Sustainability has become a key issue in managing natural resources together with growing concerns for capitalism, environmental and resource problems. We hypothesize that the ongoing modernization of competitive societies, which we refer to as “capitalism,” affects human nature for utilizing common pool resources, thus compromising sustainability. To test this hypothesis, we design and implement a set of dynamic common pool resource games and experiments in the following two types of Nepalese areas: (i) rural (non-capitalistic) and (ii) urban (capitalistic) areas. We find that a proportion of prosocial individuals in urban areas is lower than that in rural areas, and urban residents deplete resources more quickly than rural residents. The composition of proself and prosocial individuals in a group and the degree of capitalism are crucial in that an increase in prosocial members in a group and the rural dummy positively affect resource sustainability by 65% and 63%, respectively. Overall, this paper shows that when societies move toward more capitalistic environments, the sustainability of common pool resources tends to decrease with the changes in individual preferences, social norms, customs and views to others through human interactions. This result implies that individuals may be losing their coordination abilities for social dilemmas of resource sustainability in capitalistic societies.

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Intergenerational sustainability (IS) has emerged as the most serious social problem reflecting climate change and accumulation of public debt in modern democratic societies, undermining the potential interests and concerns of future generations. However, little is known about whether or not deliberative forms of democracy with majority voting help support at maintaining IS by representing future generations’ potential interests and concerns. We institute IS dilemma game with three forms of decision-making models with majority voting and examine how they maintain IS in laboratory experiments. In the IS dilemma game, a sequence of six generations is prepared where each generation consisting of three subjects is asked to choose either maintaining IS (sustainable option) or maximizing their own generation’s payoff by irreversibly costing the subsequent generations (unsustainable option) with anonymous voting systems: (1) majority voting (MV), (2) deliberative majority voting (DMV) and (3) majority voting with deliberative accountability (MVDA). In MV and DMV, generations vote for their choices without and with deliberation, respectively. In MVDA, generations are asked to be possibly accountable for their choices to the subsequent generations during deliberation, and then vote. Our analysis shows that a decision-making model with only majority voting generally does not address IS, while DMV and MVDA treatments induce more and much more generations to choose a sustainable option than MV, respectively. Overall, the results demonstrate that deliberation and accountability along with majority voting shall be necessary in models of decision-making at resolving IS problems and representing future generations’ potential interests and concerns.

There are two approaches to future planning: backcasting and scenario planning. While some studies have attempted to relate and combine these two approaches, a future design (FD) approach has recently been advocated and researched. Given this state of affairs, the paper provides an overview of the FD approach and discusses the potential benefits of linking and incorporating it into backcasting and scenario planning by summarizing the main features of such benefits for future planning for sustainability. A feature of an FD is that it explicitly orients people’s ways of thinking in the current generation to be generative for not only their own future but also generations to come, as well as in designing a plan within a coherent timeframe by demonstrating the characteristics of being prospective and retrospective from the viewpoint of a different generation. Another feature of FD lies in strategy making through some visioning process and in redefining the boundary between what is controllable and what is uncontrollable by considering the perspectives of future generations. We consider this article as a concept paper for the special issue of “Designing Sustainable Future Societies,” building on a literature review and author’s conceptual framework. Thus, our ideas and concepts suggest some potential benefits from incorporating FD into backcasting and scenario planning, further inducing people to be future-oriented and/or sustainable in terms of strategy making. We finally demonstrate some examples of FD practices and illustrative ideas of FD incorporation, remarking on possible avenues for future research.