Strategy for the long term: Pressures, counter-pressures and mechanisms in governance

•This extended editorial distills key themes of the special issue.•Contributors highlight temporality and uncertainty in strategy.•Long-term perspectives in governance require maintenance.•Strategies can create their own support over time.•Models of ambitious strategy discussed : transition, invention, reinvention. This special issue analyses and reflects on relations between long term perspectives and strategies in governance. While dismissing high modernist planning and acknowledging constraints to long-term policies, the different contributions in this volume, each in their own way, contend that strategy is necessary to face the challenges of our times. The fifteen articles highlight different aspects of the possibilities of and limits to strategy in governance, to turn long-term perspectives into strategy and strategy into reality. They all examine how long- term perspectives and issues are constituted by different governance practices and emerge in rather different policy contexts, which points to the need to better understand the diverse interplay between strategy, long-term perspectives and patterns of policy integration. Furthermore, the contributions emphasize how long-range governance requires careful attention to issues of temporality, the management of uncertainty and the interplay between the short term and the long term.