Democratic innovations are increasingly popular across the world as mechanisms for governments to explore new ways to engage the public. Numerous efforts are in place to collect and assess large numbers of individual cases (Participedia, LATINNO) and organize these often disparate experiences according to their institutional designs (Estub and Escobar 2019). Yet, these efforts have largely focused on the government-led design and institutionalization of participatory practices and its impact on representative democracy. With few exceptions (Zaremberg, 2012; Curato, 2019), little attention has been paid to the entanglements between government-led, internationally-led, and community-led forms of deliberative and participatory governance. In this paper, we argue that democratic innovations ought to be understood not in silos but within ecosystems of engagement.
We use grounded theory, drawing evidence from the Healthier Democracies project to develop an empirically-informed conceptual framework that better captures the coexistence, evolution, and adaptation of institutions and processes of participation. We suggest that an ecological lens can help us understand not only the impact of a specific State-led democratic system of engagement, but the relationships between multiple participatory practices; governance structures; as well as communities and actors living in distinct natural, political, and historical conditions. In other words, it would allow us to see participatory and deliberative democracy as an ecosystem of collective governance, rather than a series of decision-making processes within the government system.
We test the concept’s ability to reflect how digital innovations are inscribed in pre-existing frameworks for in-person engagement (Madrid), how institutionalized instances of participation function in parallel to community-driven, radical spaces of participation (Bologna), and how highly decentralized, small-scale participatory spaces allow for targeted local action (Berlin). These ecosystems comprise interrelated mechanisms such as law and policies, staffing, budgets, programs, increased cultures of participation, and different forms of citizens’ self-organization embedded in government systems. The concept sheds a different light on the multifaceted, complex, and interdependent nature of participatory and deliberative institutions and processes.
The concept of ecosystems can better account for instances of participation that do not match normative assumptions and challenging standards for institutional design, but that still allows for community empowerment and impactful decision-making.
