Making Democracy Work Again: Exploring Governance, Participation, and Policy Change

This Workshop explores how local democratic governance can address urgent societal challenges through participatory, collaborative, and experimental methods. Building on the concept of 'democracy administered' (Bertelli, 2021), it emphasises the interaction between institutional design, citizen engagement, and policy effectiveness. Across domains such as food system governance, environmental management, public health, and social justice, comparable democratic dynamics are emerging at municipal and regional levels, with variations across different European contexts. Political science has extensively studied democratic innovations such as participatory budgeting, citizens’ assemblies, and collaborative governance, often focusing on local contexts. Yet, significant gaps remain in understanding how these initiatives interact with entrenched local power structures, scale vertically across governance levels, and influence broader democratic engagement. This Workshop aims to address these gaps by: • Analysing the conditions under which participatory governance at the local administrative level strengthens both legitimacy and policy outcomes; • Investigating how sector-specific initiatives (e.g., food systems, climate action, health and housing policy etc.) operating locally can serve as models for democratic renewal beyond their immediate contexts; • Identifying institutional frameworks within local administrations that enable meaningful participation while ensuring effective policy implementation. By bringing together scholars from political science, public administration, and related fields, the Workshop seeks to advance theoretical and empirical understanding of how participatory governance operates within—and sometimes challenges—the constraints of local administrative structures. It will contribute to debates on deliberative democracy, collaborative governance, and policy innovation by offering comparative insights from multiple policy areas, emphasising the vital role of local governance in democratic renewal.

Andreola, M., Forno, F., & Giovannini, M. (2025). Tracing democratic innovations: A longitudinal perspective on a food policy council. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544251369249 Bertelli, A. M. (2021) Democracy Administered: How Public Administration Shapes Representative, Cambridge University Press. Candel, J. J. L. (2022). Power to the people? Food democracy initiatives’ contributions to democratic goods. Agriculture and Human Values, 39, 1477–1489. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-022-10322-5 Elstub, S., & Escobar, O. (Eds.). (2019). Handbook of Democratic Innovation and Governance. Edward Elgar. Fung, A. (2015). Putting the Public Back into Governance: The Challenges of Citizen Participation and Its Future. Public Administration Review, 75(4), Article 4. https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12361- Michels, A., & Graaf, L. D. (2017). Examining citizen participation: Local participatory policymaking and democracy revisited. Local Government Studies, 43(6), Article 6. https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2017.1365712 Pogrebinschi, T., & Ryan, M. (2018). Moving beyond input legitimacy: When do democratic innovations affect policy making? European Journal of Political Research, 57(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12219 Smith, G. (2009). Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511609848

1: How do participatory governance initiatives foster equity, accountability, and responsiveness across Europe?
2: When do such initiatives influence policy change and strengthen democratic engagement regionally?
3: How can sectoral cases (e.g., food democracy) across Europe inform broader governance theories?
4: What institutional and political challenges limit scaling democratic innovations?
5: How do these initiatives interact with power structures to enable or constrain change?

Title	Details
Local Police Reform as Social Innovation. The cases of Badalona and Pamplona (Spain)	View Paper Details
Making Food Democracy: Context, Governance, and the Politics of Urban Food Transitions in Europe	View Paper Details
The Democratic Politics of Feeding: Care, Agency, and Governance in Urban Food Insecurity	View Paper Details
GENDER RESPONSIVE CLIMATE ADAPTATION: AN INTERSECTIONAL ANALYSIS IN ITALY AND SWEDEN	View Paper Details
An old narrative for a new goal: the case of rural areas in the CAP reforms	View Paper Details
Reconceptualizing the freedom of expression of judges, prosecutors and lawyers	View Paper Details
Social security for food as an alternative structural response to food aid: How democratic governance contributes to the development of beneficiaries’ capabilities.	View Paper Details
Reinvigorating Democratic Governance Through Procedural Innovation: Comparative Lessons from Climate Policy Implementation in Colorado and the Swiss Canton of Valais	View Paper Details
Quality of Governance (QoG) Innovations at National and Subnational Levels of Government during the Pandemic (Covid-19) Crisis: Lessons drawn from Greece and Portugal	View Paper Details
Living Citizenship through Peer Democracy	View Paper Details
Interbranch Impartiality	View Paper Details
Multilevel Governance and Institutional Co-design: Democratic Innovation in the National Strategy for Inner Areas and the National Strategy for Sustainable Development	View Paper Details
After Autocracy - Municipal Governance in Tunisia after the Arab Uprisings	View Paper Details
Capacity Building for Democratic Innovation: Collaborative Governance and Local Action in Peripheral Lombardy	View Paper Details
From Sports Clubs to Ballot Boxes: Far Right Infiltration of Civil Society and Consequences for Political Behavior	View Paper Details
Implementing a New Level of Participatory Democracy – Democratic Innovations in Well-being Governance in Finland	View Paper Details
Participation as Representation: Electoral Networks and Democratic Innovation Adoption in Local Governance	View Paper Details
From territory to policy: co-designing governance indicators for sustainable public administration	View Paper Details
Beyond Anthropocentrism: Reorienting Urban Governance for Nature-Based Solutions in Post-Industrial Cities	View Paper Details
Beyond Neutrality: Experimental Evidence on Preferences for Diversity within Expert Panels	View Paper Details
Food Democracy Roundtable in Bologna: a critical assessment of a participatory food policy	View Paper Details
Beyond Deliberative Idealism: A Policy Process Framework for Understanding the Policy Influence of Deliberative Mini-Publics	View Paper Details