Samenvatting

Cities and communities are central arenas for the global sustainability transition, and Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is increasingly recognised as a key lever for the long-term societal learning this transition requires. Yet there is no systematic, transparent way to assess whether municipal ESD policies are designed in a future-just manner, serving the interests of future as well as present generations. The World Future Council (WFC), a German non-governmental foundation, addresses such questions through its World Future Policy Award (WFPA), which evaluates policies against its 7 Principles for Future-Just Lawmaking. These principles provide a strong normative foundation but have not yet been translated into a practical assessment tool for the ESD context. Conducted within the WFC as part of the WFPA 2027 cycle, this research addresses that gap in three parts. First, two contextually distinct cases of Participatory Budgeting (PB), Porto Alegre (Brazil) and Łódź (Poland), are described in structured policy profiles through qualitative document analysis. Second, the 7 Principles are adapted to the thematic focus of ESD in cities and communities through three co-creation sessions with the WFPA project team, producing a framework with three to four guiding questions per principle. Third, the adapted framework is applied to both cases on a Yes / Mixed / No scale, and the two cases are compared. In both cases, PB performs strongly on the democratic and equity dimensions of future justice but only partially on the ecological and intergenerational ones. The cases differ along contextual lines: Łódź demonstrates stronger legal protection, while Porto Alegre demonstrates deeper historical grounding. Reflecting on the framework's application also revealed four areas where the tool can be sharpened, including the need for a more differentiated rating scale. The research contributes a usable methodological foundation to the WFPA 2027 process, together with an evidence-based comparison of two PB cases as examples of future-just ESD policy.