SCALEDEM Project

Rationale for Democratic Innovation

According to the OECD (2020), citizen interest, knowledge and engagement all increase as a result of participation in a citizens’ assembly. Institutionalising deliberative processes facilitates collective learning and experimentation, and can potentially increase trust in public institutions, strengthen democracy, and enrich society’s democratic fitness by creating more opportunities for more people to significantly shape public decisions (OECD, 2020).

The UL Citizens’ Assembly provides a physical and intellectual space of exploration to support the university’s positioning / repositioning around its engagement and transformation agenda in the service of the UN SDGs. Its conceptualisation, methodology and activities are intended to produce a university-community forum that facilitates the identification of impactful collaborative projects and the co- construction of knowledge to support, enhance and embody the attributes of a responsive, sustainable and civically engaged university.

Rationale for the proposed study

Since ‘there is still no consolidated framework to guide how democratic innovations can systematically scale’ (Camatarri, Dobler and Vergne, 2025: 7), we propose a comparative, investigative framework to test the applicability of ScaleDem Analytical Framework in four distinct cases.

Our  current plans to transfer the UL Citizens’ Assembly from one country context to three others, offer the opportunity to examine the transmission mechanisms involved in our attempts to systematically scale this localized democratic innovation into three new socio-cultural and institutional contexts.

The four dimensions of scaling identified by Camatarri et al (2025: 9-13) are each characterized by a series of items considered necessary to ensure that the democratic innovation embodies the capacity to:

• transition from a one-off experiment, to an institutionalized process (scaling high);
• expand, horizontally – across institutions, vertically – across levels of governance, and transversally – increasing the number and diversity of participants (scaling out);
• shift people’s beliefs and behaviours (scaling deep); and
• evolve with continued improvement on a range of quality indicators (scaling in)

Our examination and implementation of the transfer of the UL Citizens’ Assembly to University Matej Bel (UMB) in Slovakia, Université Bretagne Sud (UBS) in France, and University of A Coruña (UDC) in Spain, provides us with the opportunity to catalogue and rank the Scaling variables in terms of their significance for and impact upon delivery of the democratic innovation.  We can use these results to explore the extent to which it is possible to ‘design in’ scalability by addressing  – insofar as is possible – the identified independent variables as part of the Scaling process.

Our application comprises a selection of four universities from the EMERGE.eu University Alliance. The EMERGE Alliance is commited to developing societal engagement as a primary and intrinsic mission to drive our approach in research and education. We are, therefore, completely invested not only in developing our engagement but equally, in understanding the policy levers that enable best practice, as well as the institutional impediments to delivery. In this project, we are particularly interested to examine the role played by the European Universities Initiative as a transfer mechanism.

Scaling Challenges

1. Conceptualizing the transfer mechanism – The European Universities Initiative (EUI), created by the European Commission in 2017, is a recent novel phenomenon within the European Union policy toolkit that explicitly targets the development of transnational cooperation in higher education (Marques and Graf, 2023). Despite the diverse forms of strategic alliances, however, their definitions and explanations as to why and how they are strategic remains scarce (Fehrenbach and Huisman, 2022:38). By examining the transmission of our proposed democratic innovation from one university and country context to three others, we propose to assess the extent to which membership of a university alliance can enhance or amplify existing governance structures and processes for collaborative approaches to scaling innovation.

2. Scaling high – refers to the process of formal institutionalization, confirming the democratic innovation’s transition from a ‘one-off experiment’ to mainstreamed annual occurrence. In the context of our democratic innovation there are two key areas of analysis to consider: the university institutional context; and the local/regional governance context. In relation to the former, we will examine a range of factors including: the degree of budgetary stability, administrative anchoring, dedicated staff, and integration to other institutional processes, events, departments or workflows, incorporation into strategic ambition, and the uptake of policies designed to support the innovation. In relation to the latter, we will investigate the influence and/or integration of the citizens’ assembly with local governance architectures evidenced, for example, in the ‘response duty’ of local government. To do this, we will appraise the scope and depth of local government connections and collaborations with the university-community projects proposed in the assemblies.

By categorizing and cataloguing the means by which the proposed democratic innovation is procedurally embedded in each of our four cases, we will establish possible ‘procedural pathways’ for institutionalization in alternative institutional and socio-cultural contexts.

