Academic Partners

John Dryzek and Jonathan Pickering are involved in the Earth System Governance project, the world’s largest network of social scientists working on global environmental governance. John and Jonathan were authors on the project’s new ten-year Science and Implementation Plan. John completed his term as a longstanding member of the project’s Scientific Steering Committee, and Jonathan joined the new Committee. Jonathan continued to co-convene the project’s working group on ecological democracy and co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning based on the group’s work.

The Centre maintains an active presence in the activities of the European Consortium for Political Research’s Standing Group on Democratic Innovations.

Together with our associates André Bächtiger (University of Stuttgart), Kimmo Grönlund (Åbo Akademi), Sofie Marien (KU Leuven), and Jane Suiter (Dublin City University), our Associate Professor Nicole Curato serves as the co-chair of the Standing Group’s Steering Committee.

The standing group coordinates activities related to the study of democratic innovations in Europe, with the aim of fostering an epistemic community of scholars working towards understanding how democratic innovations can improve our politics.

The consortium to organise a deliberative global citizens’ assembly on genome editing continues to gather momentum. Our partners include Missions Publiques (France and Germany), Involve (UK), Genepool Productions (Melbourne), and the University of Tasmania Centre for Law and Genetics. Partners involved in developing national deliberative processes on the same issue include researchers at Welcome Genome Campus (UK), Keele University (UK), Deakin University, Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil), Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, KU Leuven (Belgium), University of Cape Town (South Africa), Arizona State University (USA), University of British Columbia (Canada).

Our Centre is also one of the founding partners of the Global Citizens’ Assembly in connection with the 26th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Our Connecting to Parliament project is made possible by our new collaboration with IDEA. Through Professor Michael Neblo and his team of researchers, our Centre was able to design and implement the Australian version of Connecting to Congress which aims to create authentic and actionable engagement between representatives and their constituents

John Dryzek, Jonathan Pickering and Ana Tanasoca are members of the International Ethics Research Group convened by the University of New South Wales Canberra. The group meets regularly to discuss work-in-progress papers. Presentations by Centre members have included a paper by Jonathan on 'Ethical mapmaking: the epistemic and democratic value of normative theory in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments'.

The Centre collaborates with the Brazilian National Science and Technology Institute for Digital Democracy, which is multi-institutional and multidisciplinary network of research groups and laboratories from all over the world focusing on the use of digital tools to enhance democracy. We continue our joint research activities with through our associate Ricardo Fabrino Mendonça from the Federal University of Minas Gerais.

Our Centre partners with the global research project, Participedia. Selen Ercan and Lucy Parry are members of the Participedia team. Lucy Parry has been providing systematic and practical information on democratic innovations across Australia.

Participedia is a collaborative effort to identify, document, and learn from the hundreds of thousands of new channels of citizen involvement occurring in governments, communities, and organizations throughout the world. Participedia's crowdsourcing platform gives everyone the ability to share knowledge and information about these processes. The resulting catalogue provides the information necessary for scholars, practitioners, and members of the public to understand the development of citizen engagement and its contribution to democracy and governance. Participedia is made possible by a Partnership Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The project was founded by principal investigator Professor Mark Warren of the University of British Columbia and co-investigator Professor Archon Fung of Harvard University’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.

A strong connection to the PSA Participatory and Deliberative Democracy Specialist Group (PDD) has been established this year, as Hans Asenbaum, a long standing PDD co-convenor joined the Centre. With 350 members, PDD is a vibrant network of scholars of deliberative democracy.

The connection to PDD allows the Centre to deepen its contacts and collaborative projects with leading scholars in the UK. The PDD convenor team has put all its effort into supporting and engaging the scholarly community in these challenging times. Among the highlights were a six-part summer webinar series that showcased the current work of PDD members and a picture contest for Early Career Researchers

Funded by James Cook University (Claudia Benham, Simon Niemeyer and Hannah Barrowman)

Funded by the Australian Catholic University (Richard Rowland, Selen Ercan, David Killoren, and Lucy J Parry).

Funded by the Federal University of Minas Gerais Grant. (Selen A. Ercan, Ricardo F. Mendonca, Umut Ozguc).

A collaboration between Centre for Deliberative democracy and Global Governance and the Institute for Democratic Engagement and Accountability.