Intergenerational Foresight 2026

ancestral knowledge. Interventions underperform or generate inequitable trade-offs, deepening mistrust. Participation costs rise, representation weakens further and exclusion becomes self-reinforcing. This cycle of rising participation costs and weakening representation undermines both policy effectiveness and the legitimacy required to sustain long-horizon commitments.Together, these dynamics reveal a core challenge. Rural legitimacy is often earned through short- term extraction rather than long-term stewardship. Governance systems reward immediate output while transferring ecological and social costs to future generations. GDP-First Metrics & Extraction TrapWellbeing IgnoredEcosystem & SuccessGDP-Driven Wellbeing IgnoredEcosystem &Expansion RewardCommodity Wellbeing Ignored Ecosystem &Ecosystem & well-being IgnoredWellbeing IgnoredEcosystem &Pressure toExpand Exports W ellbeing Ignored Ecosystem &Expand Exports Pressure to Political Underrepresentation & Declining TrustWellbeing IgnoredEcosystem & RepresentationLimited Wellbeing IgnoredEcosystem &MisalignedPoliciesWellbeing Ignored Ecosystem &Ineffective OutcomesWellbeing IgnoredEcosystem &InstitutionalMistrust W ellbeing Ignored Ecosystem & Discontent Exclusion & Ecosystem Indicators & Renewed LegitimacyWellbeing IgnoredEcosystem & Indicators VisibleEcosystem Wellbeing IgnoredEcosystem &Investment GrowsRegenerativeWellbeing Ignored Ecosystem &Ecosystem Health ImprovesWellbeing IgnoredEcosystem &TangibleCommunity Benefits W ellbeing Ignored Ecosystem &Prosperity Metrics Broader RATIONALE Redefining prosperity through intergenerational compacts Rural governance in Latin America is frequently approached through a deficit lens, focused on managing poverty or mitigating conflict. Prosperity is implicitly defined as convergence to urban- industrial models. This provocation invites a different starting point. It asks what rural development would look like if prosperity were defined and measured by ecosystem health, social cohesion and cultural continuity. Intergenerational compacts provide a mechanism for this shift. These compacts serve as formal and lived agreements that guide how communities steward land, water and ecosystems so that they sustain opportunity across decades. They recognize that many rural and Indigenous communities already operate with long temporal horizons grounded in ancestral knowledge and responsibility to future generations.The gap is not a lack of long-term thinking at the community level. It is the absence of governance frameworks that recognize, protect and scale that thinking within public institutions, markets and fiscal systems. Redefining prosperity in this way produces concrete shifts. Policies align around continuity rather than extraction cycles; investment rewards regenerate rather than deplete. Legitimacy grows from decisions that remain credible to people and ecosystems in 2050 and 2075, rather than from short-term output alone. Under this lens, rural Latin America becomes a laboratory for intergenerational foresight. It offers pathways to rebuild legitimacy by anchoring governance in stewardship, reciprocity and responsibility across time. Intergenerational Foresight: An Approach for Long-Term Responsibility in Governance 28