Co-creating Change Through Feminist Democratic Innovations Across Eight European Countries

This paper examines feminist democratic innovations as transformative practices that challenge the limitations of mainstream democratic innovation theory, which has often overlooked gendered and intersectional dimensions of power (Caravantes, & Lombardo, 2023). By drawing from the FIERCE project’s comparative work across eight European countries, we propose a redefinition of democratic innovation - not as a top-down modernization process, but as a radical transformation grounded in feminist, intersectional, and participatory practices. Our framework centers on co-creation as critical methodology for understanding how feminist actors innovate democracy from below (della Porta, 2020; Lombardo & Caravantes, 2024), creating spaces of resistance, solidarity, and collective agency in increasingly polarized political contexts (Torcal & Harteveld, 2025). Co-creation, as conceptualized here, merges governance innovation theory (Ansell & Torfing, 2021, della Porta & Felicetti, 2022; Fominaya, 2022) with feminist participatory action research (PAR) principles (Brinton Lykes & Hershberg, 2012; Chakma, 2016). Within the FIERCE co-creation labs, feminist movements engaged in experimental, collaborative processes to expand their repertoires of action, strengthen transnational networks, and develop creative responses to anti-gender backlash. These labs operated as democratic innovation sites that foreground emotional, epistemic, and infrastructural dimensions of feminist organizing, offering empirical insights into how subaltern counterpublics enact democracy in practice. Thus, the paper contributes to a reimagining of democratic innovation as a plural, situated, and feminist endeavor. Our analysis identifies five interrelated types of feminist democratic innovation: promoting women’s rights and participation, creating counterpublics, embedding intersectionality, producing feminist knowledge, and mobilizing hybrid activism. We further articulate four key dimensions underpinning these innovations - feminist infrastructures of solidarity, counterpublic visibility, engagement with institutions, and the affective role of emotions. Finally, the study advances four recommendations for feminist research and practice: (1) maintain continuous reflexivity around intersectionality and internal power dynamics; (2) secure resources for sustaining feminist innovations across time and space; (3) embrace hybridity to reinvent activism across institutional and digital terrains; and (4) critically engage with the ambivalences of democratic innovation.