S5E26: Lifeboats: Jon Stever

This is Larry Lessig, and this is the final interview in season five of the podcast, Another Way.

In the next episode, the final episode,

I'll reflect a bit Reed blather on what I think these interviews have taught and where I think they lead. But today we talk to a friend I first met on my last sabbatical in Rwanda in 2017. John Stever, originally from Texas, was the coolest American in Rwanda, which is actually saying something because the country is filled with Americans doing all sorts of good and I'm sure lots that's not so good. He was running, John was running an innovation hub in Rwanda, as well as leading a team that was working with governments across Africa and the developing world to make government work better and to make democracy possible. The innovation hub had a beautiful cafe on the top floor of its building in the top of one of the hills in Kigali. Not beautiful in the sense that the restaurant Heaven in Kigali is. That restaurant and hotel is as its name suggests. And if you get to Rwanda, to Kigali, you have to visit Heaven. But John's place was much more understated, filled with Rwandans and cheap enough to afford making it my office, essentially my office. During my time in Rwanda, most days I would show up, order endless coffee, which was actually not great. Apparently the best Rwandan coffee is exported to places like Starbucks around the world. But then stand in one of the corners at a standup table with headphones, talking to myself, because I can't write without saying what I am writing as I write it. So I was the crazy man in the corner, a fixture of that corner in that city in Africa for at least five months. And John and I had lunch as often as we could. He told me about his work across Africa and the world. I shared ideas about what I was working on. In particular, I shared my fascination with sortition and practices of deliberative polling. And that thread became a central topic of our conversation for the many magical months I spent with my family in Rwanda. But John then did something more than simply talk about those ideas. In 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, John helped organize the Global assembly on Climate and Ecological Crises. And as you'll hear in this podcast, the assembly adopted an incredibly creative technique for building a representative sample of of the world to talk about the climate crisis and what can be done about it. The process began with about 400 people from 110 countries coming together to reimagine what global governance could be. The team developed a global lottery in which everyone on Earth had an equal chance to be selected to become an assembly member. And then 100 people from 49 countries were selected and then supported through 68 hours of deliberation to produce the People's Declaration for the Sustainable Future of Planet Earth. Assembly members then presented their declaration on the opening day of COP26. It is an incredible story. Incredible not only in its results, but in the sheer ambition and extraordinary effort that it represented. John has long been a friend. He is now a kind of democratic hero in the reimagining democracy democracy space. And I hope that this conversation might draw you to the heroic work that we all must be doing to rebuild or protect democracy. John is a graduate of Texas A and M. He then got his Master's of Science at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He is co founder and Managing Director of Innovation for for Policy Foundation I for Policy and co founder of the Impact Hub Kigali, among many other initiatives that he's helped found or lead. He's also advised and trained senior government officials in communities across more than 50 different countries. He is an extraordinary soul and I hope you enjoy this last interview in this latest season of the podcast Another Way.

Stay tuned. John, thanks so much for talking. You've been an activist building citizen assembly like structures in the most improbable way imaginable. You know, people typically think about a local town meeting by converting to a citizen assembly where people come, you know, from two miles away and they gather in a basement of a church to talk about some issue that that wasn't good enough for you. So why don't you tell us a little bit of the story about how you got to Citizen assembly world and, and, and what you think you learned from it.

Oh Larry, thanks for having me. So the most improbable of circumstances, I mean, I think the first place to start here is really a diagnosis of the, the problems. When we think about the major challenges facing humanity, inequality, the biodiversity and climate crisis, we have to recognize that we can't solve that within national boundaries, that there is really sort of structural decisions that need to be taken as a species. And so together with a few organizations around the world back in early 2020 and throughout that year, we started thinking about what could it look like to kind of reimagine global democracy, global governance, in such a way that we could hear from the voices of ordinary people to exert more legitimacy and to confer more legitimacy and to bring in more collective intelligence and lived experiences and reality into global decision making. And of course, 2020 was a year that we'll never forget, is the year in which Covid kind of upended a lot of societal norms and made very clear and kind of in some ways created a unique opportunity that this idea of interconnectedness as a species was no longer kind of a theoretical idea that we sat around talking about philosophically, but recognized that if someone sneezed on the other side of the world, you were scared for your. And in fact, that's of course the reality that if someone burns down a forest on one side of the planet, then we should all be scared for our children's children. And so it's kind of making that case of interconnectedness just really tangible and something that everybody could really feel. And then on the other hand, we were also able to just see massive societal change was possible. And so there was this opportunity to kind of radically reimagine what we could do in terms of international coordination. And then, of course, partners were more willing to kind of support and imagine being a part of this kind of change. And so I would say these three factors came together with, of course, a lot of idealism, I must say, from ourselves at Eye for Policy to Innovation for Policy foundation and some of our colleagues and partners around the world. And we started thinking maybe we can actually do this, and maybe this idea of organizing a global citizens assembly that at least we at Eye for Policy had of kind of a five year vision. We thought maybe this is something actually that we should and could and must do now in 2021, that actually the conditions are ripe, there's a sort of recognition that this is needed, that we need to solve problems at a global level, at a transnational level, and that it was possible to imagine sort of radical institutional reform, almost like a Bretton woods moment, if you will. And so we came together at the end of 2020 and early 2021 as eye for policy with two other kind of coalitions. One group from Spain, deliberativa, and another group from the United Kingdom that at the time called themselves Good Help and started kind of imagining what a global citizens assembly could look like, what it would require. We had anchored it to the global COP process, the Conference of Parties, in particular the COP 26 that was taking place in Glasgow in November 2021. And so we essentially gave ourselves 11 months, 10 months, really, to try and build, design, imagine, you know, the most radical sort of democratic experiment, you might say, at a. At a global level.

