Embedding Public Participation in Planning, Governance and Climate Action: A Cross-Disciplinary Overview

Dear Colleagues,

Over the last two decades, interest in processes of democratic renewal and innovation based on citizens’ involvement in public affairs has been growing among researchers, public decision-makers, activists, and a different range of organizations that have been interested in intensifying the deliberative functioning of our democracies (Floridia, 2017) and in fostering higher degrees of effectiveness for policies and projects aimed at tackling societal, environmental and cultural challenges in our interconnected world. These processes encompass a wide range of initiatives, practices and experimentations, including mini-publics, forms of collaborative governance, participatory budgeting, new ways of managing referendums and citizens' initiatives, as well as digital participatory innovations (Elstub and Escobar, 2019), which are able to consolidate a dialogue between bottom-up forms of civic organization and “spaces by invitation” shaped by institutions (Bussu and Bua, 2023; Blas and Ibarra, 2006; Gaventa, 2005). Initially, many of these processes had a mere local focus; however, they have since tended to scale up to different levels of public administrations, gaining a growing presence even in supranational experiences, particularly in Europe. Some isolated pilot processes have even evolved into combinations of various democratic innovations that configure multichannel systems of participation and deliberation (Spada and Allegretti, 2020), often supported by digital technology.

This expansion has led to a greater understanding of citizens’ participation as vital to people's development. As a result, participatory and deliberative processes have been integrated into educational centers and other training spaces, enabling people to understand political participation beyond the simple act of casting a vote in recurrent elections of representative institutions.

The growth of participatory and deliberative processes has been made possible by the continuous relationship and mutual feedback interchanged between public administrations, researchers and practitioners. With a slower pace, political theory and legislative/regulatory frameworks have also changed, thus contributing to the better embedding and redefining of these practices through incorporating the empirical feedback provided by ongoing studies.

However, despite the broad field of research and experimentation, a lack of reflection on the plurality of possible approaches to participatory and deliberative processes from different disciplines and standpoints remains; a transdisciplinary approach to the topic is still a long way off. Moreover, various limitations and problems have been pointed out by theoreticians, researchers, facilitators that require new “consequentialist” (Fung, 2011) and “holistic” approaches: the reduced perceived legitimacy and authoritativeness of many participatory experiences, their difficulty in achieving effectiveness, inclusiveness and high degrees of transparency and responsiveness, their decreased levels of embeddedness in the governance systems, and their consequences in terms of limited impacts, cooptation, time-consumption, and the participatory fatigue of target audiences, etc.

Given this overview, this Special Issue aims to provide a snapshot of the current state of studies and initiatives of participation and deliberation that can contribute to improving democracy and people's quality of life through interdisciplinary collaboration.

The main aims of this Special Issue are：

1. To gather the current state of the theoretical and empirical debate around democratic innovations, taking into account theories of complexity and holistic views;
2. To activate collective reflection on the near future of democratic innovations;
3. To promote dialogue between disciplines in the field of democratic innovations.

We encourage the submission of original articles, theoretical or empirical, on the following topics (though these are not exhaustive):

1. Participatory and deliberative systems;
2. The dialogue between direct democracy and forms of participatory and deliberative innovations;
3. Involving citizens in decision-making processes beyond “the local trap”, especially on regional, national or supranational scales;
4. Rethinking the digital platforms and the role of technology in blended, participatory innovations beyond their merely instrumental dimension;
5. Participation throughout the life cycle and its pedagogic and transformative contributions to changing individuals and groups;
6. Designing effective deliberative processes to tackle complex issues, such as those relating to environmental transitions;
7. Measuring and evaluating the outcomes of participatory/deliberative processes;
8. Structural and conjunctural problems and limitations of democratic innovations in relation to their incrementally evolutionary nature.

In this Special Issue, contributions must follow one of the three categories of papers, articles, conceptual papers or reviews in this journal and address the topic of the Special Issue.

A maximum 500-word abstract must be submitted by 15 January 2024. Once the abstract successfully passes the initial review, the full manuscript can be submitted by 31 March 2024. These articles will undergo double-blind peer review.

We hope you will be interested in submitting an article to this Special Issue.

Dr. Giovanni Allegretti
Prof. Dr. Patricia García-Leiva
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• democratic innovations
• participatory and deliberative democracy
• governance
• participatory systems
• citizens’ engagement
• inter- and trans-disciplinary dialogue
• transformative practices