Skip to content
Citizen Infrastructure

Scaling catalysts

Ten years ago, citizens’ assemblies were rare experiments. Today they are becoming normal democratic infrastructure in a growing number of places. That didn’t happen by magic — it happened because of scaling catalysts: organisations that intentionally drive the spread of democratic innovation in their region. Studying nine of them across three continents (22 interviews), Sammy McKinney and Claudia Chwalisz of DemocracyNext distilled what makes them effective.

Six features

Section titled “Six features”
  • An explicit scaling mission — their goal is to spread and embed practices, so they foreground network-building, capacity, evaluation, and advocacy, not just running one-off assemblies.
  • Relational change — they invest heavily in cultivating cross-partisan relationships with power-holders, while keeping strategic autonomy: close enough to influence, distant enough to keep their integrity.
  • A commitment to quality — independent evaluation, published impact reports, the OECD good-practice principles. A bad assembly doesn’t just fail; it burns political capital and confirms the sceptics.
  • Bridging local and global — they translate, both literally (the OECD principles into Basque or Danish) and socially, carrying lessons out to the world and back home.
  • Dynamic leadership and interdisciplinary teams — charismatic, well-connected leaders plus distributed expertise in facilitation, communications, and stakeholder engagement.
  • Physical space matters — not online platforms but rooms: the Democracy Garage in Copenhagen (We Do Democracy), Arantzazulab’s space in the Basque hills. Material infrastructure is where relational, in-person culture change is built.

Scaling is an infrastructure problem, not a tech problem

Section titled “Scaling is an infrastructure problem, not a tech problem”

The deeper argument — echoed by the paper’s discussants Nicole Curato, Josh Burgess and Kelly McBride — is that scaling deliberation is an infrastructure challenge: the networks, norms, spaces, legal frameworks, education pathways, and communication channels that turn one-offs into permanent practice. Their five frontiers for the field: deliberative technology and AI; education (exercising deliberative muscles young — the single most-cited enabler); legal participation frameworks (jury-duty-style paid leave and protection); community-building networks (of practitioners, civil servants, and former assembly members, whose energy usually has nowhere to go); and public communication (still treated as a “nice to have” rather than essential).

The honest tensions are real, too: catalysts can be seen as “swooping in” and imposing a vision over local knowledge; proximity to power is double-edged (some argue assemblies should disrupt power, not befriend it); over-professionalisation can crowd out the community roots that make the work legitimate; and even legal scaling can bureaucratise away the depth — as happened when Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting was scaled by statute.

For why permanence is the goal, see institutionalising deliberation; for the directions of scale, five dimensions of scaling deliberation. The lesson funders take is to back patient ecosystem-building, not just the next assembly.

Sources

Section titled “Sources”