The world needs a way for people to participate directly in decisions that concern humanity as a whole.
We already have international institutions for cooperation between states. The United Nations is the central example. But there is still no democratic institution in which the world’s citizens can collectively decide on issues that have global consequences.
A Global Citizen Council (GCC) could help fill that gap.
The proposal is not to replace the United Nations, national governments or local democracy. It is to add a democratic layer where decisions genuinely need to be made at the global level.
Climate change is the most obvious starting point. But the same principle could eventually apply to other global problems.
The idea is ambitious. It is also deliberately simple:
Global problems require global decisions, and global decisions should ultimately involve global citizens.
From idea to institution
A GCC cannot simply declare itself into existence.
For such an institution to have democratic legitimacy, its authority must come from the people who are expected to participate in it.
We therefore propose a Global Referendum as a possible founding step.
The referendum could eventually be conducted through a secure digital system based on Peer Democracy. But before such a referendum could be credible, the technology, procedures and political legitimacy would need to be independently tested.
A possible question could be:
“Do you support the establishment of a transparent and democratic Global Citizen Council (GCC) with the authority to make decisions on matters that require global action?”
The precise wording would need to be developed through an open international process.
The same applies to the required threshold. A proposal of this magnitude should have a clearly defined legitimacy requirement, potentially including both a substantial level of participation and a qualified majority.
The important point is not to assume the result.
The referendum itself should be the decision.
Why Peer Democracy?
A global referendum involving billions of people cannot simply reproduce the political structures of a national election.
The number of participants is too large. The number of subjects is too great. No individual can reasonably be expected to study every global issue in depth.
Peer Democracy approaches this problem by dividing the democratic work.
Citizens can choose where they want to contribute. They can propose ideas, investigate issues, participate in discussions, evaluate arguments, and vote.
Artificial intelligence can help with translation, summarisation, information retrieval, argument organisation and other practical tasks.
But AI does not become the decision-maker.
AI assists. People decide.
This division of democratic labour is what could make large-scale participation manageable.
What would the GCC decide?
The GCC should not become another government deciding everything for everyone.
Its jurisdiction should be limited to matters that genuinely require global coordination.
The principle of subsidiarity is therefore fundamental:
Decisions should be made at the lowest level capable of dealing with them effectively.
Local matters belong locally. National matters belong nationally. Global matters belong at the global level.
The Sustainable Development Goals provide one possible starting framework because they already identify many of the challenges that require international cooperation.
Over time, the citizens of the world could determine which issues should fall within the GCC’s jurisdiction.
The electorate
The proposed democratic principle is straightforward:
- universal adult suffrage;
- one person, one vote;
- equal voting value;
- participation regardless of nationality;
- private voting;
- transparent rules and procedures;
- protection of fundamental rights.
The precise legal definition of the electorate would have to be resolved before a referendum.
So would the relationship between the GCC, existing states and international law.
These are not minor technical details. They are among the central political questions that the project must solve.
A manageable democratic workload
The purpose of Peer Democracy is not to make every citizen vote on everything.
That would be exhausting and would probably produce superficial participation.
Instead, each citizen could have two principal areas of participation each year.
One would concern the global budget.
The other would be a self-selected area of policy from the global agenda.
A citizen interested in climate could spend time on climate policy. Another might concentrate on education, biodiversity, poverty, health, or another global issue.
This does not give anyone additional voting power.
It simply allows people to decide where they want to spend their democratic attention.
The principle is:
Divide the work, not the political rights.
The global budget
A global democratic institution would need a transparent budget process.
Citizens could use an online budget simulator to explore the consequences of different priorities and construct balanced proposals.
Rather than selecting a single extreme proposal, the final result could be determined through a median-budget mechanism.
The purpose would be to produce a budget reflecting the middle of the collectively proposed distribution rather than the most extreme position.
The entire budget would remain publicly accessible and independently auditable.
The precise mechanism would need to be tested before being used at global scale.
