Sustainable and inclusive wellbeing governance: Reinventing democracy after the crisis

Despite decades of advances in sustainability science, global progress on climate change, biodiversity loss, inequality, and human wellbeing remains dangerously inadequate. While these failures are often attributed to insufficient political will or contested knowledge, we argue that a more fundamental constraint lies in how collective decisions are made. Contemporary governance systems are increasingly shaped by concentrated economic and political power, undermining their capacity to act in the collective interest and to pursue long-term sustainability goals. At the same time, there is growing evidence that citizens broadly support transformative policies aimed at sustainable and inclusive wellbeing. We argue that governance design itself has become a critical leverage point for sustainability transitions. For example, deliberative democracy offers an alternative by representing shared societal values and goals through randomly selected citizens' assemblies. Such assemblies operate independently of partisan and special-interest control and have demonstrated success at several scales. Advances in communication technology now make their broad application increasingly feasible. In parallel, new decision-making methods, such as sociocracy, emphasise consent over majority rule and provide tools to reduce polarization and foster inclusive agreements within deliberative processes. Viewed historically, today's governance challenges resemble recurrent crises and may offer a critical opening to adopt more sustainable and inclusive forms of governance, grounded in deliberation, consent, and collective wellbeing.