05 August 2026 – While failures to make progress on climate change, biodiversity loss, equality and wellbeing are often attributed to insufficient political will or contested knowledge, a more fundamental constraint lies in how collective decisions are made.
This is our argument in a new paper, Sustainable and inclusive wellbeing governance: Reinventing democracy after the crisis, published in Ecological Economics, July 2026.
Governance design for the 21st century
Many democracies today are increasingly shaped by vested interests in maintaining current extractive and over-financialised economic systems. AI is only exacerbating the current state of play. Special interests – including fossil fuels, finance, tech, pharmaceuticals and others – can prevent policies that serve long-term, shared goals as well as prevent democratic oversight. At the same time, public surveys and deliberative experiments show broad citizen support for transformative measures: stronger carbon pricing, more progressive taxation and shifting the goal of the economy from GDP growth toward wellbeing. Closing the gap between public preferences and policy outcomes requires new democratic processes – including deliberative democracy and sociocracy – that enable shared goals of all citizens to be met, rather than those of the powerful elites.
Deliberative democracy
Deliberative democracy brings representative groups of ordinary citizens together to learn about evidence, discuss trade-offs, and recommend policy. One method of selection is sortition, i.e. random selection of participants, which helps make these groups genuinely representative and less vulnerable to lobbying. The growing use of ‘citizen assemblies’ is an example of deliberative democracy. Belgium, Ireland and France have all hosted successful citizen assemblies. Well-run citizens’ assemblies and deliberative polls can reveal considered public judgments, build legitimacy for difficult choices and identify compromises that electoral politics often misses. However, this alone is not enough and such assemblies must be fully integrated into a strong democratic governance framework which honours leadership accountability and the rule of law.
Sociocracy
Sociocracy is governance by the socius or group or society. It is based on the principle of consent rather than consensus or majority rule for decision making. Sociocratic principles and processes are a form of deliberative democracy that have been used successfully by many companies and small groups. The challenge is scaling it to larger communities, states, nations, and the world. There is no fundamental reason why this could not work. The main barriers are our lock-in to current systems of governance and the special interests who would lose power.
Collective decision-making for sustainable and inclusive wellbeing
The central problem in democratic governance is how to make better collective decisions toward shared goals. There are two interconnected aspects to this problem: (1) improving the process of collective decision-making as discussed above; and (2) developing consensus (or consent) on shared goals.
A deliberative, sociocratic process could be structured to first establish consent on the shared goals of the community. This is critical for sustainable and inclusive wellbeing. Sustainable wellbeing requires resetting our societal goals away from continuous growth in production and consumption toward a more balanced, regenerative and sustainable approach.
Blind spots and barriers
We are currently at a democratic tipping point. Democracy as a system of government where power belongs to the people is currently under attack. “Demos” the root word for Democracy means “power of the people”. If democracy is going to survive in the 21st century we must bring power back to the people.
So how do we do that peacefully? What are the pathways forward at a time when our democracies are increasingly hijacked by special interests and autocratic leaders and where inequalities are growing and wealth distribution moving backwards not forwards.
The above options will bring people back into the process of governance, but several key barriers and blind spots remain.
What do we do with AI? Could AI and information technology be a democracy enhancer or a continued power taker?
One of the central challenges is how to scale inclusive and high-quality deliberation to larger populations while maintaining legitimacy, transparency, and meaningful participation. Digital technologies and AI-assisted communication systems may help address some of these challenges, but this requires a complete reset of goals and guardrails, as currently they are more often than not used as tools of misinformation, manipulation, surveillance and unequal access.
Can this ever happen?
Governance changes at these scales have happened in the past and there are hopeful initiatives including citizen’s assemblies, but the speed and scale must be increased to be effective. We need a new brand of global leaders who truly believe in democracy.
Is the time right for another radical shift in governance? There are three lines of thinking that argue that it is. Howe, Holling and Putnam each describe cyclical patterns suggesting a near turning point: Howe sees 20‑year “turnings” and places us in a fourth “crisis” due to peak in the early 2030s before a renewed “high”. Holling’s adaptive cycle frames systems as moving through growth, conservation, release and reorganisation, with society now moving toward release and reorganisation. And Putnam shows long swings in U.S. social capital – and predicts a progressive “upswing” restoring equity and community.
Taken together, these independent lines of scholarship all point in the same hopeful direction. The resolution of the crisis can produce the renewal necessary to build better democratic systems. It is critically important to have ideas for reform ready to implement after the crisis. Our article and this blog can be seen as a contribution to this.
Read the full article here.