Okay, so. So the. The idea, though, unlike the typical international forum, was not to bring together leaders or politicians or people who purport to speak for other people in a direct way. It was, it was to be much more aspirational about involving ordinary people in this process. You and I had way back in 2017, we first met in Rwanda and we began talking about this idea of sortition as a different way to think about how we could build representative bodies. You probably had to pitch that idea to the partners that ifer policy or the partners that the other organizations helping you stand it up.

Was it obvious?

Was it an easy idea to get

people to grapple with?

Yeah, absolutely. So it's great to recall those moments in 2017 because actually at the time at Eye for Policy, we were supporting sort of innovative forums of kind of bringing citizen voice into policy making processes and kind of reimagining what governance processes could look like that serves a number of kind of democratic goals around openness and transparency, inclusion and diversity, kind of elevating what political scientists might call epistemic value or kind of collective intelligence. And you introduced me to this concept of sortition as a way to compose these mini publics, to kind of avoid certain biases that we see in self selected groups and to confer more legitimacy onto these kind of mini publics or forums. And when we were looking into the sort of Global Citizens assembly, in a way, the concept of sortition was really built in because the idea that we had was to compose a global forum that would be more legitimate because everyone on earth would have an equal probability of being able to participate. And that was kind of one of the fundamental ideas of this Global Citizens assembly on the climate and ecological crisis was, you know, what if we, what if we convened a decision making body? Essentially we had no, there is no, of course, global sovereign. That's what really sort of what distinguishes, you might say, sort of transnational mini public from a national or subnational mini public, because there is no global sovereign to confer some sort of legitimacy or to empower global, you know, sort of mini public. And so we wanted to create sort of a forum as an example of what global decision making could be. And so we started off with that question, you know, how might we compose a form in which everyone on Earth had an equal probability to participate and to do so in a way that of course couldn't possibly be representative of the diversity of our species, but to do so within the maximum level of diversity that 100 humans might be able to sort of descriptively represent our species? And so, yeah, that was kind of baked into the concept from the very beginning, then of course the question was, how might you do that? Because at a national or sub national level, you have some form of citizen registry, you know, a national security number, a voter registry form. And of course we don't have that at the global level. And the reality is that unfortunately there are a number of people around the world that might not be citizens of any one nation state, you know, in some form of statelessness and sort of refugee status. And so the idea was, how might we organize sort of global lottery when you don't necessarily have a list of all the names in the hat that you're drawing from.

So, so the idea would be China would have a certain number of representatives. Because of China's proportion of the world population, how many people would come from America? If it's 100, that, that represent the whole world.

So that's a, that's a great question there. So there was, we took a, naturally we used a NASA data set. So we took a NASA data set that looked at population density overlaid in a 2D model of Planet Earth. As the first step of the sortition, which I can talk a little bit more about, and to be internally consistent, we used that same database to sort of represent the different percentages. And in that sort of snapshot of 7.8 billion people that we used, the U.S. population was about four and a half percent. And so we didn't actually want to necessarily say therefore that the hundred people that were representing humanity 4.5%. Of course, there's no such thing as a half a person. But the idea is that not 4.5% would come, come from the United States, but that we would make sure that no individual nation state would be overrepresented. Because there, of course, like a lot of countries, that around 30% of the global population comes from countries that don't, aren't composed of 1% or more of the global population. So we needed to distribute quite a few of the positions to these sort of smaller nation states without necessarily assigning someone from each, if that makes sense.

So you came up with a breakdown of how many you need to get from everybody. And then how did you actually identify people within any particular geographical location?

