While democratic innovations extend well beyond Europe’s borders, the way they are studied remains largely influenced by Western perspectives. Through a series of online workshops bringing together participants from every corner of the globe, the ScaleDem project aims to “reverse the gaze.” In this article, we turn to Latin America and the Global South with Andrea Cervera Robles and Silvia Remolina Diaz, from the Extituto de Política Abierta in Colombia, alongside Garance Monnier, project coordinator at Missions Publiques, who facilitated these workshops.
Missions Publiques. You have been working for several years on democratic innovation in Latin America. How would you describe the state of citizen participation in the region today? More broadly, what is the current context for research on democratic innovation in Latin America?
Andrea Cervera Robles and Silvia Remolina Diaz. At Extituto, we speak as practitioners: seven years of accompanying civil society organizations, public institutions, and democratic innovation initiatives across Colombia, Latin America and the Global South. Our reflections are also shaped by learning from researchers like Thamy Pogrebinschi and Melisa Ross among many others, whose work has helped us interpret many of the dynamics we encounter on the ground.
Latin America has accumulated a rich diversity of participatory and deliberative experiences over recent decades: participatory budgeting, citizen councils, civic technology, and deliberative forums have emerged at different scales in the region. For a significant period, many of these processes were institutionalized by governments willing to invest political and administrative resources in citizen engagement but that context is shifting. Growing polarization, declining institutional trust, and the rise of authoritarian tendencies have made many participatory mechanisms, especially those dependent on political goodwill, increasingly fragile.
Yet democratic aspirations remain strong: according to Latinobarómetro 2024, 52% of Latin Americans still consider democracy the best form of government, even as only 33% report satisfaction with how it works in practice. In this gap, civil society organizations and community leaders have stepped in sustaining participatory practices where governments have stepped back, defending rights, and holding open spaces for dialogue in increasingly fragmented environments.
In countries like Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Bolivia, civil society initiatives often operate under security risks, and deep distrust in public institutions while drawing on strong traditions of community organizing, so participation spaces are held through multiple channels: face-to-face meetings, digital platforms, advocacy campaigns, citizen monitoring, and public mobilization.
This complexity is also reshaping the research field. Scholars are increasingly examining how participation functions in contexts marked by inequality, institutional fragility, informality, and differential state presence, realities underrepresented in mainstream democratic theory. Alongside this, there is growing interest in the broader ecosystem of democratic life: amplifying its scope from formal institutions to grassroots networks, social movements, and collective action in all its forms.
One of the most significant contributions of Latin American and Global South experiences is that practitioners are positioning themselves as producers and stewards of knowledge, gradually improving the conditions for citizen participation in their own contexts.
Despite the uncertainty surrounding many democratic institutions, Latin America continues to offer essential lessons for the broad democratic innovation network. Its actors keep experimenting, adapting, and searching for more effective ways to strengthen democratic life locally. For researchers and practitioners alike, this remains one of the most vital spaces for understanding how democracy can be renewed, protected, and reimagined in challenging times.
Missions Publiques. Why did a European project like ScaleDem choose to look for perspectives beyond Europe?
Garance Monnier. ScaleDem is a European project dedicated to scaling democratic innovations beyond the research lab and into real-world policy. While research on democratic innovation does not know borders, knowledge remains heavily fragmented: across disciplines, but also across continents.
In Europe, theories and frameworks that guide how participatory democracy is designed and scaled remain very much marked by eurocentrism, even though some of the processes we study originated outside Europe and only later crossed the Atlantic!
The ‘Reversing the Gaze’ workshop series aims to address this gap by bringing together experienced practitioners from different regions of the globe, not just to feed and enrich ScaleDem’s research, but to create a genuine space for exchange. Hearing how peers from different contexts approach the same challenges is itself a reflection on the state of global democracy today. These workshops aim to be as much about the participants as they are about the research.
