Beyond the Urban Bias: Democratic Innovations and Local Governance in Rural Areas

Although democratic innovations such as deliberative mini-publics, participatory budgeting and participatory and collaborative governance have become central to contemporary debates on deliberative and participatory democracy, their deployment in rural and shrinking settings remains strikingly under-theorised. At the same time, existing scholarship continues to display a strong urban bias, often overlooking how depopulation, administrative rescaling and declining local government capacity reshape participatory governance. This paper, therefore, bridges democratic innovation and rural studies by asking whether there are democratic innovations that require explicit consideration from a rural perspective and, if so, what epistemological, conceptual, and methodological challenges emerge in governing depopulated and peripheral places. These interrogations build on previous research (Ribeiro and Moniz, 2025), drawing on a mixed-methods comparative analysis of two original datasets: 59 rural-related DI cases from 11 European countries compiled from Participedia, OECD and KNOCA, and 212 cases from 18 Latin American countries retrieved from the LATINNO database (1990–2020). The analysis revealed marked regional differences. In Europe, rural DIs are dominated by deliberative practices operating primarily at the stages of problem identification and policy formulation, and are thematically focused on rural development, environmental sustainability and local governance within existing institutional architectures, notably Common Agricultural Policy-related programmes and municipal reform processes. In Latin America, by contrast, participatory and collaborative governance prevails, with a stronger presence in policy implementation and evaluation and a thematic focus on social justice, territorial rights and food sovereignty. The paper argues that these asymmetries are closely linked to the contemporary resurgence of the urban–rural divide and to uneven local government capacities in shrinking and depopulated areas. Rural socio-spatial configurations—low density, infrastructural fragilities, entrenched hierarchies and governance fragmentation—reshape the democratic goods pursued by democratic innovations, challenging standard frameworks developed for urban contexts. The paper concludes by outlining a research agenda that prioritises comparative designs, participatory action research, ethnographic and longitudinal approaches, and the exploration of hybrid governance models capable of addressing the democratic challenges of governing peripheral, shrinking and contested rural places.