Sortition on a Global Scale

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 15.5

Whether democracy is achievable or appropriate on a global scale is not immediately self-evident. Currently, politicians, autocrats, and various special interest experts negotiate global treaties and coordination protocols. These have regulated trade, the spread of nuclear weapons, or restrictions on chemicals that harmed the life-protecting upper atmosphere ozone layer. But none of these were the result of democratic process, and they tend to reflect nations’ unequal power relationships. In many cases, what is best for the politicians of a nation state is not what is best for the people of the world, or even best for the people of that particular country. There is a vast range of challenges facing humanity on a global scale (climate change and artificial intelligence being two that are currently front and center) where democratic governance could make a fundamental difference. While enforcement procedures are an obvious hurdle (not even the UN can enforce its resolutions), a crucial initial step is to devise a means of making global decisions with sufficient moral weight. This is where sortition is key.

In 2017, sortition scholars and activists on four continents crafted a proposal for how sortition could be used on a global scale to dramatically improve global decision making on tough problems with global reach, such as climate change, nuclear weapons, regulation of artificial intelligence, and poverty. The plan was prepared for a prize competition sponsored by a Swedish charity, the Global Challenges Foundation, seeking innovative ways to improve the world’s fraught global situation. While the design did not win the competition (and the $5 million award) the effort did generate a design that really could make a difference in the world. I was one of those working on this effort. The team used the multi-body sortition design I had developed in 2013 (and discussed in this book) as its jumping off place. The abstract from that grant proposal nicely sums up the task:

“Global cooperation and coordination on crucial pan-global problems has been stymied by parochial interests - either of national governments and their politicians, or business enterprises with short-term imperatives. No decision making process currently exists that carries sufficient moral legitimacy to compel global action. This proposal can solve that crucial problem and generate that global, moral authority. This can be accomplished by facilitating decision-making by the people of earth themselves, rather than as bickering national, religious, corporate, ethnic, or other factions. The key question is this: ​“What would the people of the world choose to do in addressing various global problems if they could somehow all focus on one particular problem, learn all about it, hear a wide range of possible solutions, deliberate and decide what to do?” 

“Through the use of statistically representative mini-public design we are able to answer this fundamental question. In a nutshell the concept is that initially one global problem selected by the UN General Assembly (perhaps from the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development) would be tackled. National and regional mini-publics, termed Citizens’ Assemblies, would take place all over the world, where perhaps 400 people at each mini-public would convene to learn all about the issue, interrogate experts and examine proposals generated by a variety of volunteer Interest Panels for addressing the problem. Each mini-public would seek to narrow the wide range of proposals down to those they believed were most desirable, and generate questions needing to be answered before a final choice could be made. A few members from each of these national and regional mini-publics would be randomly selected to serve on either a Global Citizens’ Assembly, or a Global Agenda Council, which would select the issue to be tackled in the next round. The Global Citizens’ Assembly would again hear from experts and ultimately adopt a resolution carrying at least the weight of a UN resolution, except this would constitute the considered democratic judgment of the people of the world, rather than of politicians.

“Of course a global citizens’ policy does not automatically carry the force of global law (legitimate coercion to compel compliance). As with UN resolutions, nation states can violate the new global policy. But this is an alternate approach, which has the possibility of exceeding the legitimacy of the undemocratic United Nations (”undemocratic” because it is based on one nation one vote regardless of population, not to mention the arbitrary veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council), which represents nation states rather than people. Whether the sovereignty of the people of the world can ultimately supersede the sovereignty of any individual jurisdiction remains an open question.”

In 2021, the first global sortition project was conducted to coincide with the global climate change conference, COP 26 (Conference of the Parties).¹ This Global Assembly convened one hundred ordinary people from around the world to discuss and make recommendations on issues of global concern, beginning with climate change. The citizens’ assembly was sponsored by a number of civic organizations including Missions Publiques, as well as the Danish Board of Technology, the Scottish government, with support from the UN, with the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra acting as its secretariat.

The sampling method failed to meet the genuinely random standard, with the pool of representative people being submitted by local civic organizations around the world. Random selection on a global scale would always be challenging, with many governments having no central lists of residents, and many people living in makeshift shelters without addresses, etc. Even if the members were genuinely randomly selected, however, the sample size of one hundred was also inadequate to provide meaningful statistical representativeness. Thus this first global assembly was largely symbolic. However, this was an initial step along a vital path.

In 2023, the Global Citizens Assembly Network (GloCAN) was founded. This consortium is seeking to learn from the experience of that first global assembly and do further research to lay the groundwork for future global democratic decision-making using sortition.

The goal of this chapter has been to prompt the reader to think of other possible circumstances in their own situations where sortition might be useful. There must be widespread every-day experience with sortition before it is likely to supplement or (I hope) supplant elections at the governmental level.

1. The French organization, Missions Publiques ran a global mass participatory climate change deliberation in conjunction with COP 21 in 2015, which relied on self-selection rather than sortition.