Every Country Now Has a Ministry of the Future. The Future Is Underwhelmed.

The Ministry of the Future, the Office for Long-Term Thinking, the Department of Strategic Foresight, the Directorate of Generational Outcomes. The names rotate. The org charts rotate too. The portraits in the lobby change, the press release goes out, the ministry exists, and for a useful period of time it generates a kind of optimism that is hard to manufacture by any other means in modern statecraft.

The optimism is the product. The future, considered as an actual deliverable, is somewhat further behind.

What these ministries actually do

What they actually do varies. The honest ones produce careful, somewhat boring reports about how the country might be different in two decades, which is the kind of document that nobody reads in time to act on it and everybody refers to once it is too late. The less honest ones produce conference-ready material about the year forty years from now, which is safely far enough away that nobody currently in the building will be held responsible for the gap between the projection and the eventual fact.

The very best of them, and there are a small number of these, manage to embed a planning function into actual budget decisions that get made by other ministries. This is hard. It involves a Ministry of the Future getting an actually-funded Minister of the Present to do something now that will pay off later, which is a category of conversation that adult policy-making has not, historically, been very good at.

Why the Gulf has so many of these

The Gulf has more of these ministries per capita than almost any region, which is interesting because the Gulf also has, in absolute terms, more long-term thinking embedded in the actual decision-making class than almost any region. Sovereign wealth funds plan in geological time. Royal families plan in dynastic time. The local economy is, structurally, organised around resources whose price horizons are measured in five-year cycles and whose ultimate exhaustion is a planning concern in many of the relevant offices.

So why also a separate ministry? The honest answer is that the symbolic and the operational are doing different jobs. The ministry is the public-facing statement that the future is taken seriously. The actual decisions about the future continue to be made in the places they were always made, which is to say in the principal's office, with the principal's advisers, on the principal's timeline. The ministry's job is to dignify the conversation. It is, in its way, an important conversation to dignify.

The polite suspicion of the long term itself

There is a polite suspicion in the foresight community that the rush to create these ministries is itself a kind of present-tense move. A government that wants to look like it is thinking long-term is rarely the same as a government that is thinking long-term. The latter is mostly silent about it. The former tends to send press kits. The future, considered as a thing capable of being underwhelmed, has been around long enough to notice the difference.