Yeah, so we took this NASA data set which again looked at kind of population density on a 2D map of the world. And what that essentially means is you would break the planet down into, I want to say it was 13 million administrative zones. And so, you know, a particular county in the United States might have a population of say 200,000 and so on. And so what we were able to do was actually randomly kind of order that database. And then our colleagues from the Sortition foundation developed a Python script to essentially pick 100 random numbers out of 7.8 billion and then identify which geographic location they came from and randomly offset a geographic point, you know, a pin essentially at the center point, sort of offset from the center point of each of these administrative zones. And so what we were doing was essentially conducting a global location lottery that was basically balanced according to human population distribution across the planet. And what we did was then a sort of second tier of that was we created an algorithm to ensure that we didn't overrepresent any one individual nation state. Because, of course, if you were to do the. The kind of random roll of the dice to pick these locations, the larger nation states are more than 50% of the time going to be overrepresented, which we felt like would be unfair, especially considering that a lot of smaller nation states already sort of are underrepresented in global fora. So we had a small algorithm to ensure that no nation state was overrepresented. And then, so what we had was 100 locations on planet Earth. We were able to run that actually live. We used software that we had published Open source on GitHub. We ran the code live on screen on a video call so anyone in the world could watch. We've recorded that, published it online, so it's kind of auditable. Everything we showed us taking the instance, using the data set, so everyone was able to see the selection of these countries really fully transparently. We were learning about that just like anybody else in the world could. There was sort of full transparency of that process. And then after selecting these geographic locations, we then needed to identify, okay, who's going to be the person that is represented by this sort of geographic pin. So we worked with local community organizations in each of these 100 places, and we trained them to be able to engage in a variety of methods of random recruitment. We wanted those random recruitment methods to be consistent. And of course, I think it's important for people in the United States to know that, of course, not everywhere in the world, not every country has sort of geographically restricted sort of area codes for phone numbers, for example. And a lot of countries don't even necessarily have formal addressing systems. You know, in some countries, you would say, turn left at the big tree and, and right 100 yards later, go up four houses. And so there was no consistent way of doing random recruitment in a way that you would you would use at a national or sub national context. So we engaged in sort of random street recruitment. So these organizations were trained to go out onto the street, meet people, invite them to participate in the Global Citizens Assembly. Of course, explain what that that was, because of course that was a completely new concept. And then we, we were able to offer, thanks to funding support, US$600 stipend for everyone in the world to spend 70 hours as a member of the Global assembly. And so to offer that this stipend to try and again ensure that not just the wealthiest and those that had a bunch of spare time could participate, but we could really make it such that anyone in the world could participate. And so this random street recruitment then recruited about 700 people, an average of about seven people per location. And then we ran a second round of this sort of lottery process or two step sortition to then ensure that the final hundred, we made sure that of those 100, one person came from each of the geographic points. So you kind of had this geographic demographic characteristic taken care of, kind of baked in. And then we made sure that the 100 people kind of represented humanity in terms of gender, age, their socioeconomic status was proxied by their educational outcome. So we looked at sort of how many years of education they had pursued, which is of course highly correlated with, with income. And then we finally also looked at whether or not they felt like the climate was in an emergency situation. We were able to compare some Data from the UNDP of about 1 1/2 million people filled out the survey. And roughly, and this was of course in 2019, 2020. And about 64% of the world population felt that we were in an emergency. And I would assume the number might be higher now given just recent weather patterns. But essentially we wanted to make sure that we were compos, an assembly that wouldn't be considered biased because of course in these random selection processes, the people that believe climate is in a crisis are more likely to want to participate. So then we also tried to try to ensure that the assembly kind of represented the perspectives on the climate as well.

So about 64% would have thought we were in a crisis. Over the course of the deliberations that they engaged in. Did those numbers change?

Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.

All right, so let's get to that at the end then. All right, so you, so this is an amazing science, really behind the idea of how do you construct something that you can honestly feel is representative of the world? Had anybody done something like this before,

as far as you'd Think we're not aware of anyone else having done this before.

Wow, you're the first.

And I think that this is, of course, I mean, to say that we're the first. I mean, you know, we, we definitely saw ourselves as kind of standing on the shoulders of tremendous number of people throughout history that have kind of dreamed about this. I mean, tracing our way at least through kind of Western written history, back to kind of concept of cosmopolite or a sort of global citizen of the world. And so it was definitely a very humbling exercise to try and do this for the first time, knowing that there would be many mistakes along the way, that there would be many things that we would learn throughout the process to improve this in future iterations, but that it was important enough to try to try and do something that we believed would be legitimate and that we could genuinely say at the end that everybody on planet Earth did have an equal probability. And of course, there was a lot of hypotheticals in the beginning before even engaging where you're like, okay, well what if we end up choosing a country, you know, insert country name, where the government might not allow us to engage in on street recruitment or might interfere dramatically with those participants. And not to say that that didn't necessarily happen, but there were a lot of, yeah, a lot of question marks and we just sort of approached them very methodically and there was just a wonderful team. I mean, in that regard, I have to really, again acknowledge the Sortition foundation and Brett Hennig, the sort of fearless leader who was able to work with us on sort of adapting and designing this approach.

Okay, so when was the selection done? Let's put it in our timeline here. So it's 2020. We're doing all this. You finished the process of selecting when.

So we finished the geographic, sort of the location lottery, if you will, around June 20th. And then we then needed to recruit local community organizations to do on street recruitment. And that was of course, very time consuming. We worked with local organizations all around the world. We tried to design an organizational structure that was as decentralized as possible. And so we brought together some community convening organizations in Latin America to bring together sort of Spanish speaking communities of practice. We worked with an amazing group in Brazil to bring together Portuguese speaking communities, etc. Of this sort of. We had nine cluster facilitators, we called them. We sort of broke the world down into kind of major countries. On the one hand, so China and India each had their own cluster facilitator. Then we had sort of linguistic Clusters, Anglophone countries, Francophone countries, Arabic speaking, et cetera. And then we also had a pot of about 30 countries that didn't sort of fit into some kind of neat box. But we needed to be able to decentralize the sort of organizational structure. And we, we didn't want those structures to sort of bring about any kind of historical issues around imperialism or colonialism, you know, former Soviet Union, for example. We wanted to try and avoid these kinds of bucketing of locations. And so we actually assigned these groups into kind of longitudinally distributed clusters. So from 0 to 40 east longitude, if, if a location didn't fit into a sort of neat language or country cluster, then we were creating these kind of mixed clusters. And these organizations then that were working in these areas were then going and recruiting together with volunteers around the world, going and recruiting local community organizations. And that took about from sort of June until probably around the beginning of, so the middle of September rather, we were still recruiting local community organizations to then go and do on street recruitment. And in a handful of locations we were, you know, the global, you know, community of partners really didn't want to leave any place out. So there was just an effort to really make sure that we could find great local community organizations in each place. And we talk about local community organizations, we're talking about, for example, Women's Economic Empowerment NGO in Socotra, an island off the coast of Yemen, to then go and do on street recruitment. And so yeah, we took some time, quite some months to be able to then bring together this global community of 100 local community host organizations. And then we were actually recruiting and finalizing the participation list all the way up until just before the, the assembly was starting. So essentially after the global location lottery in June 2021, then we ended up building this global community of cluster facilitators so just described. And those organizations were recruiting local community hosts all the way up until actually the middle of September. And we were starting the Global Citizens assembly on the climate and ecological crisis in the beginning of October. And so we were actually calling up all of the people that had agreed to participate through on street recruitment and saying, would you like to participate in Global Assembly? By the way, it's starting in about two weeks. And of course best practice would be to try and do that with at least a month's notice at a national level with much less complexity. And so of course then you get into the process of if someone wasn't able to participate, then finding the sort of, in a way, quote unquote, next best Participate in terms of the best fit of global demographic characteristics according to the folks who signed up to participate. But essentially we convened the group of 100, really, the week before the Global assembly commenced in early October 2021.

