What governance for the future?

We are in 2223 and…

… I am sitting at a café with Gaia, a member of one of the most active and recognized PDDC of my region. A PDDC? Yes, a Permademocratic Decentralized Deliberative Coordination. They tell me about their recent research on “the Shift” as we call it now. This imperceptible moment in time when Humanity finally managed to change course before the final crash. They tell me that it is clearer and clearer that contrary to the majority opinion among historians, the Shift didn’t start in the 2100s but much sooner, in the early 2020s when three major innovations occurred that would transform the way Humans coordinate and take collective decisions in line with their environment. The old-fashioned way of taking decisions survived for a long time still, but the seeds of renewal were being planted by pioneers and dreamers, by doers and thinkers around the world.

The first innovation was based on the wild idea – at the time – that any Human Being can contribute meaningfully to collective decision making when offered a proper frame for it and when a part of a collective intelligence process. This wild idea was called “deliberation”, sometimes “sortition”. It took over the world from the mid-2030s after a long time of incubation and experimentation: Citizens’ Assemblies, participatory budgeting, citizens’ dialogues or even citizens’ panels became business as usual and radically shifted the balance of power.

The second innovation allowed to enlarge the scope, was called “Permademocracy”: It was key in making sure that Humans embed themselves in time and space by considering both the future generations and the Living system in their collective decision making. You must imagine that at that time, long term thinking did not yet exist, and Humans considered that they were the only ones taking decisions. They made decisions for the Living system, not with it. They had cycles of decisions based on a 5-to-10-year scope.

Our models of decision, and more globally the organization of our societies, are deeply questioned by the challenges of the 21st century, and most of all by climate change.

Despite the first warnings of the Club of Rome (Meadows report, 1972) on the limits of growth, despite the Rio Summit in 1992 and the Climate COPs and national commitments, despite the Sustainable Development Goals proposed by the UN, our greenhouse gas emissions are still much too high to avoid a dramatic rise in Earth’s temperature and the planetary limits are about to be reached (some of them already have been).

The fight against climate change is at the heart of so many speeches and roadmaps, but without the expected effectiveness. Our models of governance at all scales are outdated.

Our infrastructures are oriented towards growth…

Why? Because these models of governance and these institutions, at least for Western countries, are the fruit of history, they have developed in parallel to the industrial revolution and the consumer society. Our public policies, our institutions, but also our mental infrastructures (cf. Harald Welzer) are oriented towards growth. Our social relations are supported by a “social contract” organizing the economy, work and free time around mass production and consumption, associated with a promise of material abundance from which everyone would benefit.

This promise has proven to be detrimental to the planet, unsustainable on a global scale, and socially unjust.

Recognizing the limited nature of resources and the challenges of climate and intergenerational justice, moving from a vision of material prosperity to a vision of a good life for all, steering towards sufficiency rather than abundance, is a major challenge for our political and economic systems.

But climate change is not the only issue at stake: artificial intelligence and emerging technologies are profoundly transforming our relationship to knowledge, to the body, to the mind; migratory flows are intensifying, and populations of the Northern hemisphere are aging; our relationship to time, to work and to others is changing. So many potential resources to make a desirable and sustainable world are also seeing the light of day.

Mad Max or Minority Report are not the only likely futures

Tomorrow can be scary. Looking at the evolutions at work with no denial, accepting the gravity of climate change, accepting that we will have to change our lifestyles and that technological progress will not be enough, as the successive IPCC reports remind us, is an indispensable first step. This requires finding the means to share an observation (scientific and societal) to discuss the solutions and the efforts to be undertaken by everyone. To overcome the conflictual of society exacerbated by social networks, it is necessary to create peaceful spaces for dialogue, to share and discuss observations, to explore disagreements and to widen the areas of agreement. Representative democracy remains legitimate to arbitrate and decide, but it can no longer avoid sharing decision-making processes – and first and foremost the discussion of the common world – with the people and civil society.

Organize collective deliberations

Citizen deliberation mechanisms have spread over the last two decades (see OECD, Catching deliberative wave, 2020). Several positive observations can be made: first, deliberative methodologies are mature and mastered by many public and private practitioners (Smith G., 2009. Democratic innovations: Designing institutions for Citizen participation. Cambridge University Press). Secondly, ordinary citizens, when drawn by lot like the citizen assemblies that are currently flourishing, are proving to be passionate about a subject that they previously considered too complex, daring, and liable. The proposals of the Citizens’ Convention for Climate Change in France, for example, or the European Citizens’ Panels of the Conference on the Future of Europe, have insisted on the importance of a society guided by the values of solidarity to succeed in transitions and increase our resilience to crises.

But there are several limits to their impact on the decision-making process. Decision-makers still feel little “accountability” and do not make sufficient use of citizens’ recommendations to transform public action. As for the stakeholders, they still look with suspicion at this citizen participation that sometimes bypasses them or does not consider their positions, their legitimate struggles. As if the participative citizen deliberation, the power relations in the social world and the representative democracy – classical and vertical, too effect in three different metaverses. So:

• Let us discuss the subjects that make people angry (sufficiency, business models in a overconsumption society, common goods, the necessary renunciations or accelerations) in deliberations that bring together citizens and stakeholders, that really have an institutional influence on the decision.
• Let’s dare open governance, with citizens drawn by lot, at all levels of territory, not to replace elected officials or trade unions, but to oxygenate the dialogues with the tools of collective intelligence and not agonistic debates. Giving the power to act and experiment to the territories, based on the results of extended governance, is a path to follow. Local experiences of ecological transition in the North and the South are numerous but struggle to connect and federate. New approaches to cooperation such as blockchain or Web 3 are proving to be inspiring for the real world.
• Let us broaden our criteria of justice – and our way of perceiving ourselves in the world – by integrating into our collective deliberations not only today’s citizens in their diversity (by fighting against epistemic injustice), but also future generations (to ensure that our choices today do not reduce the capacity to act and the quality of life of future generations) and living beings, too often seen as a decoration, a consumable and not an indispensable partner for our own survival.
• Let’s change perspective, let’s give ourselves the space to imagine another world, which considers the planetary limits (the floor and the ceiling, cf. donut theory) by not holding the western way of life, finally very recent, as an unsurpassable panacea. Imagination precedes action, so let’s learn to dream together again, as Rob Hopkins encourages us to do (cf. his book, from what is to what if, 2019).

To conclude, we see the future of governance as the key challenge on our path to a desirable future as it is the bottleneck and at the same time the leverage of our collective capacity to embrace what is to come. With social and technological innovations, embedded in our environment, we will most probably be able to achieve “the Shift”. At least this is what we dedicate our work to.

Judith Ferrando Y Puig, Yves Mathieu, Antoine Vergne
This article was published by CIDOB for the 2023 International Yearbook.