Launched on 5 December, the ScaleDem project will promote the adoption and scaling of democratic innovations as a way towards greater inclusive and participatory governance. Leading experts, researchers and practitioners will together develop tools such as roadmaps and a Compass for Scaling Democratic Innovations, to support the uptake of battle-tested solutions by policy makers and practitioners.
Building a Scaling Infrastructure
Over the past decade, researchers, practitioners, civil society organisations, and public authorities have been engaged in over 300 transnational projects to design, test, and refine new ways of making collective decisions with citizens. These efforts, supported by groundbreaking initiatives like Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe, have mainstreamed citizen science, public engagement, and participatory pilots. Yet, too few are being exploited to their full potential.
ScaleDem is the missing link: it does not aim to replicate those solutions, let alone to start from scratch, but to unlock the full potential of R&I-born democratic innovations, moving beyond the “laboratory” of R&I projects to help them create impact in the real world.
The project’s scaling infrastructure is built on three core pillars
- Knowledge Consolidation: formulating a Theory of Scaling based on insights from past projects and research, to systematically explore and support the scalability of R&I-based democratic innovations. This pillar not only builds a solid foundation for ScaleDem scaling infrastructure, but it also paves the way for future research and policy initiatives on innovative democratic governance.
- Knowledge Translation: bridging theory, practice and policy actions through a Translation Hub, involving a large community of end users to empirically test the replicability of a limited set of solutions from earlier R&I projects. This pillar creates safe spaces for critical reflection on research results and for “reversing the gaze” in research on democratic innovations, by integrating the knowledge from the ‘Global South’ in the definition of research and translation needs
- Knowledge Uptake: extending impact through on-the ground twinning and pilot programmes, strategic partnerships to boost capacity-building and dissemination actions, to ensure solutions are scalable and sustainable across diverse contexts. This pillar creates an iterative feedback loop where lessons learned from implementation are fed back into the Theory of Scaling and the Translation Hub.
At the project’s launch, project coordinator Camille Dobler from Missions Publiques stated:
“While it might feel like the start of a 42-months journey, ScaleDem is more than a time bound project: it is the exploitation channel of the work accomplished by many of our peers. European Research programmes have been frontrunners in supporting the development of new innovative solutions to renew democracy, with hundreds of solutions already available. Now imagine if you add also to this rich catalogue all the tools developed outside the EU. We have gold at our disposal: it is the responsibility of ScaleDem to test whether these solutions work in practice across different contexts, and to support their uptake outside the ‘laboratory’ of R&I projects if they do!”