How about consensus?
1) An opinion or position reached by a group as a whole
2) general agreement or accord
A consensus refers to a collective or group opinion, which seems to be what you're looking for - that the decision in question is often held by individuals, or else that people generally agree to the opinion once articulated.
It hopefully doesn't have the same baggage as "democratic" - I'm actually not sure what baggage you're running across with the word, but I'm sort of guessing the problem is something like democracy as "electing a single authority to have the power or make the decision", not democracy as "propose possibilities then everybody directly vote on the alternative solutions".
Uses might include "government by consensus", or "reached an agreement through consensus", or "used a consensus system to make the decision fair".
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Or else perhaps concurrence
- Agreement in opinion.
- Cooperation, as of agents, circumstances, or events.
- Simultaneous occurrence; coincidence.
"They reached an agreement by concurrence" or "their system of concurrence means their decisions are mutually acceptable" or something like that. It's a bit less easily used than consensus, in my opinion, takes a bit more thinking to fit into sentences, but it may work for what you need it to be.
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You might also like accord, though it's a bit clunkier
- agreement; conformity; accordance (esp in the phrase in accord with)
- consent or concurrence of opinion
- with one accord unanimously
- a settlement of differences, as between nations; compromise
- to be or cause to be in harmony or agreement
This would be used like "they reached an accord" to make a decision, or "they were in accord with each other" about their system.
Best Answer
In fact, the English expression for a burdensome gift is literally white elephant:
So-called white elephants, or albino elephants, are found in many parts of South and Southeast Asia. In Buddhist countries they may be venerated as Queen Maya, mother of the Buddha, was said to have been visited in a dream by a white elephant holding a white lotus flower, and Siddharth Gautama entered his mother's womb in the form a white elephant. The white elephant is also associated with traits like mental strength and purity.
It became a royal symbol in Siam (Thailand); the king continues to keep white elephants. The story emerged that if a courtier displeased him, the king would make him a gift of a white elephant. The courtier could hardly decline a royal gift, and could hardly afford not to maintain a sacred animal, and could not put it to productive use, and so would be ruined by the cost of upkeep.
The earliest example of its use is from a 1721 essay in London Journal:
A 2011 paper by Ross Bullen entitled “This Alarming Generosity”: White Elephants and the Logic of the Gift, in American Literature, covers the popularization of the term in the mid-19th century, presents an alternative account, that the story is a piece of orientalism and the white elephant rose as a literary trope.