Developing Tools for “Blended Democracy” in Regional Governance: A Design Experiment

In combination, global economic competition, Europeanization and the decentralization of national policies to municipalities are responsible for the increasing importance of regional governance. These developments occur in several European countries, including the Netherlands. As in many other EU countries regional governance in the Netherlands inter-municipal cooperation (IMC) serves as the main vehicle for regional governance. From a democratic perspective IMC has major problems: it is a system that is better suited for protecting municipal autonomy than for the representation of the interests of relevant regional issue publics. The need to develop new models for regional democracy is now widely recognized. In the Democratic Challenge initiative of the Dutch national government and the Dutch Association of Municipalities (VNG) “Regional Democracy” is one of the central themes. In the region of Twente a group of individuals and civic organizations – the Twente Ten – has taken up this challenge. In September 2017 this group will organize Twentement: an annual, regional democracy festival – inspired by a similar event on the Danish island of Bornholm. The festival will provide multiple regional issue publics with a platform to exchange views about a host of issues, including regional concerns. As part of the Living Smart Campus initiative of the University of Twente, the Department of Public Administration of the together with colleagues of technological departments at the UT wants to support Twentement by developing a model of blended democracy: as a mix of virtual and real time debates. In this paper we will conceptualize the idea of “blended democracy” and will describe and critically discuss possible tools that will be used to facilitate such an innovative model of blended regional democracy. In this paper we will report about the first stage of a design experiment. In this initial stage we will develop and implement the concept of a “blended democracy” and describe how we want to monitor and evaluate the use of this concept in the upcoming experiment. In the second stage we will conduct our research and use the results for further developing the idea. The results of this experiment will not only be relevant for Twentement, but may also be important for redesigning local and regional democracy, using modern-day technologies.