The Challenge of Scaling Up Democratic Innovations

Democratic innovations—whether participatory, digital, or deliberative—have multiplied in recent years through more than 300 transnational projects involving researchers, civil society organizations, and public authorities. Thanks to innovative initiatives like Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe, citizen science and citizen engagement have emerged as key drivers, generating hundreds of solutions to renew democracy.

Despite these experiments, knowledge about their scalability and political impact remains limited. ScaleDem identifies four gaps in scaling up these initiatives:

• First, a failure to scale ‘high’: many of these solutions fail to embed themselves sustainably within existing governance structures, remaining either one-time experimentations, or theoretical recommendations without practical implications.
• Second, a failure to scale ‘out’: these solutions have limited geographical reach and fail to make to reach a large enough number of citizens, with many R&I projects focusing on the development of solutions for specific challenges, making replication difficult.
• Third, a failure to scale ‘deep’: they may not talk to citizens’ hearts and minds as they do to researchers and practitioners. Too niche, or perhaps too technical, a successful solution is also one that can easily become part of the psychological and cultural layers of society.
• Fourth, a failure to scale ‘in’: these initiatives and their results may not have yielded the expected positive outcomes because of procedural design flaws. This could notably be the case for projects which under-budgeted the costs of their implementation or fail to adapt them to new contexts.

ScaleDem therefore aims to overcome these challenges. For Nora Allavoine from the European Research Office at the European Commission’s DG Research and Innovation, “ScaleDem is a new type of project, designed to be the missing link between research and society. Many R&I results remain too far removed from social and political practices, or simply unknown to those who need them (…) ScaleDem will help bring these solutions to life and scale them in the field.”

Gathered for the kick-off in early December in Brussels, the 13 project partners(1), including our Colombian partner, reflected on how this project could be applied outside the European Union.

In concrete terms, experts, researchers, and practitioners will collaborate to develop tools such as policy roadmaps and a “compass for scaling up democratic innovations,” aiming to support the adoption of proven solutions by policymakers and practitioners.

Building a Scaling Infrastructure

The ScaleDem project aims to enhance the impact of solutions developed in other R&I projects by increasing their capacity to scale. Its goal is not to duplicate dissemination efforts from initial projects but to build a scaling infrastructure based on three core pillars:

• Knowledge Consolidation: ScaleDem will develop an empirically grounded Theory of Scaling, based on insights from past projects and research, which will allow future end users to systematically explore and support the scalability of R&I-based democratic innovations. This pillar will not only build a solid foundation for ScaleDem scaling infrastructure, but also pave the way for future research and policy initiatives on innovative democratic governance.
• Knowledge Translation: ScaleDem will act as a nexus to translate this Theory into context-specific practices and policy roadmaps through a Translation Hub, involving a large community of end users to take stock of the actionability and replicability of a limited set of democratic innovations from earlier R&I projects. This pillar will create safe spaces for critical self-reflection on research results and for “reversing the gaze” on democratic innovations, integrating the knowledge from the ‘Global South’ in the definition of societal and translation needs.
• Knowledge Uptake: at the core of ScaleDem are its two Scaling Grounds, to empirically test the actionability of theoretical solutions (Pilot Programme) and the replication of already-tested solutions in new operational contexts (Twinning Programme). Two open calls will be published in 2026 to support third parties in real-life experimentations of these solutions.

Scheduled to run for 42 months, the ScaleDem project, coordinated by Missions Publiques, brings together a consortium of 12 organizations specializing in democratic innovations. It seeks to establish strategic partnerships with other EU-funded projects, including the Nets4Dem and DemoReset networks.

For more information about the project: Camille Dobler, Research Lead, Missions Publiques: camille.dobler@missionspubliques.com

More information on ScaleDem and its Consortium is available on the CORDIS Platform.

(1)Missions Publiques (France), European University Institute (Italy), Dublin City University (Ireland), Research Institute for Sustainability – Helmholtz-Zentrum Potsdam (Germany), ifok GmbH (Germany), European Capital of Democracy (Austria), Democracy X (Denmark), Nexus Institute (Germany), Fondazione ICONS (Italy), GLOBSEC (Slovakia), Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium), Democracy Reporting International (Germany), Extituto de Política Abierta (Colombia).