Democracy for a Sustainable World
The Path from the Pnyx

Explains the relationship between democracy and sustainable development and how participatory democracy can be created globally.

James Bacchus (Author)

9781009583213, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 5 June 2025

578 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 3.3 cm, 0.82 kg

'James Bacchus's book gives a vivid and impressively informed evocation of how the Athenian original worked as a regime and argues with passion that the principles which came to inspire it can still revitalize the institutions through which we must struggle as best we can to manage the ever more dangerous relations of our own troubled world.' John Dunn, Emeritus Professor of Political Theory at King's College, University of Cambridge

The path to global sustainable development is participatory democratic global governance – the only truly effective path to confronting pandemics, military conflict, climate change, biodiversity loss, and potential overall ecological collapse. Democracy for a Sustainable World explains why global democracy and global sustainable development must be achieved and why they can only be achieved jointly. It recounts the obstacles to participatory democratic global governance and describes how they can be overcome through a combination of right representation and sortition, starting with linking and scaling innovative local and regional sustainability experiments worldwide. Beginning with a visit to the birthplace of democracy in ancient Athens, a hillside called the Pnyx, James Bacchus explores how the Athenians practiced democratic participation millennia ago. He draws on the successes and shortfalls of Athenian democracy to offer specific proposals for meeting today's challenges by constructing participatory democratic global governance for full human flourishing in a sustainable world.

1. Greek Fires: Hot Stones in the Path
2. Human Goals: Finding the Path
3. Human Action: The Path Is Participation
4. Athenian Origins: Prelude to the Path
5. Democratia: Cleisthenes and the Athenians Discover the Path
6. Rowing the Triremes: Participation as Cooperation for Democracy and Sustainable Development
7. Aristotle's Garden: Participation as Naturization in the Natural World
8. In the Footsteps of Cleisthenes: Participation as Liberation Through True Self-Rule
9. The Vision of Pericles: Participation as Deliberation and Sortition
10. Frogs Around a Pond: Participation as a Global Framework for Human Imagination
11. Plato's Living Thoughts: Participation as New Institutions of Global Sortition
12. The Wall in the Stoa: The Tools for Participation Through Sortition
13. Reimagining Athens: Participation as Political Will.

Subject Areas: International relations [JPS]