The government has recently revealed, following a parliamentary question, that the post of chair of the Guardian for Future Generations is still vacant four months after the previous chair, Maurice Mizzi, was forced to resign following xenophobic comments which, even in his letter of resignation, he refused to withdraw.

This preceded more recent news that the boards of directors of the Malta Gaming Authority and the Malta Communications Authority were finally appointed after being vacant for several months.

Contrary to popular understanding, the Guardian for Future Generations is not a person, but a committee, set up by the Sustainable Development Act of 2012. Earlier this year, this law was amended slightly to give more weighting to an environmental understanding of sustainability, but it is still essentially intact.

The role of the guardian is to safeguard inter-generational and intra-generational sustainable development in Malta by ensuring the development and implementation of Malta’s sustainable development strategy. On paper, it is quite powerful: it can seek any information from the public administration, set performance indicators, perform sustainability audits, request the issuing of public service-wide directives. There should be a sustainability coordinator in every ministry, and the Guardian Committee is supported by an inter-ministerial network that ensures effective monitoring and implementation.

But there is a gulf between the Act’s noble intentions and what is actually happening on the ground. Nor is this a fault only of the post-2013 administrations. The ‘final proposal’ for Malta’s Sustainability Development Strategy has been gathering dust since 2006.

The passing of the 2012 Sustainable Development Act was one of the last-gasp actions of the Gonzi administration that had done little to follow up on the formalisation and implementation of the national strategy.

We only need to look around us to understand why successive governments have been less than enthusiastic in implementing a truly effective national sustainability strategy. In the words of Gro Harlem Brundtland, three-time prime minister of Norway, this should meet the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations to meet their own needs.

But as a nation, we do not have the self-discipline and foresight to fashion our economic growth so that it is not only of immediate benefit to us, but also for future generations. It is true that the currently booming economy is allowing the ongoing reduction of the national debt which should have positive knock-on effects on the sustainability of future pensions, for example.

But there is no discernable planning on how sustainable this economic boom is, and not only in terms of continued capital inflows such as from gaming and golden passports. It is also in terms of the wash-back effect on cost of living and quality of life, including the environmental degradation that we see being enacted every day in front of our eyes.

So, this government’s dithering on the selection of the new guardian committee comes as no surprise.

Nor should there be any illusions about the legislated independence of action of the Guardian Committee being actually allowed to take root. The real question is not who the guardian and its chair will be. It is: will government allow the guardian do its work in the spirit and letter of its own law?