Public trust, political will, and the right leadership are all necessary to create and to lift up to the global level a living democracy for a sustainable world. Given the challenges before us, we are running out of time to bring about the necessary disruption in the stalled and stalemated political status quo by significantly expanding direct democratic participation through sortition as the first step toward creating and restoring mutual public trust. Trust must be built by exercising trust. We need trust in governments and between and among governments. Most important, we need trust between and among people who have faith in their fellow men and women to assume the responsibilities of self-rule. Trust can be created by working together in trust. With mutual trust, we can summon the political will to overcome our current inertia and make the changes needed to uplift democracy for a sustainable world. We can find and follow the right leadership. And we can follow the path from the Pnyx to secure at last the global realization of living democracy.

In addition to right representation, our new framework for democratic global governance must comprise global circles of participation chosen by global sortition. We must make something new work for the world by giving new life to human institutions at every level of governance. To accomplish this, we must employ random selection to create an interlinked network of global participation that will be a central part of a new system of democratic global governance. We must establish, globally, multiple levels of multidimensional and multiconnected circles of participation through random selection, reflecting the diversity of views in the entirety of the world, ascending and descending through interaction at different tiers of governance, linking, overlapping, and jointly acting in different sectors and on different subjects of governance, in an ongoing expression of human imagination and democratic will. Among these sortition circles must be circles for nature and circles for the future. We must make these global circles into rings of human action in which everyone throughout the world will have an equal opportunity to participate.

In 508 bc, after defeating a Spartan effort to restore authoritarian Peisistradid rule in Athens, Cleisthenes and the Athenian citizenry overthrew aristocratic rule in the city-state and replaced it with a form of direct popular rule that rapidly evolved into the world’s first genuine democracy. The reforms made by Cleisthenes and his popular allies at that time formed the foundation for an ever-evolving direct and participatory Athenian democracy that lasted for nearly two centuries before its demise by military defeat. The political structure of the city-state was reorganized to bring citizens from different places together in self-governance; the Assembly was accorded full political powers, and all Athenian citizens were made equal before the law and equally entitled to participate in the governance of the city-state. Central to direct democratic governance were random selection of officeholders by sortition and frequent rotation in office. Further reforms during the succeeding decades made Athenian governance still more democratic and – after brief authoritarian interruptions during and immediately after the Peloponnesian War – more committed not only to democracy but also to the rule of law, until ultimate military defeat by Macedon in 322 bc.

As Hannah Arendt taught us, we must create something new in the world. Human action can make a new beginning for humanity. We must pursue self-liberation through participation with others in mutual action to attain full human flourishing in a sustainable world. The participatory action we take must be democratic action. Democratic action is the only kind of action that can lead to the full flourishing of human freedom. Only democracy provides an institutional framework for the fullest extent of political freedom, economic freedom, and every other kind of freedom. We must embrace the responsibility of freedom by working together to apply reason to the world. This requires active engagement for a common purpose in a truly participatory democracy. A common purpose can be found in seeking accomplishment of the social, economic, and environmental aims of sustainable development. As John Dewey insisted, democracy must become a way of life. Democratic participation is the way to attain a deeper freedom. We see this in the emergence of a multitude of bottom-up sustainable development networks worldwide.

The path to global sustainable development is participatory democratic global governance – the only truly effective path to confronting pandemics, military conflict, climate change, biodiversity loss, and potential overall ecological collapse. Democracy for a Sustainable World explains why global democracy and global sustainable development must be achieved and why they can only be achieved jointly. It recounts the obstacles to participatory democratic global governance and describes how they can be overcome through a combination of right representation and sortition, starting with linking and scaling innovative local and regional sustainability experiments worldwide. Beginning with a visit to the birthplace of democracy in ancient Athens, a hillside called the Pnyx, James Bacchus explores how the Athenians practiced democratic participation millennia ago. He draws on the successes and shortfalls of Athenian democracy to offer specific proposals for meeting today’s challenges by constructing participatory democratic global governance for full human flourishing in a sustainable world.

To help us see how democracy came to be, we have only shards of ancient Athens, only pieces of the past. Many pieces are missing of that vanished ancient world. The ancient Athenians must be examined on their own terms based on what little we can know about them. Through our modern eyes, we see their failings, including their exclusion of women, immigrants, and those they enslaved from their first democracy. Yet for those who were included in it, their democracy was considerably more democratic than the democracies of today, especially in its direct form of participatory governance through the use of the random selection of sortition. Following the fall of the Mycenaean civilization in the twelfth century bc, Greece entered several centuries of an Archaic Age before beginning slowly to emerge from darkness. Athens had survived the fall, but the consolidation of the city-state and its emergence into regional influence took hundreds of years. Dominated by an agricultural aristocracy, the Athenians were riven by social and economic strife. In succession, Draco and then Solon were enlisted by the Athenians to help resolve the divisions among them, with mixed success. Cultural unity of the Athenian people developed under the tyrannical rule of Peisistratus. Following the death of Piesistratus, and the exile of his oppressive son, the Athenians were ready to seek self-rule. They found a leader in the visionary Athenian aristocrat Cleisthenes.