"Scholars are increasingly examining how participation functions in contexts marked by inequality, institutional fragility, informality, and uneven state presence, which remain underrepresented in mainstream democratic theory.
Andrea Cervera Robles
Coordinator of collective intelligence in Extituto
Missions Publiques. What does “reversing the gaze” mean in practice? What has your experience with these workshops revealed so far?
Garance Monnier. Each workshop lasts around three hours online and is adapted to the time zone of the region. To date, we have held two sessions: one for Latin America, conducted in Spanish, and one covering Eastern Europe and the Balkans. We follow a general format that we adapt based on feedback from facilitators and participants. The session opens with a contextualised framing by two guest speakers, experts who bring concrete examples from the region, to anchor the discussion before we go deeper. For Latin America, we had Benjamin Goldfrank and Rocío Annunziata. For Eastern Europe and the Balkans, there was Irena Fiket and Paulina Pospieszna. Each of them draws on their own field of expertise, reflecting the context in which they work.
We then spend the core of the session exploring each ScaleDem’s four scaling dimensions – High, Out, Deep, and In – asking: What differs across contexts? What is similar? What translates? What requires rethinking? What realistic success factors look like from a non-European perspective?
What has already struck me is how much the conversation varies depending on participants’ backgrounds and the perspectives they bring: the state of democracy in their country, how this shapes their practices, and what they consider possible or impossible. The same question can open up very different discussions depending on whether participants are speaking from contexts of democratic stability, institutional fragility or political crisis.
Andrea Cervera Robles et Silvia Remolina Diaz. “Reversing the gaze” is, at its core, a challenge to the direction of knowledge production in the democratic innovation field. Most theories of democratic innovations have been built on European evidence and tested in European contexts. These workshops ask what happens when that logic is inverted and the Global South is not the site of application, but also the source of stress-testing the theory. In practice, this means creating a structured channel through which experiences from the Global South can inform and challenge existing frameworks at an early stage.
The workshops also engage with the limitations, particularly those related to the social, cultural, educational, and community conditions required to pilot, advocate for participation and sustain democratic innovations over time. Participants repeatedly pointed to challenges associated with securing funding, establishing political support, and be a platform for initiatives grounded in local realities.
In many of the contexts represented, low levels of institutional trust and unstable civic spaces are persistent conditions that practitioners must address when designing participatory processes, that is why democratic innovations rarely expand through institutional channels alone. More often, they endure through community ownership, local legitimacy, and the capacity of communities to adapt creatively to changing political environments.
The workshops therefore reinforced the central question of which elements can genuinely travel across contexts, and which are inseparable from the political, social, and cultural conditions in which they emerged?
"These workshops ask what happens when that logic is inverted and the Global South is not the site of application, but also the source of stress-testing the theory.
Silvia Remolina Diaz
Coordinator of Demo.Reset in Extituto
Missions Publiques. What do you hope will concretely emerge from these workshops?
Andrea Cervera Robles et Silvia Remolina Diaz. We hope the workshops will foster a transparent and reciprocal process of learning and validation of these helpful insights for a global understanding of democratic innovations. In the short term, we are committed to ensuring that the experience gained by the participating organisations is given due recognition and to highlighting their contribution to research. In the mid and long term, we see the Theory of Scaling as a bridge between academic research and the realities faced by democratic innovation initiatives outside Europe by offering a nuanced framework for understanding impact under structural constraints. It can help organizations and policymakers gradually build the conditions that enable the proliferation and sustainability of democratic innovations.
Garance Monnier. We also hope to organize a cross-regional session to cover all regions and have a more global outlook. So far, the workshops are siloed by region, but we aim to give a real space for participants to exchange, share experiences, and compare challenges. This is also the goal of the project. In terms of deliverables, the learnings from these Reversing the Gaze workshops will be fed into a policy paper we hope to disseminate in different international conferences. Beyond the production of knowledge, our aim is to circulate these perspectives and contribute to a more open, more collective, and more representative reflection on the diversity of democratic experiences around the world.
