The World Summit of the Committees of the Future brings together, for the first time, the committees responsible for dealing with future issues in different parliaments. The World Summit will be held in the Parliament of Finland on 12—13 October 2022.
The goal of the World Summit is to introduce the future committees of different countries to each other and to identify topics that the committees want to discuss together. In their speeches, the committees of the various parliaments will highlight themes they consider important.
They include, for example, the possibilities of technology in achieving more environmentally friendly and equal development, the need for transnational regulation of digital business and the use of algorithms, and the importance of parliamentary cooperation in proactive decision-making and responding to sustainability challenges. The questions raised by the Committee for the Future of the Finnish Parliament are related to the relationship between the Earth’s limited natural resources and technological development, the future of algorithm-based communication, humanity in 2222, and the importance of citizens’ future skills, hope and trust for social development.
The world summits launched now are intended to form an international forum for parliamentary discussion on future policy. The committees that have a mandate in their own parliaments to deal with long-term issues would meet in the summits. The faster different crises arise in different parts of the world, the more important it is to create opportunities for a dialogue on the future.
The Committee for the Future will host the meeting. When it was founded in the Finnish Parliament in 1993, it was the world’s first parliamentary committee dealing with future policy. Later, future committees have been established in other parliaments as well. Future committees from the parliaments of Chile, the Philippines, Iceland, Lithuania, Paraguay and Uruguay will participate in the Summit. In addition, there are other committees that deal extensively with future issues. From those invited to the Summit, at least the parliaments of Austria, Canada, Poland, Thailand, Estonia and Vietnam will participate. One of the goals of the World Summit is to encourage the creation of new future committees.
The World Summit of the Committees of the Future will be opened by Speaker of Parliament Matti Vanhanen. The Summit will be chaired by the Chairperson of the Committee for the Future of the Finnish Parliament Joakim Strand. Due to the pandemic, the committees can also participate in the World Summit virtually, although the focus is on physical participation.
At the end of the Summit, the committees will issue a joint statement, with which they want to ensure that the just started international parliamentary dialogue on the future will continue. An English-language publication on the World Summit will also be published shortly after the Summit. It will present the World Summit, the committees participating in it, and the participants’ proposals for common future issues that are important in our time.