans heavily on tools that already existed – strategic foresight, the Youth Check, participatory dialogues. It does not clearly define intergenerational fairness or anchor it as an enforceable principle in EU law. And it notably avoids engaging with the revision of the Better Regulation guidelines – currently under preparation, arguably the single most concrete opportunity to make long-term thinking binding rather than aspirational. Wider scope doesn’t fix that: intergenerational fairness still remains a lens the Commission can apply when convenient, not a requirement that constrains the Multiannual Financial Framework, climate policy, or the current deregulation drive. The EU’s next Youth Strategy is due in March 2027, drawing on consultations running through 2026. That’s our nearest concrete opening to push for enforceability before this framework hardens into the EU’s default answer on the subject.
The UN is lagging behind
Set against that progress, the UN’s record looks worse still. Weeks after the 2024 Summit of the Future, Under-Secretary-General Guy Ryder told the Hamburg Sustainability Conference that the Secretary-General intended to appoint a Special Envoy for Future Generations “in the coming weeks.” By July 2025, terms of reference and a budget proposal were ready. Then member states simply declined to fund the post. It’s absent from the 2026 budget, and the UN’s own tracker now describes the appointment as “temporarily on hold.”
An ad hoc working group co-chaired by Jamaica and New Zealand, set up to examine how UN mandates are created and reviewed more broadly, reported back in March 2026, and the General Assembly adopted a resolution on the mandate lifecycle shortly after. Worth tracking – but as Tilbury notes, none of it has yet unlocked the Envoy’s appointment. Quieter work continues too: a network of Future Generations focal points, a Group of Friends convened by Jamaica and the Netherlands. None of it carries the mandate or the money a funded Envoy would.
Both processes – the EU and the UN – are now set to converge, with the Commission’s own progress report, and the UN’s high-level review of the Declaration. As Professor Tilbury puts it: “Declarations create the mandate; institutions and budgets create the delivery.” The EU has at least built some of the institutional capacity – a Commissioner, a strategy, a stated intention to act across policy, opportunity and place. The UN hasn’t even secured the funding to staff the role it promised nearly two years ago. Neither has delivered what our coalition asked for in 2024: rights for future generations anchored in law, not just referenced in a communication.
That’s the gap we intend to keep closing.