Okay, so they're convening and they're meeting on Zoom, like structure, right?

That's right, yeah. And we were bringing everyone together online. And that was actually also another, in a way, another innovation in the kind of democratic sort of mini public space that I don't know if would have been conceivable a few years ago, but essentially Covid had kind of forced all of us to realize that we could work online if we had to. And so we were bringing people together online. Of course, that in itself was another challenge. Thinking about what digital platforms are accessible everywhere in the world, that's another story, of course.

No, but that's the same story. So, like, you couldn't use Zoom to do this, right? Mean, how, how did you do it?

We were able to use Zoom. In the end, there were some question marks about whether or not Zoom would work everywhere because in at the time in mainland China, people were not able to create new Zoom accounts. And so essentially we needed to find Zoom accounts that were in China to be able for the members of the assembly in China to be able to use Zoom. We were exploring other, you know, video conferencing tools. In China they have a system called VOove, but VUV was sort of reciprocally blocked in India because some Indian applications were blocked in China. And so there was no real perfect solution. We also were able to get support from an incredible organization in Spain called flosscat. So they were building Jitsi solutions, so an open source tool. But of course, the challenge with the open source tool at the time at least, was that just managing the server configurations to be able to have as good a quality as you can get such a large corporation like Zoom. But we had a Jitsi deployment as a backup in case we needed to use it, so that we had kind of a redundancy.

Okay, so in the beginning of October, you begin to meet. So what is the rhythm of the conversation? Do you open up with everybody in one room and then break into breakout rooms or how does that work?

That's a great question. And there's just a number of innovations in the Global assembly that I don't think would have been conceivable before we tried this. I mean, essentially, normally with a mini public, you would start in a plenary, everybody would come in, you would kind of launch Offer the framing question, have some high level speakers, get everybody excited, inspired to see their mandate to then go and work through the Assembly. In this case, because we were talking about a globally representative, you know, 100 person community. We're, we're talking about people from 49 different countries. They spoke 42 different languages.

Wow.

More than a 30% had varying degrees of literacy, 10% were completely illiterate, and more than a third of the group had never before been on a video call before. So imagine that. I mean, that's kind of inconceivable, I imagine for many listeners of this podcast that, you know, people have not ever seen another human face on a screen that they were talking to. And so we, you know, having the assembly sort of mediated and taking place on this online platform, we wanted people to feel safe and comfortable. Of course, you know, important sort of deliberative precondition is for people to feel comfortable and safe and so, and hopefully brave in this kind of forum. And so what we did was we actually started the assembly in small breakout groups and we created these groups of five. So the entire assembly was broken up into 20 breakout groups of five, which we tried to maximally sort of diversify within sort of longitudinal windows so that, you know, people were able to, to talk to somebody on a similar time zone in a time that made sense for them. And the idea was that these assembly members would be able to, in this, you know, first meeting and in these breakout discussions, you know, work with a smaller subset of people and try and essentially be able to build some sort of group cohesion and comfort and familiarity throughout the Assembly. And I think it's important at this point to recognize that, you know, how do people that speak 42 different languages actually communicate on a zoom call? Right. And so a big part of the design of the Global Citizens assembly was ensuring or trying to ensure that the members of the assembly had the support they needed to be able to participate fully. And, and when we're talking about such a diverse group, that means creating information materials and pedagogical tools that could try and explain some of the complexity of the climate and ecological crisis from a scientific perspective, of course, and then offering opportunities for the members to share their own lived experiences. But it also meant making sure they could communicate in a common language. It meant making sure that they could co create outcomes together. And so we actually partnered all of the individual assembly members with the community host organization in their community. And this community host provided each member with a translator, with a companion to support, you know, zoom and the kind of computer elements of the, of the online engagement. And so what we did was basically we paired up these assembly members with this kind of team of support, if you will, in the same way that we might think of a representative having kind of staffers.

Right.

So each of the assembly members had staff, a translator and someone to use their machine. And in many cases you're talking about someone that may or may not have completed sort of primary school, having access to a kind of university educated translator and someone to operate Zoom and the computer and other tools for them. Right.

It's quite easy. I mean, just as a footnote, like, who is funding this incredible infrastructure? Because that's obviously, obviously expensive when you imagine this all the way around the world.

Right, that's, that's right, yeah, we, we were able to get support. So the Global assembly on the Climate and Ecological Crisis was feeding into COP26 in Glasgow. And so the Scottish government as hosts actually provided a hundred thousand pounds to be able to support this. The Scottish government, of course, has been really a leader in, in exploring a lot of democratic innovations in open government. And so they offered £100,000 to support this initiative. And then we were able to fill the rest of the sort of funding requirements to organize this with private philanthropy. So groups like the One Project, the Climate Emergency Collaboration Group, which is kind of a mix of OAK and SIF and Ford foundation and other big private philanthropy, Gulbenkian and other private funders. And all of this, of course, is public, publicly and transparently shared on the website for the Global Citizens assembly because of course, transparency in this regard is extremely important.

