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Decolonising Democratic Innovations: Beyond the White and Western Gaze

Fri, October 1, 6:00 to 7:30am PDT (6:00 to 7:30am PDT), TBA

Session Submission Type: Virtual Created Panel

Session Description

A growing branch of democratic theory and practice proposes “democratic innovations” as an antidote to the legitimacy crisis of liberal democracy, by including lay citizens in the working of government through deliberation and direct participation (Newton, 2012; Smith, 2009).
Debates on strengthening democratic institutions through participatory and deliberative processes have been mostly led by western scholars, and, with notable exceptions such as South America and experimentation with participatory budgeting (Fung, 2015; Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2016; Wampler and Touchton 2018), the focus has too often been on western settings and reform proposals for western democracies. Citizen participation in Africa or Asia has often been implemented and studied as part of western-led development projects, under the neoliberal rhetoric of good governance (World Bank, 1992).
Academic work in non-western contexts which engages with “democratic innovations” and the alternatives these may offer to liberal democracy has rarely been acknowledged and included in participatory governance and deliberative democracy scholarship. Furthermore, this line of research has mostly sidelined issues of white privilege and structural racism entrenched in western liberal democracies and it has limited engagement with critical race theory. This is surprising given the ambition of deliberative democracy scholars to expand the scope and reach of democracy towards greater social inclusion and social justice. These theoretical and analytical frames could help to understand barriers to equal participation.
Engaging with democratic innovations from such “decolonising” or “de-centering” viewpoints can provide novel insights into
(a) perspectives for democratic institutional reform within and beyond “the West”;
(b) the epistemological and methodological groundworks underlying current reform proposals;
(c) constructive proposals to acknowledge and address structural racism in existing attempts at innovating democracy.

This panel aims to discuss these themes and facilitate dialogues on democratic innovations between western and non-western scholars to move beyond the “western gaze”.

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