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Category Archives: Global

Rebuilding Democracy

Posted on August 1, 2025 - 2:34 pm by
Space shuttle starting, picture by NASA

Rebuilding Democracy: From Insight to Movement

The Strategy to Restore Efficacy in a Fragmented World

Democracy is in retreat. Across much of the world, citizens feel disempowered, misrepresented, and frustrated with how politics works—or doesn’t. A growing number no longer believe that voting every few years for distant politicians can shape their lives or solve urgent problems. Trust is eroding, populism is rising, and the stakes—from climate breakdown to social cohesion—have never been higher.

Yet this crisis is not inevitable. It is the result of institutions that no longer fit the societies they were built to govern. Democracy has not failed because people lost interest in freedom, but because its inherited form—based on collective blocs and party systems—no longer reflects how individuals live, work, and connect today. What has failed is a structure, not a principle.

Rebuilding Democracy is the strategy for renewal.
Building on the book Rethinking Democracy, it turns the framework of Civil Democracy into a practical roadmap for rebuilding democratic efficacy—step by step, from understanding to new institutions.

The New Framework: Civil Democracy

Civil Democracy provides the institutional architecture for restoring the link between participation and impact. It enables citizens to act responsibly together—individually empowered, collectively effective.

At its core are two freedoms:

  • Meta-decision freedom: the right of every citizen to choose how to participate—directly, through trusted delegates, or through combinations of both.
  • Actor openness: the inclusion of all actors who earn public trust—civil society, academia, associations, communities—rather than confining representation to political elites.

Digital tools make this flexibility scalable and transparent. Citizens can see how their trust shapes outcomes, and open actors must make their reasoning visible. The result is a living circuit of accountability and efficacy—a democracy that works because it restores responsibility where it was lost.

From Understanding to Movement

If democracy is to be rebuilt, insight must become action. Civil Democracy offers the model; the Movement of Movements provides the method.

Across nations and systems—democratic or authoritarian, local or transnational—citizens can begin the same journey: turning awareness of failure into agency. The process unfolds through seven steps that transform disillusionment into structured renewal.

The Seven Steps of Democratic Renewal

  1. Understanding – Recognize that the roots of democratic failure are institutional, not cultural. The problem is structural—and therefore solvable.
  2. Awareness – Realize that each of us has participated in a culture of delegation and must now reclaim responsibility as citizens.
  3. Outreach – Turn insight into connection. Build networks of trust by speaking openly about dysfunction and possibility.
  4. Platform – Create shared digital infrastructure for deliberation and decision-making at scale, governed by citizens rather than capital.
  5. Political Capacity – Learn to act together: develop collective intelligence and coordination to make decisions that matter.
  6. New Institutions – Translate movement into governance. Embed Civil Democracy into hybrid, federal, and participatory institutions that restore accountability.
  7. Better Life – Experience democracy as a living system of cooperation and shared purpose—where trust replaces resentment and governance serves the common good.

A Living Dynamic

These steps do not describe a campaign with an endpoint but a rhythm of renewal. Each local initiative can become a node in a broader movement of movements, exchanging experience, tools, and legitimacy. The goal is not uniformity but connected responsibility: autonomous communities linked through shared learning and mutual trust.

Civil Democracy thus becomes both an institutional and cultural transformation. It turns spectatorship into co-authorship, complaint into contribution. Responsibility becomes the new form of freedom: not freedom from others, but freedom with others—to shape our shared world.

Learning, Responsibility, and Hope

Every act of participation generates knowledge. Through interoperable digital systems, Civil Democracy transforms this experience into a living science of democracy—learning loops that make governance self-correcting and self-improving.

This union of hope and realism defines the project’s moral core. Hope, because citizens can again govern themselves; realism, because structural irresponsibility can be changed only through structural reform. Rebuilding democracy is not about idealism—it is about competence, trust, and responsibility.

Join the Movement

Rebuilding Democracy is an invitation—to citizens, students, institutions, and movements—to make democracy real again. Each of us can begin where we stand: forming deliberative circles, connecting initiatives, testing Civil Democracy in practice.

Together, these actions will build the first planetary infrastructure for responsible governance.