So the total budget for the whole

project, just over a million US dollars.

That's not that much really.

No. So you think of a lot of voluntary contributions from a lot of really beautiful and passionate people all around the world. And I think that's, that's really the story of the Global Citizens assembly really is that first of all, we demonstrated that it's not utopian to imagine that humanity can come together and in a sort of equal footing, to be able to deliberate about issues that are incredibly important and affect us differently around the world. But secondly, that there is this incredible amount of energy for people all around the world that not only want to imagine these new institutions, but are willing to sort of dedicate tremendous amount of time, energy, love to be able to build them. And you know, the Global Citizens assembly we, we tried to create and in the beginning of 2021, at Eye for Policy, we designed a sort of holocratic, you Might say sort of decentralized organizational structure, so we could invite people in and sort of scale the number of people that could contribute to the initiative. And we were able to sort of onboard around 400 different individuals and organizations in 110 countries with within about six months to implement the Global Citizens Assembly. And I must say that every single person that worked on the Global assembly was underpaid by many standards. And our estimate of the Global Citizens assembly is at least higher by a factor of four times in terms of what it should have cost to implement. But in this case, we were building the Initiative while fundraising for the Initiative. And what we actually did was when we started this, we said, okay, we. What is it? What is it that we're trying to do? It's kind of minimum, in a way, minimum, viable Global Citizens assembly that meets the requirements that we're trying to see. And we thought, okay, 100 people and a few other things that we thought, okay, needed to be there. And we thought, we can do this for if we need to, as little as $750,000. Ideally, you know, we might be able to do this for a million and a half, but, you know, in a perfect world, we'd have $3 million. And. And then we just kind of. We structured kind of three anchor budgets. And so depending on how much we were fundraising would sort of allow us to add more capabilities to the Global Citizens assembly, to bring on board more support, to extend the number of hours that people were able to deliberate, et cetera.

Okay, so let's pause on the process for a moment and just think a little bit about the substance of what you wanted people to work through. Because obviously, the climate crisis is a huge issue. We've seen, for example, in.

In Paris and France, there was a

similar project that worked through the similar questions in just as ambitious a way. I think it was quite impressive what they were able to accomplish. So when you framed it to the people who were participating, what were the questions that you felt people needed to work through in a deliberative context?

The framing question that was developed by the Global Knowledge and Wisdom Committee, which is important to kind of highlight that we had these sort of two advisory bodies. And the Global Knowledge and Wisdom Committee was chaired by Bob Watson, who had the only scientist who have ever chaired both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. So Professor Bob Watson chaired the Global Knowledge and Wisdom Committee, which developed a framing question for the Global assembly of how might we address the climate and ecological crisis in a fair and effective way. And so the idea was this kind of overarching question was what was presented to the members of the Assembly. And in terms of the structuring of that, we tried to sort of encourage the members of the assembly to focus at a principles level. And this is somewhat inspired by the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who says, you know, that the sort of cosmic city or the sort of global community of humanity is a moral space, and that when we think about the kind of influence that the Global assembly might have, the sort of discursive influence that it would have on global politics, it would come in at a sort of principles level to be able to guide the kind of decisions and vision that was being set in the negotiations that were taking place at cop. And so the members of the assembly were really encouraged to think about the kind of principles that would guide our sort of action as humanity to address this climate and agricultural crisis in a way that was fair and effective. And we worked with the Knowledge and Wisdom Committee to identify a number of people that had different perspectives, whether it was scientists or a petroleum engineer, activists all around the world, people from small island states that are, of course, at imminent risk of needing to vacate their home countries because they're underwater, to share their different perspectives, experiences, and views in the climate and ecological crisis. And then they were encouraged to be able to share their own lived experiences about the climate and ecological crisis as well, and to start coming up with what they felt like could be visions and principles to guide action at a global level.

Okay, so then what were they? Where we get. Where did we get.

So the members of the assembly, and you can imagine there are 20 breakout groups of five people, each deliberating in a number of languages via their translators. And what they did was they would develop ideas in their group and proposals in their group that would then be edited together by a group of independent editors, together with the other 19 groups. And that would be sort of composed into one sort of unifying document that sought to bring in all of these different views, sort of filtering process, if you will, that was done by these independent editors. And then the groups would come back together in plenary and small group to evaluate that. And this took place in sort of iterative fashion. And what it resulted in was a document that the members of the assembly chose to call the People's Declaration for the Sustainable Future of Planet Earth. And this document featured a number of principles. For example, one that is really important to highlight is that the members of the assembly, their fourth Declaration was they felt like humanity had a right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, which must be included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example. And not only that, they felt like it should be protected at multiple levels of law and that it should be monitored. So essentially what the members of the assembly were saying in kind of international legal terms was that there should become a covenant of a sort of right to, or a convention on the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. And in fact, last year, the un, so about nine months after the Global assembly concluded, the United Nations General assembly actually voted to include the rights to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. So that's one example of an outcome from the Global Citizens assembly, for example.

So you can trace that to your Assembly.

Yeah, and I think it's quite dangerous to sort of say that we, or rather think it would be misleading to say that the Global Citizens assembly, you know, unilaterally resulted in this. Of course, that would be incorrect because this is. We're talking about four decades of global, you know, transnational civil society and social movement activity to, to see this happen. And in the, in the weeks before the Global assembly convened in 2021, the United nations, the Human Rights Council, had passed the. The right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. And so it's actually from that momentum that the Global Citizens assembly was discussing and sort of adding their, their voice to, to this process and sort of joining in this global call for, for this to become a right.

