This Workshop addresses the challenges of democratic governance amid institutional complexity, citizen disengagement, and urgent political transitions. It calls for contributions examining contexts such as climate governance, food democracy, and public health, aiming to identify institutional models that enhance legitimacy and problem-solving capacity, and advance debates on democratic innovation and diversity. The Workshop draws particular attention to Southern Europe, where overlapping social, ecological, and economic crises are shaping distinctive democratic practices and governance arrangements.
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?
1: Linking sectoral democratic experiments to broader governance and administration models.
2: Participatory governance as a model for deliberative democracy and collaborative decision-making.
3: Impact of participatory governance on policy, legitimacy, and citizen engagement.
4: Scaling democratic innovations: challenges and opportunities across European regions.
5: Political culture, partisanship, and institutions shaping democratic innovation success.
6: Role of civil society, social movements, and public administration in governance.
7: Examining equity, justice, and systemic change across regions and nations.
8: Comparative analyses across sectors and regions to identify transferable lessons.
