W/holistic participatory democracy: An ideal societal governance design

Abstract Current societal systems ( including societal governance ) are legacy systems of the industrial age. They are derived from reductionist thinking, the worldview of the industrial age. With the advancing information age, they become increasingly problem riddled and need to be transformed, based on a new worldview (i.e., w/holistic or systems thinking ). The aim of this paper is to create an ideal w/holistic democracy design that dissolves current problems, serves citizens, and allows their direct participation in governance. The research method is a theory‐based design, whereby generic organizing principles of Biomatrix Systems Theory are applied to create the design. The theory distinguishes between organismic and functional systems, whereby an organism (e.g., nation ) emerges from the interaction of its functions (e.g., political, economic, cultural, and ecological ) organized by an ethos, as well as from the interaction with other organisms (i.e., citizens, organizations, and other nations ). Those distinctions give rise to a five‐faceted governance design (i.e., concerned with the conceptual and physical reality of the nation, single and multifunctional development, and relations with other systems ), which is executed by different governance structures (i.e., a Citizens Forum, National Development Forum, and Function Forums ), with the dual participation of citizens as equal members of the nation ( using a general vote ) and as expert citizens associated with a specific societal function ( using a functional vote ). Because the theory describes generic w/holistic organizing principles, it can be concluded that the implementation of the design ( called W/Holistic Participatory Democracy ) will dissolve problems derived from the current reductionist representative democracy model.