Drawing on United Kingdom (UK) engagement and international case studies, this paper identifies core design principles and eight key characteristics of successful long-term strategy-making. It develops them into practical lessons and proposed design features for system reforms that could help transform democracies like the UK to be more long-termist and capable at navigating challenges ahead.

The playbook is a practical and open-source account of what national strategy should look like in the United Kingdom (UK) – to make the UK more long-term, bolder in solutions, and able to mobilise all national capacities, not just central government. The playbook sets out the steps, stakeholders and tools involved, offering choices to suit...

This paper sets out to examine how governments come to a national view of what really matters over longer time horizons, the ways governments can best confront and tackle future problems, and how the configuration, mechanisms and capabilities of the state can best enable the pursuit and delivery of long-term outcomes for citizens.

Responding to changing political preferences is a democratic imperative. Better-resourced bureaucracies should be more able to comply with new political directions, irrespective of their willingness to do so. This paper examines how bureaucratic capacity affects responsiveness, finding that spare organisational capacity significantly increases the likelihood of bureaucracies consenting to program changes and more expeditious implementation.