Governing the Future: Temporalities in Local–Global Politics

How do different ways of imagining, anticipating, and relating to the future shape political coalitions, democratic governance, and interactions between local and global actors? This panel examines how political actors organize not only around shared interests and policy beliefs, but also around competing conceptions of time, desirable futures, urgency, continuity, and responsibility toward future generations.
This question has become increasingly important for democracies confronting geopolitical transformations, technological acceleration, environmental crises, and the weakening of multilateral governance. While electoral cycles and demands for immediate results often encourage short-term decision-making, many contemporary challenges require sustained collective action across generations and levels of governance. Conflicts therefore arise not only over policy goals, but also over which futures should be prioritized, whose knowledge of the future is recognized, and who has the authority to define the appropriate pace and direction of political change.
The panel takes the Future Temporalities Coalitions Framework as one possible conceptual point of departure while welcoming contributions grounded in other approaches to political time, anticipatory governance, intergenerational justice, policy coalitions, democratic representation, and local–global politics. It particularly encourages theoretical, empirical, comparative, and methodological papers examining democratic short-termism; political conflicts over urgency and delay; Indigenous, Afro-descendant, local, scientific, and state temporalities; environmental and science diplomacy; biodiversity and climate governance; technological change; and the formation of coalitions around competing visions of the future.
Contributions may focus on any geographical region and employ qualitative, quantitative, comparative, or interdisciplinary methods. By bringing diverse perspectives into conversation, the panel seeks to clarify how temporal assumptions shape political identities, interests, alliances, and policy change, and to develop a broader research agenda on how democratic societies can govern uncertain and contested futures across local, national, and global scales.