Oxford Ministry for the Future (OMF) is an interdisciplinary network of academics, writers, policymakers and corporate leaders working to convene high-profile public events and educational activities that amplify voices from the humanities and social sciences. Our vision is to inspire a sustainable and more equitable political economy for the future.
Understanding the realities at the science-policy and corporate-government interfaces, the humanities and social sciences are uniquely placed to turn good ideas into clear policies and actions. We seek to stimulate moral imagination, connect the dots, and galvanize urgent, practical responses to the climate and environmental (poly-)crisis. Moving from diagnosis to solutions, topics include:
- The political economy of a sustainable future. Describing in some detail a new political economy that emerges from the present one, so it is not just utopian or theoretical, but practical and applied, even to the extent of drafting policy and legislation.
- Measuring progress. Building on ideas of the circular economy and planetary boundary models, we work on the replacement of GDP to measure progress towards fair and flourishing, sustainable political economies.
- Land use and wildlife welfare. Exploring the (re)turn towards Gaian (or ‘Ecotopian’) thinking with emergent and coherent projects that feed and sustain humans, draw down carbon from the atmosphere, and give space to our wild fellow citizens.
- Energy security, green energy. Understanding technologies, capacity and efficiency issues, bottlenecks, risks. Techno-economically feasible solutions still need their specific social and political organization: we’ll discuss the appropriate mix of distributed, community-based energy generation, market-based and government-driven practices.
- Financing the green transition. We desperately need trillions of dollars that are not easily available now, but could be generated as fit to use where needed. We address funding challenges and opportunities ranging from carbon quantitative easing and government spending, to loss and damage funds and financial help for ‘virtuous petro-states’.
- Policy-making. In our educational activities and events, OMF scholars and students help generate good new legislation to pass on to relevant legislative bodies, and discuss the methodology and procedures involved.
- Fairness and equality of opportunity. Incentive structures for a fair transition to a sustainable and fair society include not only subsidies and taxes, but innovative organizational structures, and the full engagement of the whole population. Declaring justice as fairness to be a moral and practically effective commitment is a stance that will enrich our political discourse.
- Structures of feeling. OMF seeks to position work for a sustainable political economy as a meaning-giving existentialist project for all who wish to participate in it. OMF also treats hope as an active process and a social phenomenon, and investigates the conditions for nurturing constructive hope, social movements and multi-generational projects towards a still achievable, more equitable, and sustainable future.
OMF events
Conversation with Elif Shafak and Jonny Thomson on Nature and Humans: Connectedness, conflicts and rights
Like most things in nature, ‘the river is a giver, the river is a taker’. And we are many things to it: exploiters, beneficiaries, dependants, polluters, destroyers, healers, stewards and guardians. The latest OMF event, at the Weston Library on 2 June 2025, focused on water. We heard stories about our fraught relationship with rivers from author Elif Shafak, water scientist Robert Hope, London barrister and founder of Lawyers for Nature Paul Powlesland, river historian Katherine Ibbet, political economist Rebecca Henderson, and ecologist Sandra Diaz (Tyler Prize, 2025). Thank you to the organizing teams at Saïd Business School, Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Global Canopy, and Hertford College.
Art, Nature and Science: Imagining other worlds
On 28 April 2025, OMF hosted global cultural icon Brian Eno and environmental novelists and storytellers Kim Stanley Robinson, Laline Paull and JM Ledgard at the Sheldonian Theatre. We were treated to the premiere of ‘Life Wants to Live’: a braided reading underscored by original music composed by Brian Eno for this occasion. The performance stimulated interdisciplinary academic discussions about the biodiversity crisis and its solutions, with anthropologist Nayanika Mathur (of Crooked Cats), ecological economist Dr Nicola Ranger and political scientist Thomas Hale (of Long Problems). Thank you to the organizing teams at Hertford College, Global Canopy, and Saïd Business School for helping to make magic happen.
In Conversation with Richard Powers
Richard Powers is an American novelist whose works explore the effects of modern science and technology. He won the 2006 National Book Award for Fiction for his novel The Echo Maker and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Overstory, and he has also won many other awards over the course of his career, including a MacArthur Fellowship.
The inaugural OMF event took place at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford on 13 June 2024.
A panel discussion with Kim Stanley-Robinson, which took place in the Weston Library on 14 June 2022, planted the seed for an Oxford Ministry for the Future.