To respond to the ecological, social and democratic crises we face we need to realize that participatory democracy is the necessary permaculture of healthy representative and accountable democracies. Democracy is brought into being and generated by being democratic here and now in everyday relations. And, for all types of democracies to be sustainable they have to be integrated into the “mutual aid” or “gift-gratitude-reciprocity” relations of biodiversity by which life sustains life on this planet: Gaia or Earth democracy. The coordination and integration of democratic diversity set out in this volume has the capacity to bring about eco-democratic succession, modelled on ecological succession, as the alternative to failed reform and revolution.

There is a multiplicity or pluriverse of modes or families of democracy and citizenship on this planet, from diverse types of participatory democracy to Gaia or Earth democracy. In response to the ecological and democratic crises, the aim of this volume is to disclose and survey five modes of democracy: Indigenous democracies, Local/global participatory democracies, representative democracies, international/global democracies, and Gaia democracies. We study how they are enacted and the ways in which they interact in order to show how they can coordinate and cooperate democratically in response to the ecosocial crises we face. We call this integration of democratic diversity “joining hands” and explicate six ways of joining hands in practice. The Introduction includes overviews of each chapter.

In this chapter, James Tully takes us deep into the phenomenology of the kind of dialogue across traditions that is capable of disrupting the unjust power structures that currently connect diverse traditions in the modern global order. He contrasts “genuine dialogue,” in which traditions have equal status as forms of human understanding, with the many kinds of “false dialogue” that are likely to emerge under circumstances of unequal power and power-knowledge. As beings that make sense of the world through our received traditions, we tend to project onto others the terms that make the world meaningful to us. Deparochializing our political thought must begin by “reparochializing” it, recognizing that the truths we hold to be self-evident have arisen within a sociohistorically specific context. The “deep listening” required for genuine dialogue requires practices of the self that must be cultivated over time before dialogue can generate reciprocal elucidation and transformation. When we succeed, participants in this dialogue can achieve not only mutual understanding but also the possibility of bringing to light ways of “thinking, judging, deliberating, and acting together in response to the situation they share that were unimaginable and unthinkable prior to the dialogue.”