Intergenerational justice is an inherent component of nuclear waste management. By looking at challenges of intergenerational justice at various stages of the repository siting process, the following thesis is discussed: Current generations can anticipate notions of intergenerational justice by applying high procedural standards to enable equitable distribution between generations and thus adequately recognize the needs of future generations. Applying high standards in this context means a constantly critical, reflexive, and open process, without bias or selfishness.

This study addresses the concept of smart governance in the context of smart cities, with a focus on analyzing the phenomenon of smart collaboration. Relying on the existing collaboration and participation concepts in the smart city domain, an empirical analysis was undertaken of how ICT can promote collaborative governance and increase the participation and engagement in government. The multiple case studies focus on three cities in Brazil that run municipal operations centers in an effort to “become smarter”: Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, and Belo Horizonte.

Human societies face various unsustainability problems, often characterized as “wicked” in the sense that they have no single definitive formulation. Thus, the role of creativity or insight in solving such problems has attracted a lot of attention from scholars. Therefore, this study investigated how an emerging methodology, Future Design (and its unique intervention of asking problem solvers to take a future generation’s perspective), can facilitate insight problem solving (IPS) and the generation of sustainable solutions.

Nuclear waste management seems to exist in a perpetual state of crises. For 50 years the nuclear states of the world have fought, and generally lost, the battle to deal with the nuclear waste problem. Worldwide, there is a growing acknowledgement within industry and government that social and ethical issues are just as important as technical issues when developing safe programs for nuclear waste management. This paper is a review of some of the outstanding social and ethical issues that are influencing discussions on nuclear waste management around the world.

After decades of ineffective state-led global climate governance that has been dominated by mostly short-term Northern political and corporate interests, we are now witnessing an increased recognition of the planetary scale of the climate crisis and its impacts on present and future life on Earth. The Anthropocene is argued to be the new geological epoch and is associated with fast-approaching planetary boundaries and a new understanding of promethean humans as a powerful geological force.

After decades of preparation, the final disposal of spent nuclear fuel has reached the construction stage in Finland, and the neighboring Sweden is likely to soon follow in the footsteps. These Nordic countries rely on a similar technical concept based on passive safety, advocated as a means of minimizing the burden to future generations. The scholarly literature on the ethics of nuclear waste management has thus far paid little attention to the views of the broader publics on the associated ethical challenges.

In recent years, sustainable futures have gained momentum in the political discourse on shaping policies to better cope with future challenges in Europe and around the globe. Society’s transformation towards sustainability—formerly the exclusive domain of sustainability scholars and a few politicians and activists—has begun to become a topic of interest more widely debated in mass media and among the general public. For example, a 2019 Forsa survey revealed that most Germans perceive climate change as the country’s most urgent problem.

This paper discusses why there is a growing need for intergenerational programs and approaches to public policy. It suggests they provide some important and unique contributions to contemporary American society. These contributions include responding to challenges emerging from an aging society; by developing productive roles for the aging population, bridging stereotypes associated with age, and promoting understanding between the generations that discourages generational competition;.

Two Andean countries – Ecuador and Bolivia – have politically recognized the rights of nature, an idea that is also gaining traction at the sub-federal in the United States. The origins of the concept can be traced to the cultures of indigenous peoples of the Americas as well as to the work of American legal scholar Christopher Stone. Recognition of nature’s rights holds out the possibility of an alternative approach to environmental management and politics, as well as to a fundamentally redefined relationship between nature and society.

The interests of children in a climate-challenged future are under-represented within UK policy-making and public discourse. Debates on intergenerational equity have centred on economic logic rather than the moral issue of harms to the next generation, or the responsibilities of today’s generation. Civil movements play an important role in changing public and political thinking on this issue; however, research on intergenerational climate justice activism has so far been confined to the youth movement.