Intergenerational Foresight 2026

The Future50 Initiative is a purposeful effort to reshape the practice of foresight and its inclusive participation. Created through a joint effort between the Global Foresight Network and the Global Shapers Community, it gathers fifty emerging leaders from various regions to collaborate with experienced foresight practitioners over several months.Its goal is not to develop a single model or set of recommendations. Instead, it aims to examine how intergenerational design can enhance foresight’s ability to address long-term challenges by rebalancing perspective, power, and responsibility across different generations and timeframes. This handbook contributes to the ongoing development of foresight as a leadership and governance skill. It does not aim to establish a new orthodoxy or replace existing methods. Instead, it promotes intergenerational foresight as a means of redirecting and strengthening established practice amid increased uncertainty, risk, and accountability. By combining conceptual framing, guiding principles, and practical insights, the following methodology shows how wider participation across time, geography, and experience can enhance decision quality and legitimacy. Key to this contribution are the provocations developed through regional collaboration. Each provocation demonstrates the application of intergenerational foresight within a specific context while addressing broader governance dynamics that go beyond any single region. These are not definitive solutions or prescriptions, but strategic prompts designed to identify blind spots, challenge inherited assumptions, and broaden leaders’ strategic perspectives. The handbook acts as a reference point rather than a fixed guide. It positions intergenerational foresight as an ongoing practice that must continually evolve as the futures we aim to govern become more complex, contested, and consequential. It encourages reflection on how organizations currently embed foresight and how they might develop it to better serve both current and future generations. The Future50 initiative Purpose and scope of this handbookForesight has often been positioned as a specialist function, concentrated in dedicated units, expert communities, or advisory roles. While this helped establish analytical credibility and protect long- term thinking within systems otherwise driven by short-term incentives, it also narrowed the locus of authority over the future. Over time, assumptions about expertise and legitimacy shaped participation in foresight, determining whose perspectives held significance. Decision-makers often frame knowledge rooted in lived experience, local context, or long- term stewardship as contextual input rather than recognizing it as a form of strategic authority. As demographic change, climate risk and technological transformation accelerate, the limits of this arrangement are increasingly evident. Long-term challenges affect generations, regions and social positions unevenly and no single vantage point can fully grasp them. Under these conditions, the greatest gains emerge when foresight is treated not as specialist expertise but as an institutional capability: embedded in leadership expectations, decision routines and organizational culture and shared across roles and levels as part of everyday governance. From specialist practice to institutional capability Intergenerational Foresight: An Approach for Long-Term Responsibility in Governance 7