Yeah, but I think what's important to recognize is the way in which an assembly like this can surface ideas that have become almost taken for granted in society, but otherwise wouldn't necessarily find voice, because who's going to be pushing it? So the fact that you coalesced around an idea which the UN then would agree on is a measure of the validity of the process. It's like showing that you are discovering something that is in the air, so to speak, and affirming it in a way that validates both the UN and what you were doing.

Yeah, I think that's an interesting point and can be seen in a number of the other proposals that were put forward by the members of the assembly. That I think. And what's interesting is that when a lot of people look at the people's Declaration, they're. They're like, oh, yeah, that, that makes sense. You know, that's obvious. It's, it's intuitive. And then, you know, I think some people's tendency then is to think oh, well, if all of this stuff is obvious, then we don't, we don't need to invest a million dollars into bringing people together to say a bunch of things that everyone thinks is obvious. But I think that's, that's precisely the point. You know, we've been running off the cliff of environmental and climate devastation for the last several decades knowing fully well the implications of this. And so when you bring people together from around the world that don't have vested interest, that aren't in the pocket of the oil and gas industry, then, wow, it turns out that they believe we should do something about the ecological crisis and the climate crisis. It turns out that, that, for example, you know, they believe that Mother Nature, that, that the environment itself has its intrinsic rights. Right. That for example, EcoCides should be protected by law and enforced by law. They believe that education in environmental and climate education is critical. And of course that seems very intuitive to a lot of people, but unfortunately that is not the policy direction at a transnational level or at a national level in many countries around the world.

So what were the, and we're going to link to and how all of the material that you ultimately produced available to people listening here. But what were the areas of the greatest contention? Like where did people not agree? Or was there like the hottest issue that you fought about?

Yeah, so it's an interesting question because those moments of contention are not really what stand out for me when I think back to the Global Assembly. Yeah, because of course, you know, politics and political discourse more generally in America is so much driven by polarization and contention. This kind of adversarialism and kind of design of competition, for example, between political parties and elections. And you know, the Global assembly was, yeah, it was rather a space of togetherness. It was kind of a space to encourage empathy and sharing. This, There was, was a common commitment towards a common goal, you know, this recognition that people were doing something important, they had responsibility, they were working together to develop something that would be meaningful. And yeah, you know, I think of the kind of warm voices in diverse languages, for example, that would welcome other members to plenary sessions. But yeah, of course there were, there were areas of disagreement and misunderstanding, but I would, I would suggest that those mainly took place at this kind of meta level, you know, at the, at the level of belief and expectation and values that, you know, this kind of, you know, what is the role of the state, for example, what is the role of citizens vis a vis sovereigns? You know, what is the balance between, in individual rights versus Collective rights, for example, that would have been and would be interesting to go into deeper. And at Innovation for Policy foundation, at I for Policy, we're really interested in future democratic innovations, future citizens assemblies initiating transnational deliberation. To really address this question, how do you get diverse citizens to own human rights agreements and to really deliberate on the values that underlie them? And it's interesting because, you know, for example, you know, some of the facilitators and hosts of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the sort of initial drafting process, Jacques Maritan, for example, explicitly avoided talking about the kind of values that would underline the agreements. And what's interesting is that I think in a lot of our kind of political forums, the disagreements are actually taking place at that meta level and aren't really being surfaced in the discussion. And I think that took place to some extent in the Global Citizens Assembly. But really, if you want to be particular about the areas of disagreement, we did, and I hope this is useful for other democratic and governance innovations. We, we really sought to create a very transparent and open system to kind of elevate all of the knowledge from the Assembly. And we created something we called an explanatory note, which accompanies the People's Declaration, where we've detailed each of the statements of the declaration, the process through which each statement was iteratively developed and drafted, refined, and then we actually count each of the votes for each of the statements because we felt it was important for the legitimacy and the validity of the Declaration that members weren't voting on sort of an aggregate document, but they were really voting on individual lines to avoid, in the worst case scenario, the kind of rider statements that get attached to bills, for example, in US Legislature, but essentially to ensure that there was a very strong common agreement around particular statement to be included. And so what you can see in this explanatory note is you can actually then get in and drill into each of the areas of agreement and where some people may have disagreed with a particular statement, where they would have maybe voted against it or abstained, and we've tried to capture some of the main justifications for each of the members votes.

But I imagine that if you had one of these assemblies in real space where there was ample opportunity to begin to mobilize faction against faction, one dynamic would be responsibility for the problem. And I imagine a whole bunch of people in the world would look at countries like the United States, which is majorly responsible for the carbon that's out there, even though China is producing a bunch right now, over the whole of the 20th century century and the 21st century, we've produced more look at countries like that and say things like, you guys should bear the burden of cleaning this up or slow down more than the rest of us must. There would be a kind of global equity interrogation. And did you see any of that in the context of what came out through the deliberations you were seeing?

