Intergenerational Foresight 2026

Many extractive-sector reforms have focused on transparency and consultation, including environmental hearings, free, prior and informed consent processes, open-data portals and stakeholder frameworks.92 While these tools increase visibility, visibility without authority can entrench dispossession by legitimizing outcomes that communities cannot meaningfully influence.93 The central governance challenge is no longer how to improve transparency, but how to redesign decision-making so that power cannot be easily centralized or captured. The Dual Governance Model (DGM) responds by shifting from participation to shared sovereignty. It establishes a two-key system in which licensing, monitoring, enforcement, penalties and benefit-sharing cannot proceed unless both the state and a legally constituted community governance body approve them. Authority is embedded in law, not goodwill. This distinction is critical. Co-ownership refers to shared legal authority, joint rights and obligations and enforceable decision-making power.94 Co- management refers to shared operational execution and where co-management is not anchored in co-ownership, participation often collapses into symbolism.95 By embedding operations within shared legal authority, the DGM makes accountability durable and contestable. The provocation advances an architectural rather than aspirational shift. It seeks to collapse the governance mirage by making exclusion structurally difficult. When communities must co-author, co-sign and co-enforce, governance systems must become legible, auditable and resilient to technocratic capture.RATIONALE Aligning authority with accountability ILLUSTRATIVE PATHWAYS These pathways are illustrative rather than prescriptive. They demonstrate how institutions can implement the Dual Governance Model in practice across diverse political and legal contexts. Embedding shared sovereignty at points of highest leverage Licensing remains the primary gate through which power, value and long-term ecological outcomes are determined. Requiring joint state-community approval for licences would convert community consent from a procedural step into a condition of legal validity. Making community consent a condition of legal validity shifts governance upstream. It ensures that decision-makers and communities co-author extraction terms, safeguards and restoration plans rather than contest them after harm has occurred. Reconstituting legitimacy through co-governed enforcement and benefit-sharing Joint community-state bodies can serve as shared custodians of monitoring, sanctions, remediation and revenue allocation. When enforcement authority and benefit-sharing are co-governed, communities move from external watchdogs to institutional stewards with a direct stake in long-term outcomes; benefit-sharing shifts from compensation to co- ownership of rules and responsibilities.Replacing technocratic complexity with legibility as a governance norm Shared sovereignty creates a forcing function for simplification. When communities must co-sign and co-enforce decisions, contracts, monitoring systems and revenue disclosures must become legible and auditable. Capacity is built through exercising authority rather than through parallel training detached from power. Aligning governance time horizons with intergenerational stewardship Extraction decisions shape ecological and social systems for decades, while political cycles span only a few years. Embedding communities as long-term co-governors reorients decision- making toward durability, restoration and intergenerational benefit. This perspective strengthens resilience to political turnover and long-horizon risks such as climate volatility and demographic change. Internal safeguards are essential. To mitigate local elite capture, the DGM embeds rotational leadership, transparent selection criteria, recall mechanisms, public disclosure of decisions and revenues and mandatory representation of women and youth within community governance bodies.Together, these dynamics explain why transparency and consultation alone fail: they increase visibility while leaving power structures intact. Intergenerational Foresight: An Approach for Long-Term Responsibility in Governance 36