By Hanne Bastiaensen and max stearns, Democratic Society
Who we are
Hanne Bastiaensen is trained as a sociologist and has worked in the field of democratic innovation for over a decade, mainly in designing and implementing projects and processes. More recently she is particularly involved in the process of visioning and how it translates into practice.
max stearns is a researcher, strategist, and senior design lead with Democratic Society. He leverages a background in community organising, civic design, and design research and strategy to explore, create, and maintain opportunities for thriving, collective futures.
Democratic Society is a non-profit which leads experiments to strengthen and reimagine democracy. These include the coordination of numerous deliberative and participatory processes and events at the local, regional, European and international levels, for example, citizens’ conventions, tables of discussion, citizens’ assemblies, people’s panels, follow-up committees, governance reviews, policy developments. Our work, inspired by our theory of change, over the last ten years has shown us that, while each has served as useful and important democratic contributions to our partners’ ambitions, without consideration for how these processes and events fit into broader, longer-term visions of democracy, they tend to be just one-off deliberations.
But isolated deliberations cannot sustain resilient democracies. While they enable a momentary reinvention, improvement, or extension, they do not, inherently, enable the creation of continuous, strategic, and future capacities for strengthening and reimagining democracy.
In order to address this challenge, we are, therefore, developing a new approach to our work; one aimed at building and maintaining more and better ‘Democratic Infrastructures’.
What is ‘Democratic Infrastructure’?
We define Democratic Infrastructure as: persistent, generally available sets of elements that enable the continuous development, reinforcement and reimagination of democracy in a defined context.
More specifically, Democratic Infrastructure exists when there is a mix of elements, including but not limited to:
(2) capabilities,
(3) networks, and
(4) governance systems.
And, these elements operate in a given context with:
(B) consideration of direct and emergent impacts over time, and
(C) the capacity to enable democratic self-improvement.
This is, therefore, infrastructure that enables efforts, now and in the future, to strengthen and reimagine democracy. Through such infrastructure, we want to enable inclusive democratic processes that have knock-on effects over a longer period of time, enabling the vision and capabilities for democracies to thrive.
Vooruit Open Movement
Vooruit is the social democratic political party of Belgium. Under the leadership of a new president, the party wanted to make a transition from a classic political party to a more open movement. The President asked Democratic Society to work with Vooruit to help realise this internal democratisation process and to involve a wider circle of society in their movement.
The initial question Vooruit brought to us was how to design a path for participation to provide wider input for the next election programme. In line with our thinking on Democratic Infrastructure, we reframed this question through intensive co-design sessions to become one of how to involve people in a sustainable way and over a longer period. We created a vision for democracy together.
The most important element was the focus on challenges. We designed a system whereby a broad group of citizens can select the most important challenges and collect input on solutions. Through deliberative panels, members, non-members and policymakers from the party, can decide together what impacts are possible. The party leadership has to be humble in this approach, creating networks with experts, ‘experts by experience’ and citizens who are facing a challenge. This focus on challenges can directly generate input for the election programme, but also indirectly has the potential to intensively involve citizens over the longer term.
We do not see Democratic Infrastructure as a final output or something to achieve, but rather as a ‘medium’ that allows movement and relations within democracy to happen and to grow. We use the verb ‘infrastructuring’ to highlight the need for democratic participation to move beyond one-off deliberations and towards more open-ended and long-term processes where diverse actors have the capacity, the tools, and the opportunity to experiment together.
This more organic approach to infrastructure allows for unplanned possibilities to emerge and evolve through a continuous process. Democratic Infrastructures allow different actors to collaborate on a longer-term basis, which is essential to foster trust between these actors. This, in turn, creates a conducive environment for continuous experimentation. Importantly, Democratic Infrastructures allow the interplay between bottom–up and top–down, as well as different scales of democratic innovation. As such, unlike technological and economic understandings of infrastructure, which primarily focus on standardisation and reproduction, our definition of Democratic Infrastructure seeks diversity and variation; it is generative at its core, enabling resilient democracies.
Climate Participatory Budgeting in Vienna
This project began as part of the Healthy Clean Cities programme from EIT-Climate KIC. The aim of the project in Vienna was to look at the main barriers to decarbonization. From the start, the participatory budgeting (PB) process was designed as more than a one-off participatory process. Its explicit goal was to be a key enabler of the long-term goals of democratic innovation and just climate action. Apart from the value of the PB process itself, the goal was to contribute to the creation of democratic infrastructure for just climate action.