From proposals to decisions
Peer Democracy should also provide a route from an idea to a decision.
A citizen could introduce a proposal.
The proposal would then need to attract sufficient support to proceed. If it passed an initial threshold, it could enter a period of deliberation.
People with relevant knowledge or experience could contribute expert analysis. Other citizens could examine the arguments, ask questions and rank them.
Artificial intelligence could help organise and translate the material, but the final political judgement would remain human.
The process would therefore contain several stages:
idea → support → deliberation → prioritisation → vote → implementation → evaluation
This is important because democracy should not end when a ballot is cast.
A decision should be followed by implementation and evaluation.
Transparency and privacy
A global democratic system would need exceptionally high standards of transparency.
- The software should be open source.
- Budgets should be publicly auditable.
- Rules should be published.
- Administrative decisions should be documented.
- Conflicts of interest should be declared.
- At the same time, individual votes must remain private.
- The last principles are not contradictory.
The system should be transparent; the individual voter should have privacy.
One possible model would allow political discussion to be pseudonymous during deliberation, while giving participants the option to reveal their identity afterwards.
Blockchain or similar technologies might contribute to the integrity of public records, but no particular technology should be treated as a solution in itself.
The system should use whatever combination of cryptographic, organisational and institutional safeguards can demonstrate that votes are accurately recorded and protected.
Security comes before scale
A global vote cannot be based simply on the assumption that smartphones make democracy easy.
Digital participation creates serious questions about identity, authentication, coercion, hacking, misinformation, exclusion and unequal access.
These problems must be solved before a global referendum can be considered legitimate.
Independent security experts, election specialists, civil-society organisations and researchers should therefore be involved from the beginning.
The system should be tested in progressively larger pilots.
A global referendum should be the result of successful experimentation—not the experiment itself.
Inclusion is a prerequisite
Digital democracy cannot be genuinely global while billions of people remain offline.
The latest ITU estimates put the number of people using the Internet at around six billion in 2025, while 2.2 billion people remained offline. The digital divide also involves affordability, quality of connection and digital skills.
This means that a Global Citizen Council cannot simply be designed for people who already have good smartphones and reliable broadband.
Participation must include appropriate alternatives and support:
- multilingual interfaces;
- accessible design;
- education and training;
- local discussion centres;
- assisted digital participation;
- suitable offline-to-online procedures;
- measures to reach communities with limited connectivity.
The goal is not merely to build a digital democracy.
It is to make digital technology serve a global democracy.
The United Nations’ Global Digital Compact already recognises the importance of closing digital divides, meaningful participation, human rights and human oversight of technology.
That provides an important starting point for further work.
Local participation, global decisions
A global democracy does not have to mean a world of people sitting alone with their phones.
Quite the opposite.
The digital platform should be connected to physical communities.
Local groups could organise meetings, workshops and debates around global proposals. Participants could then bring the results of those discussions back into the digital process.
A workshop could, for example, discuss a proposed climate measure and help participants understand its consequences before they vote.
This creates a connection between the global and the local:
global questions, local conversations, shared decisions.
Legitimacy cannot be downloaded
One of the greatest dangers is to confuse technical capacity with democratic legitimacy.
A million people downloading an application would not create a global democracy.
Neither would a billion.
An application is only infrastructure.
Legitimacy comes from people accepting the rules, trusting the process and recognising the resulting decisions as their own.
That is why the project should develop gradually.
First come experiments.
Then pilots.
Then broader participation.
Then institutional partnerships.
And, if the conditions eventually become sufficient, a global referendum.
The sovereignty problem
The greatest political obstacle is not technology.
It is sovereignty.
Modern international politics is based on sovereign states. Governments are accountable primarily to their own citizens, and states are reluctant to transfer political authority to institutions beyond their control.
A Global Citizen Council would therefore challenge an important assumption of the present international order: that legitimate political authority ultimately stops at national borders.
This cannot simply be wished away.
The GCC would need to establish a clear relationship with existing states and international institutions.
