Striving for sustainable global democracy through a group decision-making process: a critical review of an online course to model transformative praxis

The Journal is an open access journal. All articles are made freely available to readers.Our open access policy is in in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition - it means that articles have free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.Sustainability is not simply about changing practices but more centrally about agreeing to change practices together’ (Flanagan et al. 2011). To achieve such ends, groups need to improve processes for making complex decisions together. The challenge faced recently in Copenhagen (including a large number of diverse participants in policy discussions) indicates the need for new ways to mprove discursive democracy. Poverty and climate change are ‘wicked’ problems (Rittel and Webber 1984) that comprise many diverse interrelated variables and that have a strong value and emotional dimension. The shortcomings of many approaches to these problems is that they are expert driven, do not involve the public in decision making, and have a narrow focus on technical issues. They do not consider issues in terms of their interrelated complexity with human cultural issues and values. This paper addresses the transboundary conundrum of how to address complex social and environmental challenges while engaging with people's diverse values and emotion