In this example, governance innovation, capacity building and cultural change are elements that continually reinforce each other in order to build democratic infrastructure. Governance innovation was seen as a precondition, not only for the success of this PB process, but also to address complex challenges in the future. The first experiment was a far-reaching collaboration between the different local government departments on the climate PB process. By means of strong co-design, the different departments became co-owners of the process, both in terms of content and design. This involvement allowed for a strong focus on capacity-building around democratic design, not only in the department working on engagement but across the city government. This process of democratic innovation has now become deeply rooted within the various departments of the city (and outside through a wider network). It is therefore the start of a cultural shift that looks at challenges through a different, democratic lens. When trust and expertise is present and broadly supported in the city, more experiments can be conducted from which new learning can emerge, strengthening the capacity and culture. By focusing on capacity building and governance innovation, we were able to at least start building the democratic infrastructure in Vienna.
We have distilled the following elements and essential characteristics from a review of our previous projects.
Elements of Democratic Infrastructure
1. Vision(s) for Democracy
Common, complementary, and/or competing visions exist of what democracy can or should look like in the future in that particular context. Whether these are held by a government entity, across a network, or by the general public, they are visions of what Democratic Infrastructure ought to enable or build toward.
2. Capabilities
Certain capabilities are intentionally developed by key actors in the defined context. There are many useful capabilities, but three that are especially important to serve the adaptive and purposeful intent of Democratic Infrastructure:
| Learning how to learn | Rather than focus on learning one skill or gaining one piece of knowledge, build the capability to continuously learn and adapt skills and knowledge. |
| Using/fighting power | Democracy needs power, but healthy democracies also need to build the capability to understand, use, share, and challenge that power. |
| Democratic design | Build the capability to intentionally create, organise, and maintain enabling conditions for the emergence of Democratic Infrastructure. |
3. Networks
Intentional networks, based on long-term relationships, are formed across – and even beyond – the defined context. They build trust between various actors – crucial for long-term democratic collaboration and experimentation. If these networks are stable over a longer period of time, and are generally available (in the sense that they are not project or topic exclusive) and are composed in ways that enable the development of democracy, they play an important role as part of Democratic infrastructure.
4. Governance Systems
New ways of working, structures for resolving challenges, and systems for meeting needs, are established by the governance of the defined context. These governance systems enable the activation, maintenance, and adaptation of these new democratic practices.
Essential Characteristics of Democratic Infrastructure
A | Flexibility
Flexibility is a fundamental feature of Democratic Infrastructure. Flexibility enables the elements to be applied in different ways, as part of different configurations over time, and to different ends, as the democracy in the defined context transforms over time.
B | Consideration of direct and emergent impacts over time
Democratic Infrastructure cannot exist without consideration of direct and emergent impacts over time. This consideration must extend, at least, beyond any single deliberation, and can go as far out in time as imaginable. Any deliberation that is planned, is planned with consideration of the futures it will, or might, lead to.
C | Capacity to enable democratic self-improvement
A mix of these elements only constitute Democratic Infrastructure if, cumulatively, they have the capacity to enable ongoing democratic self-improvement. What ‘democratic improvement’ specifically means in a particular context – and the efficacy with which it can be achieved – will reflect the level of intention and consideration given to determining what it means to strengthen and reimagine democracy.
A Networked Approach with LIFE/PACT
The LIFE/PACT project focuses on Nature Based Solutions (NBS) in Leuven, Madrid and Krakow.
Together with several local and other partners, Democratic Society is working on the implementation of NBS, both in neighbourhoods and in anchor institutions. Replication is an important element of the process, involving replication cycles both within and across cities. Strategies that are tested within a certain context can be tested and refined within other contexts. Democratic Society is responsible for creating (and implementing together with partners) the strategies for citizen engagement in neighbourhoods, and stakeholder engagement in the anchor institutions.
As part of this process, we designed a Participation Hub which brings together different actors around citizen engagement and stakeholder engagement strategies. The core group includes partners who oversee the replication process, those who implement it, the owners of the anchor institutions, city officials, local institutions and academics. In addition, there is a looser involvement of grassroots groups, journalists, artists and activists.
This network or hub builds relationships with the explicit purpose of having conversations around participatory practices, triggering actions, exchanging knowledge with others, and sharing resources. Within this hub, the experiments with NBS are monitored and further knowledge accumulated within the network. The intention is that this hub can continue to exist as a knowledge and learning network in different cities beyond the initial LIFE project on Nature based solutions. We therefore aim to contribute to the creation of the elements of democratic infrastructure that can help respond to democratic challenges over time.
Towards more and better Democratic Infrastructure
By putting forward our idea of better Democratic Infrastructure, our main objective is to facilitate more resilient democracies over the longer-term. While one-off deliberations still have a place to demonstrate the value and impact of participation we – at Democratic Society – will focus on efforts to build infrastructures for longer-term democracy; democracy that is more equitable, inclusive, impactful and fit for the long run. This means enabling governments, organisations, networks and other contexts in which we work to be able to address major challenges in democratic ways, now and in the future.
We will design and implement new democratic methods and governance and connect citizens and democratic spaces at different scales to create networked Democratic Infrastructure.
