Abstract for: Aligning Desirable Futures and Public Policy Support Under Systemic Constraints

Several global initiatives—such as the Paris Agreement, the Millennium Development Goals, and the Sustainable Development Goals—have been introduced to articulate desirable futures. While individuals, groups, and organizations often endorse these futures, they remain reluctant to support the policy measures required to achieve them. In this paper, we study how representations of systemic structure shape the alignment between desirable futures and policy support. To examine this, we revisit Jay W. Forrester’s World Dynamics model and recalibrate it using global data from 1970 to 2023. We then deploy the model as a boundary object in an experimental design to examine whether exposure to systemic constraints affects the alignment between desirable futures and support for policy interventions required to achieve them. Our results show that exposure to systemic constraints aligns desirable futures and public policy support without affecting aspirations of what futures individuals desire, instead, restructuring the mapping between aspirational evaluations and policy support by increasing the salience of system constraints. We contribute to the literature on future-making by identifying a structural mechanism through which distant aspirations become translated into actual policy support. Pragmatically speaking, our finds indicate that policy makers should emphasize system structure rather than abstract benefits of their policies. However, future research should examine how different representations of systemic constraints reshape aspiration–policy alignment across contexts, and whether such effects generalize beyond experimental settings. To support R coding to analyze the data