Yes. Yeah. So questions of equity were definitely central to the discussion. And the Declaration does acknowledge in particular the sort of differing responsibilities and requirements of states. But ultimately, again, this question relates to kind of how we understand and structure political discourse and negotiation. It relates to the kind of how members of the assembly see their role and their responsibility. You know, are members of a decision making body responsible for the kind of narrow interests of a political party as in the United States, or are they representing the interests of their neighbors and community as a whole? You know, are the, are the members of a decision making body at the transnational level representing the narrow interests of a particular, particular nation state? Or do they feel responsible for humanity? Are they representing the interests of other humans in other states? And then, you know, are the norms and customs of a discourse in a decision making body, are they actually feeding disagreement and contention polarization to create BuzzFeed headlines? Or is there a dialogue amongst members that is aimed at elevating what the political philosopher Havermass called the unforced force of better arguments? You know, are we trying to find and establish public reason? And I think, you know, what's really important here is like, the ways in which the members were invited and then also, of course, informed about the climate and ecological crisis to be able to have this conversation. And of course, when we talk about such a diverse group of people, it's important to recognize that, like, not everybody in the world can read a, you know, time series graph of climate science data from the ipcc. And so what we did was we developed this sort of pedagogical innovation. We called it the seven generation anchoring exercise. And it was really explicitly inspired by seven generation thinking from first nation communities in what is now the United States, that, you know, when they were facing a question, they would think, how might our decision affect people seven generations from now? And so with that kind of intergenerational perspective, we started thinking, how might we support members of the assembly to understand where they are now? So what's happened in the past, how that influences where we are now? And then, how are decisions that we're taking now going to affect the future? And so to achieve multiple goals. In the beginning, beginning of the assembly, we invited members to talk about their great grandparents lives. So three generations in the past, what were their lives like? And they were able to get to know each other about this and to foster empathy through this kind of conversation. But importantly, we were able to ask them then to estimate roughly when their great grandparents would have been born. And then, you know, to fast forward, to talk a little bit about their life and what it's like now and then to imagine the future and what their great grandchildren's lives might be like. So three generations into the future and to estimate when their great grandchildren might be born or the great grandchildren in their community if they weren't planning on having children, but to essentially construct a time series of their family histories. And then we were able to overlay those individual members sort of family timelines onto the climate and ecological crisis data. So to look at questions of biodiversity, geographically, you know, what's happened with biodiversity since your great grandparents were born till now, and what might happen under a variety of scenarios, you know, by the time your great grandchildren are born. And similarly, the members were exposed to information about historical carbon emissions and where they came from. And you know, and when your mandate, as you know, in a legislative body or decision making body, you know, is to represent the interests of, you know, broader group that you feel a responsibility and you're exposed to this kind of information, it wasn't so antagonistic, it wasn't so difficult for the members without vested interests to recognize that of course, certain countries have a disproportionate responsibility to address the climate and ecological crisis. And of course, all countries and all people, you know, deserve to have certain minimum living standards.

Okay, so how did the assembly or the process change the participants? Like, how are they different afterwards than before?

You know, I must say, Larry, that the impact of the assembly on the members was profound. But not just on the members, on the organizers, on many observers of the assembly. And I must say on myself, you know, like I am the Global assembly is the thing in my life that I am most proud of having led, of having been a part of. And the impact on the members and on all of us was just occurred through so many different channels because of course, you know, there were a number of relationships that were formed, but people really were able to, you know, through sitting together and discussing and getting to know people, were really able to foster so much understanding and empathy for people from so many, many different backgrounds. And you know, in addition to this, people learned and gained understanding about the climate and ecological crisis. In a deeper level, you know, many members reported that, you know, they learned significant amounts through the assembly. This in many cases led to behavior change and activated people. You know, there's, you know, several anecdotes of this. One of the members from Brazil who had reported that she'd never been a part of local meetings, you know, she was working as a cleaner, was, you know, after the assembly, sort of activated to start participating in local, you know, climate and environment group meetings, to go to, you know, local city meetings. And then, you know, within two years of the assembly having finished, she was serving as, as an advisor for her local mayor on environmental issues. That is why these types of governance designs are just so important, because it gives people an ownership of their community, of the issues that affect their lives, and it gives people the belief that they have the agency and the power to do something about it. And I think that's the impact of that is continuing to spread. Not only having this kind of proof of concept that a Global Citizens assembly is possible, but having engaged so many community organizations from all over the world to be a part of delivering it, to be a part of a new type of democratic innovation, a governance innovation, and to see that many of the community organizations have then gone on to participate in other networks and activities, to participate in, for example, a summer school on how to organize other climate assemblies and otherwise. And yeah, I think the impact of the Global Citizens assembly at a kind of human level, at an individual level, at a kind of community organizational level, is just continuing to radiate.

Okay, so you got into this believing this would be worth something, and you obviously end it thinking it was worth something. But how would you characterize what you know now relative to what you knew when you started this process? Like why, why do you think you were right to do this? And why do you think it might be right to try to institutionalize doing this in a more regular way across a range of truly global problems?