Click on “Learn” to read more and create an account to join this emerging movement of movements. You find the full paper under https://civil-democracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Scholtz-Movement-of-Movements-7-Steps.pdf.

The children of tomorrow will ask: “Why did you let the old system keep failing?”
Let our answer be: “We didn’t. We built something better.”

 

The Uniting Element in Reconciling Divided Societies and Building Global Governance

Posted on July 30, 2025 - 5:56 pm by
Presentation title Democratic Efficacy: The Missing Link in the Too-Long Unsuccessfully Tried

Recently, the possibility opened up to present the Civil democracy approach to Rebecca Shoot, Co-Convener at the Washington Working Group for the International Criminal Court (WICC) and former Executive Director at Citizens for Global Solutions (CGS). I was especially happy because Rebecca’s recent work with CGS was aimed at global governance, while her ongoing one at the WICC has a focus on divided societies and intractable conflict, a wide areas with cases as Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland, the recently reheated conflict between India and Pakistan, with cases currently seen as more historically conflictive but with ongoing potential for violence as Bosnia/Herzegovina, Cyprus, or Rwanda, or cases of societies in continuous struggles to build peaceful relations among their members and social groups, as Lebanon or South Africa. Her work thus bridges two fields in which the demand for better institutions is most present. I have worked on both areas, but at that time my theoretical conceptions seem not yet have been clear enough, so that none of that work has been able to publish so far, and I was thrilled by the challenge to present both vastly different fields under one uniting perspective and eager to see whether I would be able to communicate the advantages of Civil democracy in both fields better this time.

Presentation slide with the text: Two Long-Time Riddles Global Governance The current global institutional system is in legitimacy crisis because people don’t see themselves as political agents in global governance. Private actors and informal multi-stakeholder arrangements in global governance disempower ordinary citizens. Global institutions fail to build democratic agency from below. Divided Societies In many conflict zones, people need to escape conflictive narratives and passive defense for common problem solving. Current attempts build on politicians facing the incentive of building internal legitimacy conflictively. Peace is made by people, not by politicians. Two different areas, one common problem:

The second slide introduces the common perspective in form of the common problem of democratic efficacy:

Democratic Efficacy The fact that people feel heard and part of the political process through their formal democratic participation Needed for democratic global governance as well as pacifying divided societies Once partly realized, today mostly lost, plus a table that describes democratic efficacy in the Second half of 20th century in Western societies (+few others) as Realized through group homogeneity norms, in most non-Western societies as Unrealized, globally in this period as Realized through national representation, and in the 21st century in Western societies (+few others) Increasingly unrealized through individualization, in most non-Western societies as unrealized, and globally as Increasingly unrealized through globalization.

Slide #3 introduces how the problem can be solved:

Regaining Democratic Efficacy: Identifying the problem "The one vote on the ballot": "Partitioning representation" Demands people to join non-overlapping groups for representation Works only if such groups exist: pre-media counties, pre-1968 classes Regaining democratic efficacy is possible Decision orientation Individualizing participation Individualizing representation For areas as global governance and divided societies Vision: Long-term democratic efficacy builds peace and prosperity Strategy: Implementation possible through small-starting movements

Slide #4 dives deeper into the “How” of regaining democratic efficacy:

How Does It Work? Decision orientation Making important decisions with individualized participation and representation, rendering representative positions less important. Accepting complex decisions with many (incl. compromise) options Retrieving option rankings from all citizens without overload Individualizing participation Mixing direct-democratic participation and representation through the 'meta-decision freedom' to either participate of be represented Indirect ranking as decision proposal or for representation Individualizing representation Splitting and specifying the vote allows to include all political actors from traditional actors to specialized civil society organizations Named 'Civil democracy' for empowering citizens and civil society

And the fifth slide is already the last, describing the current perspective:

What Next? Spreading the word Rethinking Democracy to be launched late 2025 Search for cooperation partners in five areas Western societies, public media, urban governance, Middle East, global (esp. climate) governance Funding and (re-)building a platform On existing but non-scalable prototype Starting the 'Movement of movements' e.g. for global governance: Connecting transnational climate NGOs for democratically mandated civil society representation and own collective decision proposals at upcoming COP negotiations. For further information: hanno.scholtz@uzh.ch, +41.79.755.3227

Let me know what you think of the presentation!