- Its authority should initially be narrow and clearly defined.
- Its purpose would not be to govern everything.
- It would be to govern those matters where no individual country can adequately solve the problem alone.
The transition therefore need not be a sudden abolition of national sovereignty.
It could be a gradual extension of democratic authority to problems that have already become global.
The United Nations and the GCC
The GCC is conceived as complementary to the United Nations rather than as its replacement.
- The UN represents states.
- The GCC would represent citizens.
The two institutions would therefore provide different forms of legitimacy.
The UN already has extensive experience in international cooperation, diplomacy, implementation and dispute resolution.
A future GCC could provide something that the present system lacks: a direct democratic connection to the world’s population.
How these institutions should cooperate would need to be negotiated and developed over time.
There is no reason to pretend that the institutional design is already settled.
It is one of the things the project must discover.
A possible route to establishment
The route to a GCC is therefore better understood as a process than as a fixed timetable.
Phase 1 — Research and design
Develop the Peer Democracy model.
Test different voting, deliberation and budgeting mechanisms.
Study digital identity, privacy, cybersecurity and accessibility.
Invite researchers, democratic institutions, civil society and technology experts to challenge the model.
Phase 2 — Local and national experiments
Build working prototypes.
Use them in real democratic settings.
Measure participation, understanding, security and decision quality.
Learn from failures as well as successes.
Phase 3 — International pilots
Connect participants from different countries.
Run deliberative experiments on genuinely global questions.
Test multilingual participation.
Test whether people from very different political and cultural backgrounds can use the same democratic process.
Phase 4 — Build a global constituency
The project can then grow through civil society, educational institutions, artists, researchers, democratic movements and eventually political institutions.
This is where a sandwich strategy may become relevant.
Research by the Accountability Research Center describes sandwich strategies as processes in which reform-minded actors within institutions and organised citizens outside them reinforce one another. Its comparative research found that such approaches can contribute to institutional change, but also that they depend on concrete institutional openings and can encounter significant obstacles.
That is a useful lesson for this project.
Change is unlikely to come entirely from above.
Nor is it necessarily enough to wait for a grassroots movement to become enormous.
The two sides may need each other.
Phase 5 — The global referendum
Only when the technical, legal and democratic conditions are sufficiently mature should a global referendum be considered.
The referendum would then not be a publicity event.
It would be the culmination of years of preparation, testing and public discussion.
And its result would be respected.
A YES would provide a mandate to negotiate and establish the GCC.
A NO would mean that the proposal had not yet achieved sufficient support.
Either way, the process itself would be democratic.
No fixed date
It is tempting to put a date on the future.
2030 is close enough to feel concrete and far enough away to seem possible.
But there is little value in claiming that three billion people will have downloaded an application by then, or that a referendum will automatically follow.
We do not know that.
What we can say is that the conditions are changing rapidly.
Digital connectivity is expanding. Artificial intelligence is transforming how information can be processed. Global problems are becoming harder to separate from one another. And international institutions themselves are exploring new forms of global digital cooperation.
The task is therefore to become ready.
If the opportunity comes in 2030, we should be ready.
If it comes later, we should continue building.
If it comes earlier because circumstances change, we should be ready then too.
The first global vote
The ultimate objective is simple.
One day, people everywhere should be able to open a trusted democratic system and participate in a decision that concerns the whole planet.
Not because a government has granted them permission.
Not because a political party has selected the question.
But because humanity has developed an institution through which people can collectively decide matters that genuinely belong to everyone.
That institution could begin with climate.
It could begin with a single referendum.
It could begin locally, nationally or internationally.
We do not know exactly where the first successful step will come from.
But we know what direction to explore.
From national democracy to global democracy.
From representatives alone to direct citizen participation.
From political power concentrated in institutions to political work distributed among citizens.
The road is long.
The destination is uncertain.
But the direction is increasingly clear.
Global problems will require global decisions.
The sooner we develop democratic ways of making those decisions, the better.