Intergenerational Foresight 2026

GLOBAL RELEVANCE The dynamics described here are not unique to Sub-Saharan Africa. They reflect a global governance failure mode in which systems claim inclusion while designing out meaningful power. Across the Amazon basin, Indigenous communities face consultation regimes without authority.96 In Indonesia’s West Papua, formal autonomy arrangements coexist with centralized control over extraction.97 Even strong legal frameworks, such as the Philippines’ Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act, demonstrate how consent can remain procedural when communities lack binding decision rights.98 Comparable shared-authority models are already emerging elsewhere. Canada’s Towards Sustainable Mining framework and Australia’s co-management agreements with Aboriginal communities formalize joint authority over monitoring, standards and benefit-sharing.99 These cases underscore a transferable principle: legitimacy strengthens when decision rights are embedded in law rather than mediated through goodwill. By embedding communities as long-term co- governors, the Dual Governance Model addresses a deeper temporal mismatch between short political cycles, long extraction horizons and multi- generational ecological impacts.100 In this sense, the provocation answers a global question with African clarity: what if inclusion were not a performance, but a power structure? The DGM offers one practical architecture for making that shift durable, auditable and resilient across generations. Intergenerational Foresight: An Approach for Long-Term Responsibility in Governance 37