I tend to see this in this sort of long arc of human history and kind of liken this moment to where we were 11,000 years ago in the Neolithic revolution when humanity discovered agriculture, that we sort of came together and were able to start forming communities larger than hunter gatherer societies and were able to feed those populations. And, and there are some archaeologists and anthropologists that sort of think that at that moment in time, we didn't have the social technologies necessarily to be able to live together at scale, that we needed to create things like harvest days and marriages and weddings and rules. And norms that ultimately sort of evolved into the modern nation states and that we were building these kind of social technologies that could bring people together and allow us to live together in larger and larger numbers. And the challenge is that those numbers of, you know, these. These nation states have now sort of proliferated, and we're now taking decisions at a planetary level between these nation states. We haven't created a social technology that allows these diverse nation states to then be able to come together and to take decisions. And that's absolutely necessary because, of course, all of the major challenges that we face when we think about, again, inequality and climate and crisis can't be solved at the national level. We can't expect, you know, the Rwandan government, for example, you know, where I've lived for the last 16 years, has done a tremendous amount to, for example, ban plastic bags before the state of California. Really innovative things to be able to sort of improve the environmental situation, to protect biodiversity, to ensure that it's developing in a way that's. That's, you know, not overly contributing to the climate and ecological crisis. And, and yet, you know, Rwanda can't control the carbon emissions from their neighbors from, you know, the United States, for example. And so it's critical that we can find better international solutions. And, you know, what I'm really excited about is that the United Nations Secretary General, who offered some supporting remarks for the Global assembly, head of COP26, that really called on world leaders to listen to what global citizens had to say as part of the Global assembly that Secretary General Guterres is convening the Summit for the future at the end of 2024 to try and bring more people together to think about this and to kind of reimagine what global institutions of governance need to look like and how citizen voice can become a part of that. But I'm absolutely convinced, and I guess I was before the Global Citizens assembly, that we need to create these new institutions. And I would say what's changed is that. That I'm even more convinced that it's possible because of what we were able to do, because of the amount of the commitment and the passion and the love that was sort of came together from, again, more than 110 countries around the world to pull this, to be able to organize the Global assembly in 2021. I'm even more convinced that it's possible.

That's really what's most exciting about this for me, because, you know, if you, if you say to the ordinary person, what we need is better global governance, and they have in their minds, the UN or politicians in general, that seems like a non starter. And it's a non starter because for most people, existing structures of governance are not institutions to trust. I think the UN gets a bad rap. But whatever, whatever the reason for that cynicism or skepticism is, it's there. But I think if we can begin to surface this alternative as you described it, these alternative institutions of global governance, which is not about like making some big muckety muck, have power to say X, Y and Z, but better ways to find out what the citizens of the world think, then people would be more encouraged by the idea of beginning to make judgments or decisions at a global level. There would be an integrity. There could be an integrity to the process, and the could is a big word here, but an integrity to the process that led people to believe actually there is a. They're there and we need to pay attention to it in a way that right now people look at the UN and they're like, you know, that's just a bunch of posturing and corruption by powerful forces to try to bend nations to do what nations ought to not do or do for different reasons. And so what you've done, you're a hero here, John. What you've done is demonstrate first iteration of what if we are a species in 100 years will, I predict, be the norm, like the normal way in which we try to address global questions in a world where there continues to be nation states, there continues to be elections, perhaps, but where the institution of representation at the global level can't rely on what we see now as these broken institutions. And so it's inspirational. It's a model for the world. It's also a model for countries. But I'm really grateful you did it. I'm grateful we met and we could have these conversations because I've learned so much as I've watched you take this and turn this from, you know, ideas over relatively bad coffee into something that really matters.

Well, thank you, Larry. Thank you very much for having me. You know, I think first of all, I'm reluctant to accept the title of hero because of course, something like this is not possible without a tremendous number of people around the world, as I mentioned, coming together to pull this off.

Off.

But I think what, what I hear you saying at the core of that is that there is really a crisis in our collective imagination about governance. And this trust in institutions is a part of that. And I think the challenge is that in the United States, for example, we. We talk about, you know, Americans like to describe their country as a democracy, and that's just a farce. I mean, political scientists have shown that actually our legislature functions more like an oligarchy, for instance. And the challenge is that we're describing, in a way, this American exceptionalism. The US Government's convening this global summit for democracy, for example, and by doing so, by calling the United States a democracy, we're not doing justice to the potential of what democracy can be. And I think we're setting the bar so low at the moment for what governance is. And I think that's really the challenge for, for democratic reformers, for activists, for people all around the world, is to kind of challenge these conceptions of what democracy is and what it can be and to kind of imagine these new futures and of course, to work for them relentlessly.

Yeah, I mean, you and I both admired Van Raybrook's work and his great book Against Elections. But in that book, of course, he describes the history of democracy as contingently tied to elections. That there's important stages in the history of democracy where democracy looks more like the sortition process that you tried to implement at the international, at the global level. And that it's accidental, that we've come to collapse the idea into a single model. And it's terrifying because, you know, I think what we see in democracies around the world is a system set up for the purpose of benefiting all the people and then a system corrupted by the forces that aren't eager to see democracy. Governments represent all the people. And I don't know if we have a way out of that. I don't, I don't think, I don't know if we architecture, we can architect the system to avoid that, especially for these big governments. So amplifying the imagination of those who are describing a different democratic process is critical so that people can begin to think, wow, we can have a democracy without having these absurd elections or not relying solely on these elected representatives to speak for us. And so that's what I think our comments. Common project is to try to build

and yes, you're my hero.

You're not the only hero. There are plenty of people out there, but I'm so grateful you're one of them. And we've had a long relationship as friends and we will continue, assuming we live long and maybe we'll prosper. We'll see. John, thanks very much.

Thank you for having me, Larry.

This has been the 26th and penultimate episode of season five of the podcast Another Way podcasts produced by Equal Citizens but literally made by Josh Elstrow of Elstro Productions. You can find out more about Equal Citizens at equalcitizens Us and you can give us your thoughts thoughts on that site. We, or at least I love feedback, especially ideas. And we all love when you spread the podcast to others. And of course, we're also grateful for your support. Anything you can give will help us keep the podcast and Equal Citizens and its work going.

Thanks again.

Stay tuned for the Final Episode. Thanks again. And stay tuned to the Final episode, which will try to draw together the lessons that these 26th episodes so far have taught me and may be suggested to you.

Thanks very much.

Sam.