Intragenerational deliberation and intergenerational sustainability dilemma

Abstract Many sustainability problems have occurred because the current generation affects future generations, but the opposite is not true. This one-way nature may induce the current generation to take advantage of resources without considering future generations, which we refer to as intergenerational sustainability dilemma (ISD). While deliberation is known to bring a change in individual opinions and to lead to a good decision in some intragenerational problems, little is known about how intragenerational deliberation affects individual opinions and collective decisions for intergenerational problems, such as ISD, in societies. An ISD game (ISDG) along with interviews and questionnaires are instituted in rural and urban societies of Nepal. In ISDG, a sequence of generations, each of which consists of three people, is organized, and each generation chooses either to maintain intergenerational sustainability (sustainable option) or to maximize his or her own generation’s payoff by irreversibly imposing a cost on future generations (unsustainable option) under an intragenerational deliberative process. Our results demonstrate that urban subjects have a wider variety of individual initial opinions and support an unsustainable option more often than rural subjects do. It also shows that individual opinions change through deliberation when subjects in a generation do not share the same initial opinion, reflecting that urban subjects change opinions as compared to rural subjects. Such opinion changes are identified not to work in the direction to enhance intergenerational sustainability for urban generations. Overall, our experiments suggest that intragenerational deliberation does not necessarily influence individual opinions for resolving ISD.