Every year, twenty-five essays are selected from hundreds of submissions to the Global Essay Competition. These essays are authored by a generation of future leaders from all around the world. Answering to a thematised call that revolves around the main topic of the Annual St. Gallen Symposium, young talents discover a range of interconnected topic areas that are rarely discussed in these combinations outside of the symposium. The essays propose novel ideas that address major challenges we collectively face today. Their problem statements are provocative and their suggestions to tackle the challenges are creative and visionary.These writings inspire important conversations about our future during and beyond the symposium. Indeed, it is one of the main goals of the St. Gallen Symposium to enable the Leaders of Tomorrow to carry the dialogue forward every year, and to connect these inspired young thinkers with the decision makers and powerful organisations of today. This year, the main topic of the Global Essay Competition was “collaborative advantage” and “reinventing the intergenerational contract”.   

As many of the top twenty-five essays stipulate, achieving intergenerational justice is the main purpose of a reformed intergenerational contract. Intergenerational justice can be defined as justice between two currently living generations, but also, as justice among several successive generations. The core idea of intergenerational justice is closely tied to the idea of sustainability:  if all (current and future) generations are to benefit, it is crucial that each generation receives what it is entitled to from the previous one, and contributes its fair share to coming generations. In this context, a balance must always be struck between the freedom of the current generation, which makes the decisions, and its obligations to future generations, which must live with the consequences. Intergenerational challenges require a collaborative effort on all levels of communities and organisations, from individual to intergovernmental settings. By adapting a collaborative approach, societies can find effective value creation mechanisms between businesses, governments, and across generations.

A conviction shared by the authors of this year’s top essay submissions has been that collaborative action arises from dialogue and mutual understanding. It requires the collaboration of entities (individuals, institutions, states and beyond) from different action domains. It requires the collaboration of entities that might have never identified each other as collaborating partners before. It is therefore necessary that these collaborating partners exhibit openness, flexibility, and a willingness to acknowledge and work on new problems. Collaborative action can be initiated in a bottom-up fashion, and evolve organically, and it can also be orchestrated by supra-national or intercontinental organisations.

At the same time, collaborative advantage, if created only among the most well-positioned entities, will not reach its maximal capacities. In order to harness the power of collaboration, current divisions between generations as contract partners of a new intergenerational contract must be salvaged.

The divisive factors – identified by the Leaders of Tomorrow – are manifold and complex. For example, geographical divides mean that certain populations are more at risk of conflict and extreme weather linked to climate change, while also being less likely to receive the kind of future-oriented education that would result in efficient local problem-solving. Another example of a divisive factor is the different age of the contract participants. Age divide creates a generation-specific “communication barrier”, where misunderstandings and disagreements arise due to the fact that generations differ in their attitudes and habits when it comes to the use of language and media outlets. Moreover, age divide endangers the legitimacy of existing institutions and decision-making routines, as elder generations are often left out and left behind in the digitalised era, while younger generations face a much higher entry barrier of gaining a political voice, or even, of making a living, as the public spending on pensions increases. Finally, in the most extreme case of age divide, parties of the intergenerational contract do not even “meet”, and the fact that decisions made today disproportionately impact the future of unborn generations remains largely unaddressed.

The top contributions of this year’s Global Essay Competition provided a plethora of actionable ideas to restore and reinvent the intergenerational contract for maximising our collaborative advantage. The essays carefully consider a refreshing array of topic areas that could foster intergenerational cooperation, ranging from socioeconomical and financial issues to ecological, institutional and even individual-level solutions. A strong sense of urgency was the most common sentiment in the essay submissions: Leaders of Tomorrow agree that the time of “talking the talk” is over, and we now must collectively “walk the walk” to restore intergenerational fairness. The essays call for taking responsibility and their action recommendations address all actors (individuals, companies, governments, and beyond) and all generations. There is a remarkable diversity of the contribution’s contexts, including examples from the United States, Europe, Russia, China, Japan, Singapore and India.

A more holistic way of dealing with our global challenges is required. Four out of twenty-five essays discovered the power of linking environmental protection with pension plans. The main argument of this stream of essays is that pension plans in general should become “greener”. Whether this is achieved by incorporating green investment into the default option of pension plans, or financially incentivizing employees to opt for non-polluting jobs, future reforms of the pension system should consider the issue of environmental sustainability.

The issue of pension reform has also been linked to sustainability in a broader sense, arguing that especially in aging societies, young people are disproportionately burdened to finance the pension of older generations, and thus less likely to afford housing and subsequently, their own retirement. Recommendations to overcome this challenge include the reform of the estate tax, introducing universal basic inheritance, and embracing traditional family systems once again, while also acknowledging the existence of underprivileged families and creating mechanisms that ensure their access to intergenerational justice. The Leaders of Tomorrow do not necessarily see the state as the main decision maker in pension-related issues. One essay argues that a public pension reform should be overseen by a democratic and diverse global forum.

