Governing Long Problems: Challenges and Solutions

The world confronts a growing number of “long problems,” such as climate change, demographic shifts, or building and maintaining critical infrastructure, which span more than one human generation. This article reviews how scholars of governance from a range of disciplines have thought about such problems and their solutions. It considers three questions. How are long-term governance challenges conceptualized? What barriers to effective governance do they present? What tools and strategies may help address those challenges, and how and under what conditions might they be effective? The literature has paid significant, but uneven, attention to these issues, highlighting the need to build the theoretical and empirical evidence base around the challenges long problems present and how they can be addressed.