3. Scaling Out – this aspect of scaling is significant along three dimensions: horizontally (across institutions), vertically (across levels of governance), and transversally (increasing the number and diversity of participants). Given the intersectionality of scaling dimensions, we anticipate that the vertical and horizontal dimensions of scaling can be fully explored and assessed in our consideration of the alliance structure as a transfer mechanism and the process of institutionalization (scaling high). This challenge relates particularly to the implementation of our democratic innovation, concerning the creation of processes and procedures to guarantee equality, diversity and inclusion of marginalized groups in our citizen assemblies. Here we are interested to test the efficacy of our assembly participant recruitment procedures: how fair are they? What measures are taken to involve lesser heard voices? How representative are our assemblies in terms of age, sex, gender, inclusiveness etc?

4. Scaling Deep – refers to the impact of democratic innovations in terms of how deeply they shape people’s values, beliefs, attitudes, and civic identities. In consideration of this scaling dimension, we begin with insights from the Irish case. For five months, between the end of July and November 2021, the Irish government sponsored ‘a national conversation on research in Ireland’ (Creating our Future, Expert Committee Report, 2022). 18,062 submissions were collected, revealing high levels of public interest to engage with research, whilst noting that ‘more work is needed to create a stronger sense of national public involvement in research as well as challenging assumptions about knowledge hierarchies and who should have a voice’ (Creating Our Future Expert Committee Report, p56). Whilst there is an increasing belief that civic society and enterprise organisations in the social economy are potentially key partners in supporting policymakers and higher education institutions to connect teaching and learning, and research and innovation with societal needs, the mechanisms by which this should occur are less clear.

5. Scaling in – references the need to continually improve the quality of our internal processes to ensure that they match up to our ambitions for inclusivity. Here we are concerned to examine the various institutional evaluation and audit procedures in order to assess the institutional processes through which we promote diversity, equality and inclusion of access to our initiatives and, more specifically in relation to our citizens’ assemblies, the mechanisms by which we expand assembly participants’ experience of deliberative practice and engagement. For this we will use the OECD (2022) recommended quality standards and ethical benchmarks for public participation as a measure of the extent to which are universities acknowledge and prioritize meaningful citizen engagement.

 

Proposed solution

We will deploy a mixed methods research design, combining the attention to detail and context of a case study approach, with the need to build on the theoretical foundations of the ScaleDem analytical framework and provide meaningful inferences regarding the necessary and sufficient conditions for each of the scaling dimensions to occur.

Our identification and categorization of differing institutional contexts and behaviours will be guided by new institutionalist organisational theory, which pays attention not only to codified structures and protocols, but also to alternative ‘ways of doing business’ and ‘organisational protocols’ that reflect the evolution of culturally specific practices over time (Powell and Di Maggio, 1991).

Together our research team will co-design a systematic and comprehensive set of audit questions for each scaling dimension. This collaborative design will ensure that the particularities in any of our cases can be accommodated and included in the study. In doing so, we will be able to establish a set of criteria – based on the ScaleDem sub-dimensions and indicators – for each Scaling Dimension. In judging whether or not our cases meet each of the specified criteria, we do not anticipate strict, yes or no answers: rather, we assume it more likely that we will find partial fulfillment of many criteria. For example, the proposed sub-dimensions and key components for ‘Scaling High’ include the identification of ‘growing budgetary stability and/or funding’ (Camatarri, Dobler and Vergne, 2025:10). It is possible that budgetary stability may be partially achieved in different ways in different cases. Our audit questions will need to allow for differentiated modes of budgetary stability (philanthropic, governmental, institutional) and partial – as opposed to complete – fulfillment. In other words, we need to be able to note when a case is moving closer to budgetary stability and under what conditions this occurs. This can be achieved using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (Ragin, 2000; Lee, 2014), a social science method developed in order to combine case-oriented and variable-oriented quantitative analysis.

In fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (Fs/QCA) causal conditions are explained as ‘attributes’, enabling the analysis to explore the relationships between identified attributes in one Scaling Dimension (for example, the relative significance of budgetary stability versus institutional anchoring, in Scaling High); and also between scaling dimensions (for example, the co-dependence or otherwise between Scaling High and Scaling In).

