This keynote bridges two strands of democratic theory often treated in isolation: the commons as a practice and ethos of care, and the institutional design of participatory democracy. It begins by reframing commons not as merely local mechanisms for managing scarce resources, but as relational infrastructures grounded in ontological interdependence - what Arturo Escobar terms ‘the praxis of caring for the web of life’. In the face of ecological and moral breakdown, commons demonstrate a practical orientation of care toward planet, community, and shared problems. The talk then turns to political realism: contemporary democracies, entangled with corporate and financial power, are structurally misaligned with the caring logic of commons, leading to neglect, cooptation, or marginalisation of commoning practices. To address this institutional mismatch, the keynote proposes a design for associative democracy that complements electoral democracy: It does so by devolving specified domains of sovereignty to organised societal actors. The result is a deepened, pluralised democratic architecture that safeguards commoning while embedding care into public policy.