Scaling Democratic Innovations

Interest in democratic innovations has grown steadily in recent years with researchers, participation practitioners, and policymakers increasingly seeing them as a promising way to strengthen and revitalize democracy. However, even the most well-designed ideas on citizen participation in decision-making, effective deliberation, and the co-creation of equitable and knowledge-based policies will have little impact if they are not implemented and tested in practice. Moreover, if an innovation proves successful in a given context, questions remain: can it actually be scaled? And what conditions are necessary to facilitate scaling and turn promising ideas into change?

SCALEDEM is an EU-funded project that aims to develop practical answers to these questions. The project supports researchers, practitioners, and policymakers in identifying opportunities and addressing challenges for scaling innovations across four dimensions: scaling high (impacting laws and policy), scaling out (impacting greater more and new people), scaling deep (impacting cultures and identities) and scaling in (impacting processes' quality). Following a collaborative and transdisciplinary process in its Translation Hub, which acts as a bridge between theory and practice, SCALEDEM deploys two ambitious Scaling Grounds in the forms of Twinning and Pilot Programmes. By establishing iterative feedback, reflection, and capacity-building mechanisms, SCALEDEM facilitates practical experimentation with democratic innovations and will support stakeholders in learning and drawing lessons from such processes. Beyond this, the project contributes to the development of a community of practice which is interested in such insights.

The project aims to enhance the replicability and adaptability of solutions across diverse operational contexts, while also ensuring the practical applicability of theoretical frameworks. At the same time, SCALEDEM fosters and engages a global community of end users. The project capitalizes on strategic partnerships with relevant R&I projects, initiatives, and networks to address knowledge fragmentation, identify opportunities for synergistic capacity-building efforts for policymakers, practitioners, and researchers, and broaden the societal and political impact of EU-funded research within the EU and beyond.