Objectives and expected outcomes of the project

This research will provide a systematic consideration of independent and dependent scaling variables related to institutional structures and actor behaviour at local, regional and European levels in order to process trace the alternative routes to scaling high, scaling out, scaling deep and scaling in, in relation to our selected democratic innovation, in this case, a university-community citizens’ assembly.

Our study will:

• Illuminate the interactions between different scaling dimensions and point to the wider environmental contexts in which they are more or less significant.
• Provide a foundation of empirical evidence on the role played by policy architecture at local, regional and EU levels.
• Reveal the very practical steps that can be taken to promote scaling of democratic innovation within and between different institutional and policy contexts.
• Identify actions to promote trust between the scientific community and citizens via the promotion of deliberative fora and community-based participatory research.

Outputs:

Co-designed audit mechanism to assess the scaling dimensions.

Co-designed tool-kit to audit democratic performance comprising an implementation guide and accompanying assessment manual.

Description of the action: rough project plan and timeline (WPs, phases, milestones)

Workpackage 1: Assembly Delivery

Consortium partners in each country will plan and deliver their own university-community citizens’ assembly with the aid of existing informational assets, check-lists and content-creation templates created by the University of Limerick.

Workpackage 2: ScaleDem Audit

Consortium partners will co-create a series of evaluation items to assess our democratic innovation along the four ScaleDem dimensions identifed by Camatarri, Dobler and Vergne (2025). The collaborative design will ensure that our assessment takes notice of the potential variations in institutional forms and norms in each country/region.

Data collection protocols and assessment items for each ScaleDem dimension will be co-designed in consultation with all assembly stakeholders in accordance with the EMERGE Alliance commitment to best practice engaged research and university-community engagement. This will enable us to explore fully the potential indicators for each of the ScaleDem dimensions across all country cases. The data collected and the process of data collection will align with our overarching Alliance mission, Empowering the Margins of Europe via Regional and Global Engagement (EMERGE).

Geographical scope and target groups

Each community-university assembly will aim to be as representative as possible of its area, with an emphasis on diversity, inclusion and the representation of lesser heard voices.

Limerick is the third most populous urban area in Ireland, with approximately 50% under 35 and an average age of 39.3 years. The area is increasingly diverse, with 11% non-Irish residents, 1,860 Travellers, and 72% identifying as Catholic. Whilst census statistics show that Limerick’s overall affluence has increased, they also illustrate that approximately one fifth of the population live in areas classified as disadvantaged. These designated ‘Regeneration areas’ are characterised by higher rates of unemployment, lower rates of educational attainment, higher rates of unskilled / low skilled workers, higher lone parent rates, higher dependency rates and decreasing populations (Fitzgerald, 2016). For these ‘left behind’ places, this picture is little changed in 2026.

South Brittany

Banská Bystrica

A Coruña

 

Societal impact of the project: what is the expected impact and how will it be evaluated

Insert Logic model here

 

Description of project team/consortium: CVs uploaded separately. In this section we reconmmend briefly presenting the organizations, their expertise and complementarity (if consortium)

University A Coruna, Spain

University BS

University of Limerick, Ireland

University Matej Bel, Slovakia

References

European Commission: Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture, PPMI, Grumbinaitė, I., Colus, F. and Buitrago Carvajal, H., Report on the outcomes and transformational potential of the European Universities initiative, Publications Office of the European Union, 2025, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2766/32313

Fehrenbach, Hana, and Jeroen Huisman. 2022. A systematic literature review of transnational alliances in

higher education: The gaps in strategic perspectives. Journal of Studies in International Education.

https://doi.org/10.1177/10283153221137680

Lee SS. (2014) ‘Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis’, Epidemiol Health, 36, e2014038

Marques, M., Graf, L. (2024) Pushing Boundaries: The European Universities Initiative as a Case of Transnational Institution Building. Minerva 62, 93–112. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-023-09516-w

OECD (2022), OECD Guidelines for Citizen Participation Processes, OECD Public Governance Reviews, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/f765caf6-en.

Powell, W.W.  and Di Maggio, P.J. (1991)(eds) The new institutionalism in organisational analysis, Chicago: Chichago University Press

Ragin, C. C. (2000) Fuzzy-set social science,  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.