Funded through the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the Project Team includes:

• John Dryzek

• Selen Ercan

• Lucy J. Parry.

Project Description

In recent years, there has been a rapid development of participatory and democratic innovations around the world, with new channels of citizen engagement in politics often falling outside the realm of electoral representation and legislature. Participedia is an online, user-generated collaborative project documenting this growing compendium of participatory politics. It aims to map innovative processes as they develop in almost every country, and provide researchers and practitioners with accessible information, tools and good practice.

The Australian contingent of this project builds on the existing Australian catalogue and will provide robust, systematic and practical information on the variety of democratic innovations from all over Australia.

The project aims to 1) comprehensively catalogue current and past participatory Australian political processes and 2) explore emergent themes and lessons from Australian cases 3) develop a future research agenda for learning across cases to provide systematic and practical advice for researchers and practitioners worldwide. These objectives feed into Participedia’s primary aims of mapping democratic innovations, explaining and assessing their contribution to democracy and most importantly, transferring this knowledge back into practice.