The most radically revolutionary idea in the world remains the notion that “we the people” are capable of governing ourselves. This idea began with Cleisthenes and the ancient Athenian democrats, but it is only partly fulfilled today. Human rights have meaning only if they have genuine content. It is in the exercise of rights with content through genuine democratic participation that our natural capacity for self-rule can be enlarged and we can become more capable of self-rule. In sharing the capability, knowledge, and potential that each of us possesses, we can confront the real world and cooperate to make it into a better world. By acknowledging our unity as one species, accepting our place as a part of nature, and asserting control of our technosphere, we can become one global network. As it is, we comprise a living system, a universal agent of systems thinking, and, through collective action, we can become a much more successful one. Full democratic participation can accomplish the fullest effectiveness of this living network. It can produce sustainable development. If everyone participates, then the benefits of this collective action will be maximized; but if some are left out then their knowledge and potential will be lost to the whole, and thus the network will be less capable of making a sustainable world. The billions of people who are invisible must be made visible by expanding the circle of our moral imagination, and all must be enabled to achieve self-liberation by participating in their own governance.

The path to global sustainable development is participatory democratic global governance – the only truly effective path to confronting pandemics, military conflict, climate change, biodiversity loss, and potential overall ecological collapse. Democracy for a Sustainable World explains why global democracy and global sustainable development must be achieved and why they can only be achieved jointly. It recounts the obstacles to participatory democratic global governance and describes how they can be overcome through a combination of right representation and sortition, starting with linking and scaling innovative local and regional sustainability experiments worldwide. Beginning with a visit to the birthplace of democracy in ancient Athens, a hillside called the Pnyx, James Bacchus explores how the Athenians practiced democratic participation millennia ago. He draws on the successes and shortfalls of Athenian democracy to offer specific proposals for meeting today’s challenges by constructing participatory democratic global governance for full human flourishing in a sustainable world.

Participation is meaningless without communication. Just as the Athenian leader Pericles communicated with his citizens in his famous Funeral Oration, so must we communicate with one another to take and coordinate human action through human cooperation. Communication is not possible without a space in which to communicate. The basis of participatory democracy must be communication and action taken together in a public space. We must therefore have more public spaces for democratic participation by everyone, including those among us who have been excluded, who have been marginalized and invisible. Within these public spaces for participation, communication must occur through deliberation with people coming together and talking things through on fair and equal terms to arrive at a mutual decision based on mutual rational criticism. This deliberation must include everyone, and it must be face to face. Local experiments throughout the world have shown that this can be done. By using an ancient sortition machine they called the kleroterion, the ancient Athenians showed how the collective wisdom of the people can be summoned and employed in making public decisions. They also learned through hard experience – exemplified in the trial and execution of Socrates – that collective wisdom and collective action through democratic decision-making are best when the decision-makers are educated to be the best citizens and make the best decisions.

Not one of the numerous global risks we confront can be averted without better governance through global cooperation. All these risks – the ones we face now and the ones we may soon face next – transcend national borders, cross the globe, and therefore require global solutions. Moreover, many of these risks are interconnected; thus, they require interconnected solutions. Within the biological and chemical container of the Earth’s biosphere, human civilization is not a collection of individual structures of living that are entirely separate and distinct. It is a complex system of interconnected – and interdependent – networks of all kinds, many of which extend across our imagined political borders. Moreover, the ecologies of the world that human cities and states inhabit are all connected through natural systems. The atmosphere, hydrosphere, and cryosphere of the Earth, the biosphere that comprises the Earth’s ecosystems, are all connected. The many parts make a whole. To find planetary solutions, we must employ systems thinking to create institutions and other political arrangements to achieve effective Earth system governance, which must see and treat the world as a whole. To do this, we need human cooperation in problem-solving at every level of human endeavor. Foremost among our tools in this task must be democracy, and democracy must be devoted to sustainable development. Although democracy is in retreat throughout the world, we must fulfill our duty of optimism by establishing democracy everywhere and at every level, including democratic global governance.

The challenges for governance in ancient Athens are dwarfed by the challenges for governance in our own time. Humanity seems incapable of cooperation for collective action. We are failing in problem-solving. This failure is evidenced at every level of governance. It is especially obvious in global governance, where an escalating avalanche of ecological and other crises has already begun and hurtles toward us. The failure of democracies is particularly distressing in that it is the democracies that, in the eyes of those who support and believe in them, are supposed to do the most to meet the common needs of humanity. The human species has survived and thrived because we have cooperated. We must do so now if we are to meet the challenges before us and secure the fullness of human flourishing through sustainable development. We have, however, not yet found the common will that is indispensable to taking the collective action that is necessary to achieve our goals for humanity. Like the ancient Athenians in their triremes, we must learn to row together to serve the public good. We must, like them, form participatory knowledge networks for the public good. This requires vastly more public participation in self-rule at every level of human governance. New cooperative networks for sustainable development are examples of the kind and extent of popular participation we need to continue to survive and succeed as a species.