In February 2019 the parliament of the German-speaking Community of Belgium passed a resolution new in the democratic history of Europe. East Belgium, seventy-seven thousand people, nine municipalities: from that day forward a citizens’ council would sit permanently, anchored in law. Twenty-four people chosen by lot, eighteen months each. They set the topics citizens’ assemblies would tackle. The parliament committed to respond to every recommendation within a year, publicly, with justification.
The designer was David Van Reybrouck. His book Against Elections argued that Athens, Florence, Venice worked not with elections but with the drawing of lots. Aristotle himself criticised the vote as an oligarchic procedure: it privileges the rich, the well-known, the articulate. The lot favours no one. This insight was buried for centuries.
By 2024 East Belgium had run twelve citizens’ assemblies on topics from elderly care to teacher shortages to digital education. The recommendations were concrete and most were implemented. Three of four binding measures for family carers passed. One was rejected, and the rejection was debated in open plenary.
Then Paris went further. In July 2024 the city council transposed a citizens’ law directly into binding law for the first time in any large European city. The law on homelessness was drafted by a hundred Parisians chosen by lot, working for six months with social workers, those affected, welfare associations and city councillors. Fifteen concrete measures: expanded emergency sleeping places, guaranteed round-the-clock sanitary access, mobile social work that goes out to people instead of waiting for them to arrive, a right to basic medical care. The council adopted it without substantial changes.
Ireland showed the same pattern on a constitutional scale. In 2016 a Citizens’ Assembly of ninety-nine people drawn by lot met over five weekends to deliberate on abortion. They heard physicians, lawyers, theologians, women with differing life experience. The assembly recommended liberalisation. The government put it to referendum. In 2018, 66.4 percent voted to strike the constitutional clause. A change previously impossible had become reality within two years.
What citizens’ councils accomplish is a different level of discussion. A parliament debates along party lines. A citizens’ council has no lines. Whoever sits there is not bound to a position by the opinion of a party. They can listen, learn, change their mind. This openness is what we do anyway on the near levels, at the family table, in the neighbourhood meeting. The assembly is small enough to allow genuine encounter.
And the diversity becomes visible. Whoever sits in a parliament is on average male, academically educated, in middle age. Whoever sits in an assembly chosen by lot looks like the society. Carers, tradespeople, people with migration backgrounds, the young, the old. The assembly is, in a direct sense, more representative than any elected body.
But citizens’ councils have a blind spot. They see only the living. They hear only those who can sit at the table today. Those not yet born appear in no citizens’ council.
Wales answered this. In 2015 it passed the Well-being of Future Generations Act, and in 2016 Sophie Howe became the first Future Generations Commissioner. Her task: speak in the name of people who are not yet born, with a legal mandate to ensure that forty-four public bodies align their decisions with seven well-being goals. She could sue. She could issue binding recommendations. When the M4 motorway expansion threatened to breach those goals, she showed it, and the first minister cancelled the project. Instead a transport bundle of rail, bus and gentle mobility was developed.
Finland took a different route. Since 1993 its parliament has had a Committee for the Future, seventeen cross-party members who must give an opinion on the long-term effect of every legislative proposal. At the 2005 pension reform, a committee opinion secured that the plan was coupled to rising life expectancy. At the 2022 climate legislation, an opinion secured binding climate neutrality by 2035, more ambitious than the government had aimed for. The Hungarian variant, created in 2007 with constitutional anchoring, taught a harder lesson: when the political will was withdrawn under Orbán, the function shrank. Institutions survive only when they are anchored in the society itself.
Roman Krznaric put a frame around all this with The Good Ancestor: democracies in their present form are structurally oriented toward the short term. Electoral periods of four or five years bind politicians to a time horizon far too short for climate, biodiversity, demographic development. Krznaric proposes a mix of citizens’ assemblies with future mandates, parliamentary committees for the future, constitutional clauses protecting future generations, and generational funds. The Iroquois Confederacy had this centuries ago: every decision made with a view to seven generations.
Then the serial moves from deliberation to allocation.
Porto Alegre, 1990. A community hall in a poor district. A hundred and fifty people sit over maps, a list of demands, a city budget. A woman points to an unpaved street. A man argues for a water pipe. A teacher campaigns for a school. They decide what will be built with money that politicians used to allocate.
This was the first participatory budget. By 2024 around eleven thousand five hundred municipalities worldwide were working with this model. The effect is measurable. Between 1989 and 2003 Porto Alegre’s water connections rose from 75 to 99 percent. Sewer connections from 46 to 85 percent. Infant mortality halved. Sónia Gonçalves’ 2014 study in World Development, comparing over two hundred Brazilian municipalities, found that participatory budgets raised health and sanitation spending by two to three percentage points and lowered infant mortality measurably. When citizens decide about money, they spend it differently from elected politicians. They spend it on the basic needs of those who suffer the most deprivation.
Yves Sintomer distinguishes four models: the binding Porto Alegre model, the consultative model, the administrative modernisation model, and the neoliberal model where austerity is dressed up with pseudo-democratic legitimation. Only the binding kind shifts the distribution. The consultation kind changes mostly trust, which is not nothing, but is less.
The connection to the heliogenic thesis is direct. What a city invests determines how it will function for decades. A city that invests in schools built with clay walls has, in twenty years, a different school. A city that invests in decentralised energy has a different energy balance. When the diversity of the city, with the values people already carry on the near levels, is allowed to decide about money, the money flows toward local, fine-grained, diverse investments. These fine-grained investments are the precondition for a heliogenic city: one that sources materials locally, produces energy decentrally, lets food grow in the region.
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