Indigenous decision-making can sustain democracy - and humanity

Indigenous Australians have for tens of thousands of years practiced a far richer form of democracy than did the city-state of ancient Athens. Our First Nations inhabitants achieved this with a similar population to Athens, less than a million, but over an area of land 16,000 times larger.

Indigenous wisdom and practices of self-governance and environmental care provide a survivallesson for modern society. These lessons can also help us reduce the degradation of the air, water, soils, bio-diversity and improve the wellbeing of humans who may survive the emerging "Ghastly Future."

While universities teach engineering students how to design self-governing automobiles, self-governance is not taught at graduate schools of business, management, or government. Instead, our most gifted future leaders are educated to manage the top-down command-and-control hierarchies used by political dictators.

Authoritarian bureaucracies undermine democracies and are unable to reliable manage the complexity of environmental threats. As result the number of democratic nations in the world is decreasing, with those remaining being degraded. The inability of hierarchical management structures to manage complexity has resulted in regular public inquiries into the failures of banks, casinos, aged care and other institutions.

Indigenous practices follow the self-regulating, self-managing and self-governing practices of all forms of life. For this reason, it can be described as ecological governance. Adoption of this wisdom and practice would promote democracy with reliable wellbeing for businesses, civic, educational and other institutions.

While scholars have identified global environmental risks as "the most important mission for universities in the 21^st century", the un-integrated silos of academic knowledge make them impotent to identify and teach solutions. The solutions require integrating the knowledge of engineers and system scientists with the practices of Indigenous Australians.

Words are the tools of thinking, and the English language lacks words to describe the complex indigenous relationships to nature that governs the lives of indigenous people. Rather than being owners of their "Country", they are "of" a place as "ownees". Nor do Aboriginal languages have words for "value", "price", "cost", "markets" or "hierarchy". These words are embedded in modern minds to drive our actions. However, these words are not required to sustain indigenous life. In addition, they are irrelevant for understanding how other living things become self-regulating, self-managing and self-governing.

As a result modern society has become subject to market failures and the "group think" of hierarchies. Modern governance processes have put at risk the wellbeing of humanity: Lord Stern advised the UK government in his 2009 report that "Climate change is the greatest market failure the world has ever seen".

Indigenous thinking introduces difficulties for modern society as it involves new ways of understanding, feeling, hearing and participating in reality. The English language "speaks about" nature and environments as if these concepts are separate from people. However, Indigenous languages describe complex networks of relationships that are place-connected, physical, cultural and intuitive. Transformative learning is required to recognize humans as a part of multispecies ecosystems.

Bottom-up self-governance is fundamental to the way Indigenous Australians govern their communities and larger regions. One of us witnessed and reported to the Australian Parliament about how competing clans demonstrated a contested, distributed type of decision-making in order to manage mining royalties. Political scientist Elinor Ostrom described distributed contested decision making as "polycentric" governance in her 2009 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Ostrom identified how pre-modern societies self-governed their life-sustaining resources among competing interests to avoid "the tragedy of the commons" without markets or state hierarchies.

Ecological governance is a form of polycentric governance that is radically different from the command-and-control systems in modern societies and management education. It introduces the paradoxical contrary ~ complimentary "Yin ~ Yang" relationships that required to survive complexity. Ecological governance provides a process that can constructively manage the systemic conflict between shareholders seeking to maximize their profits at the expense of benefits for other stakeholders. This arises because both types of stakeholders share corporate resources that Ostrom refers to as "Common Pool Resources".

Ecological governance would create "A new model of corporate governance" wanted by fund-manager Larry Fink to benefit all stakeholders. Fink is the CEO of BlackRock, which manages 10% of global listed equities. This allowed Fink to persuade his CEO colleagues of the US Business Round Table to adopt as their corporate purpose, "benefit to all stakeholders".

The ability of large polycentric-governed corporations to deliver benefits while remaining competitive and resilient for over half a century has been demonstrated. Examples are the US-based Visa card organization, the John Lewis Partnership in the UK, and Mondragon's multi-stakeholder cooperatives in Spain. Besides delivering business excellence, firms with distributed decision-making spread democratic processes.

The conversion of existing shareholder corporations to polycentric governance could be encouraged in a manner that also introduces an ecological form of governance by introducing a self-funding tax incentive. In the US, tax incentives have resulted in over ten percent of non-government workers owning shares in their employer to a total value $1.4 trillion. The political arithmetic of sharing corporate dividends with all voting citizens in any country creates an irresistible incentive for political leaders.

The tax incentive would be for shareholders to introduce changes in corporate constitutions that would allocate each year a small percentage of equity to a new class of stakeholder shares. This creates a process to establish a universal wellbeing income, or "Social Dividend" for all citizens to reduce reliance on tax-funded welfare. It could also remove the need for, cost and complexity of compulsory superannuation contributions.

The need for existing tax incentives for employee ownership would become subsumed. This saving along with increased tax revenues from stakeholders would make the tax incentive self-funding. Additional saving would arise from stakeholders obtaining a voice and influence to increase the ability of firms to become self-regulating as found in natural systems and Indigenous societies.

By widely sharing corporate ownership with local control, a basis is created to develop bottom-up local circular economies to sustain humanity as existed in pre-modern times. The role and size of government is reduced as stakeholders become co-regulators and the private rather than the public sector distributes a wellbeing income.

Crucially, corporations who take on as their purpose to provide benefits for all their stakeholders become responsible for countering environmental degradations. Today most of the eight billion people of the planet have become stakeholders of corporations. So ecological corporations have the capacity to engage locally with their stakeholders in protecting local environments. In this way the traditions of indigenous Australian could be applied globally to reduce the severity of a "ghastly future".