Regenerative Democracy for Envisioning and Fostering Flourishing Societies

Fabricio Casarejos,Ivan Engel,Carlos Rufin

doi:10.3390/su13115808

Abstract

The main objective of this article is to propose a new concept of Regenerative Democracy for envisioning and fostering flourishing societies. In pursuing this goal, this study is structured in three research strands, as follows: (i) the proposition of a cohesive set of indices for assessing global democracy and its historical crisis, stability, and transitioning regimes; (ii) an evaluation of empirical correlations and interdependencies between global sustainability and democracy; and (iii) the proposition of a new concept of Regenerative Democracy and its respective system dynamics modeling archetype for portraying societal transitions and their respective patterns of behavior over time. The overall results and discussion of this study indicate an empirical trend of democratic instability, comprising a decline in quality distribution among democratic states and an increasing risk of socio-ecological degeneration. These results also reveal a highly interdependent relationship between historical achievements of essential societal needs and global democratic stability and consolidation. Finally, flourishing societies relies on social equity, political participation, intergenerational justice and solidarity, long-term thinking, and synergistic relationships between societies and Earth’s life-giving systems.

Highlights

This section encompasses the proposed set of indices for assessing global democracy, the analysis of the correlations and interdependencies between global indicators related to sustainability and democracy, and the proposed concept of Regenerative Democracy and its respective system dynamics modeling archetype
2018, Polity IV’s global democracy index (GDIPIV ); the global percentage index (GPIPIV ), which is proposed to quantify the percentage of states with democratic features; and the relative difference index (RDIPIV ), which is proposed to quantify the difference between the values of GDIPIV and GPIPIV
With a critical turning point in 2006, RDI consistently decreased from 0.01 in 1972 to −0.20 in 2018. These results indicate a gradual decoupling between GDI and GPI, signifying an increasingly unbalanced relationship between the quantity of states with democratic features and the overall quality of democracy

Summary

Introduction

The pursuit of global sustainability requires long-term thinking on what a flourishing society should be as well as on the preconditions that would enable it to evolve not just safely and fairly [1,2,3,4,5]. A foremost challenge of the 21st century is that societies must ensure that no one falls short on life’s essential needs while ensuring that human activities do not disrupt the stability of Earth’s life-giving systems [3,4]. A flourishing society is one that is wealthy, and regenerative, resilient, well-governed, and enlightened by meaningful aspirations, such as freedom, justice, equity, quality of life, ecological sensibility, and political participation [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion