Indigenous decision-making can sustain democracy - and humanity

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".