Global with Local Consensus for:
Social rules
Humans are social animals but, like all other life, have also evolved to compete. During recorded history, social rules have been established to regulate human behaviour and to limit aggression. Societies change these rules with time.
International consensus
Within nations, governments direct how society is organised and changes its rules. There are different forms of national government and of devolution to sub-national levels. There is also a diversity of national groupings for economic benefit across continents. However, at global level the United Nations (UN) and other forums formalise idealised standards of international behaviour consensually, through agreement of the many nations.
Local consensus
At the level of local communities too, consensual agreement between many interests tends to be the basis for decision-making, within frameworks established by the levels above. Decisions made locally about managing the environment, monitoring health, and maintaining cultural traditions, summate from local levels to affect the entire global community. Although in some cases it may be the maintenance of diversity (e.g. in nature, language and cuisine) which enriches our lives globally, in others it may be the convergence of attitudes that matter. We all need to agree about climate change, infectious disease and corrupt or divisive politics.
Good Governance?
Opportunity from the internet
The development of the internet has challenged societies, both in terms of accelerated change and promotion of divisive disinformation, but also offers a major opportunity. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has shown how levels for consensual decision-making, at international and local levels, can work together at global scale with little expense. A group in IUCN has already developed several environmental networks in this way.
Multilingual, transactional, virtuous
Information (and decision support tools) provided from global science to local people should of course be fully multilingual and not only top-down in one or a few major languages. If local and indigenous knowledge (for instance on management concepts and results) were provided as an exchange in each language, tools for local use in the many languages could be fine-tuned in virtuous cycles. Mutual guidance, from levels where governance is consensual, would then inform the variety of government structures at intermediate levels.