Public trust, political will, and the right leadership are all necessary to create and to lift up to the global level a living democracy for a sustainable world. Given the challenges before us, we are running out of time to bring about the necessary disruption in the stalled and stalemated political status quo by significantly expanding direct democratic participation through sortition as the first step toward creating and restoring mutual public trust. Trust must be built by exercising trust. We need trust in governments and between and among governments. Most important, we need trust between and among people who have faith in their fellow men and women to assume the responsibilities of self-rule. Trust can be created by working together in trust. With mutual trust, we can summon the political will to overcome our current inertia and make the changes needed to uplift democracy for a sustainable world. We can find and follow the right leadership. And we can follow the path from the Pnyx to secure at last the global realization of living democracy.

In addition to right representation, our new framework for democratic global governance must comprise global circles of participation chosen by global sortition. We must make something new work for the world by giving new life to human institutions at every level of governance. To accomplish this, we must employ random selection to create an interlinked network of global participation that will be a central part of a new system of democratic global governance. We must establish, globally, multiple levels of multidimensional and multiconnected circles of participation through random selection, reflecting the diversity of views in the entirety of the world, ascending and descending through interaction at different tiers of governance, linking, overlapping, and jointly acting in different sectors and on different subjects of governance, in an ongoing expression of human imagination and democratic will. Among these sortition circles must be circles for nature and circles for the future. We must make these global circles into rings of human action in which everyone throughout the world will have an equal opportunity to participate.

Necessary tools for the success of the new participatory framework for democratic global governance will be expertise, rules and rule enforcement, and interaction among the new circles of participation across and up and down the different levels of governance. We must be able to discern when expert advice is needed and when to heed it to produce better results. We must also be able to tell what is expert advice and what is not. In the process of democratic decision-making in the new network of democratic global governance, there must be a balance between the combination of right representation and collective wisdom on the one hand and technical and other forms of expertise on the other; for such a balance will produce the best results. What is more, just as we need a different kind of democracy, so too do we need a different kind of rules. A reorienting of global rules away from the limitations of the Westphalian system and in a planetary direction is required for the new network of democratic global governance. There must also be continuous interaction among all the participating parts and all the different levels of the new framework of democratic global governance.