D1.3 – Report on innovative spaces and views on emerging trends in democracy innovations

Democratic Innovations (DIs) have become a powerful lever for practical implementation and political impact. But how much difference do they make? To avoid DI’s becoming an empty buzzword, it is important to assess how widespread they are and what difference they effectively make. Research itself can be biased and over-estimate their impact. Or on the contrary, it can under-estimate much of what is happening under the radar. The emergence of specific practices in determined geographical areas or democratic regimes, is to be understood as context dependent. We consider this to be a conversation about the various ‘sciences of democracies’ (Gagnon et al, 2025), i.e. the historiography of successful models. This is about how to bust open the black box of democracy and, adjacently, democratic innovations. It allows not only for interdisciplinary thinking, but also for competing intergenerational methodologies to emerge. As this report focuses on emerging practices in democratic innovations with an eye to intergenerational dialogue and systems-thinking, we imbue this ethos in our scoping efforts. In this report, our modest aim is to contribute to a scanning of the field with an eye to the epistemological questions raised above.