In October 2010 the Knesset approved a law disbanding the Commission for Future Generations (CFG), which was established only nine years earlier with tremendous support. Its mandate was to broadly criticize legislative processes and implement “Future Intelligence” in the government; the format was subsequently adopted in other countries as well. Years later, while the proponents of the CFG saw it as a solution to underrepresentation of the public’s interests, the politicians who argued in favor of disbanding it insisted that their interests were much more contiguous with those of the public than unelected experts. I argue that two different types of conflicts appeared in relation to the Commission: the intergenerational priorities conflict; and the delegate-expert conflict. The comparative weight of each one of these conflicts changed during the existence period of the CFG.
This research is the first attempt to give a full account of this historic case, and it covers all relevant available resources. My conclusion is that the CFG was abandoned not so much due to narrow short-term considerations, but rather due to its extensive attempt to establish predicting and the future as a new type of expertise in the space of governance, and to emphasize the special knowledge that only those possessing this expertise commanded. Lessons from this case study can be relevant to further research in the fields of public policy, futurism, environmentalism and history and sociology of science and politics in general, and Israel and Zionism in particular.
Lastly, this research contributes to our general understanding of the complex processes of power allocation between different types of actors in the space of governance, particularly between non-elected experts and elected decision makers, an issue increasingly occupying Israeli politics in recent years.