In addition to emphasizing the global environmental benefits of pension reforms, some Leaders of Tomorrow also propose novel linkages to reinstall climate justice. For example, one essay identifies engineers as important actors that could mitigate climate risks. Specifically, adding certain elements into engineering education, such as collaborating with climate activists and social scientists, would help engineers to better understand the impact of their actions on social as well as environmental structures. Introducing the equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath for engineers would prevent the next generation of engineers from perpetuating climate injustice. Furthermore, engineers should engage in co-developing knowledge and data with local communities, while making their scientific process available to the public.

Reinstating intergenerational health and health equity is yet another burning point that should be addressed by decision makers. As the Leaders of Tomorrow pointed out in several essays, health expenditures are one of the main causes of intergenerational poverty. For sustainable future healthcare systems, a shift is needed in the discourse around health: we must pivot away from victim blaming, and include mutual care, accountability and prioritizing human lives over profit. The essays revolving around healthcare represent a broader, socioeconomically embedded approach, as they include issues such as digital wellbeing, the psycho-social benefits of kindness, and mutual social care. There is a lot that can be done on the individual level to break the cycle of bad intergenerational health; however, we must acknowledge the underlying socioeconomic causes of poor health, and address them in a systemic, institutionalized manner.

For example, one essay urges for a more systemic understanding of the intergenerational effects of substance addiction, and proposes the establishment of a “Global Medicines Authority for Human Safety and Bio-social Justice”. Mitigating rising healthcare costs can be done without undermining pharmaceutical innovation, as the recommendations of another essay aptly point out. First, governments can tax sugar more in order to decrease sugar consumption. Second, in order to address increasing public healthcare spending requirements, debt financing should be introduced instead of cost cutting. And third, through a collaboration of governments and the pharmaceutical industry, a tax reform should be implemented that rewards newly discovered treatments that have an impact on societal welfare.

While the opportunities to influence the future are increasing, the foresight of decision-makers cannot keep pace. Two essays argue that new “Generations Councils” should be incorporated into decision making processes on all institutional levels (firm, government, international) to ensure that the interest of future generations is represented. In a similar vein, two further essays argue that we not only must predict the future, but we must also design it. These essays demonstrate the power of Future Design, an interdisciplinary framework encompassing insights from economics, psychology, ethics and neuroscience. The Future Design process is already in use in several Japanese municipalities and has been proven useful in climate-related policy making, among others.

Long-term thinking in policy making is challenging when there is an intergenerational democratic deficit, as one essay highlights. One solution to this problem would be to adjust regular policy cost-benefit analyses by accounting for different impact for the different generations. For this, it would be crucial to improve the data analysis capabilities of governments, and to codify political commitment to intergenerational fairness. Furthermore, increasing age diversity in policy making bodies would help with both of these points.

The ever-renewing toolkit with which we can tackle mounting challenges is a cause for optimism. This toolkit is not purely techn(olog)ical, as it also refers to our capabilities as humans to shift our perspectives and revisit definitions for greater collaborative advantage. Leaders of Tomorrow express their high trust in existing institutions, adding that their continuous adaptability is key in answering to new challenges. In addition, several essays recommend the creation of new institutions. The essays echo the sentiment of a Symposium speaker, the politician and economist turned activist from Botswana, Bogolo Kenewendo: “How we position our institutions now, will determine how resilient we are in the next crisis”. Such new forms of organisations might be created on the grassroot level, addressing rigidities in local educational systems, for example, or on the national level, to provide more visibility to disadvantaged groups, or even on the supranational level, in the form on new intergovernmental councils. At the moment, regional representation is not equal in the world, and therefore, while institutional reforms should still take place on the multilateral level, a stronger regional representation is needed. Values such as diversity, transparency, accountability, inclusion, and compassion are mentioned as guiding posts for these new institutions.

A further opportunity for collaboration beyond institutions is the use of digital platforms with the sophisticated tools of artificial intelligence, changing media landscapes and immersive technological innovations. For example, today 30% of the global food supply does not reach its destination due to logistical inefficiencies. This is not a resource problem – it is a management problem. The top twenty-five essays call for more responsibility: it is up to all of us to correct these inefficiencies, and it is not just the responsibility of the developing world. Collaborative platforms and novel technologies, combined with the ultimate human goal of creating fairer societies, can be the way forward to better connect producers and consumers, stop overproduction, optimize product, aid, as well as knowledge distribution globally.

Even if we do not have all the answers today, even if it seems like we might never have all the answers, we must continue the dialogue on these pressing issues. We must update our language and discourses to include terms that best describe our new challenges, and that progressively identify populations at risk – groups of people and organisms who might have never been placed in the same category before; however, now they are connected through risk. How can we talk about these new challenges, if we do not know what to call them or how to place them in a broader system of interdependencies? We here in St. Gallen think that the Global Essay Competition is an excellent form of maintaining and updating this dialogue. The influx of essays from young thinkers every year keeps us on our toes and prompts us to new exchanges, where we can say: “This is what we know, what can we do about it – together?”