# Intergenerational Fiduciary Duty **Domain:** Fiduciary Governance / Long-Term Stewardship / Continuity **Doc Type:** Canonical Duty Concept **Maturity:** Proposed ## Definition **Intergenerational fiduciary duty is the obligation to preserve assets, knowledge, authority and institutional capacity for beneficiaries whose claims extend beyond the tenure or lifetime of current decision-makers.** ## Continuity Application Continuity may require stewardship across generations of staff, hardware, formats, cryptography, providers and states. Current administrators must therefore avoid decisions that improve present yield by destroying future recoverability, migration capacity or institutional independence. The duty can require prudent spending, preservation of principal or productive capacity, diversification, documented risk, succession planning, competence transfer and periodic re-evaluation of purpose. It supports [[wiki/Continuity Finance|Continuity Finance]] but cannot be reduced to investment management: semantic knowledge, keys, interpreters and legal recognition are also entrusted assets. ## Structural Precedents Endowments, pension trusts and perpetual-care funds demonstrate institutions designed to serve beneficiaries across long horizons. They remain analogies. None presently carries a settled fiduciary duty toward a computational person. ## Key Insight **Long-duration custody fails when each generation may consume the capacity needed by the next.** ## Sources / Provenance - [Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act](https://www.uniformlaws.org/viewdocument/final-act-109). - [PBGC: Understanding Your Pension and PBGC Coverage](https://www.pbgc.gov/workers-retirees/learn/understanding-your-pension-pbgc-coverage).