The “Missing Link” between Research and Society

Participatory, liquid, digital, or deliberative democratic innovations have been gaining traction in the last 10 years. European Research programmes have been frontrunners in this regard, with engaging researchers, practitioners, civil society organisations, and public authorities in over 300 transnational projects to design, test, and refine new ways of making collective decisions with citizens. These efforts, supported by groundbreaking initiatives like Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe, have mainstreamed citizen science, citizen engagement, and have generated hundreds of innovative solutions to renew democracy.

Yet too few are being exploited to their full potential. That is where ScaleDem comes in. The project identifies four scaling gaps to fill.

First, a failure to scale ‘high’: many of these solutions fail to embed themselves sustainably within existing governance structures, remaining either one-time experimentations, or theoretical recommendations without practical implications.

Second, a failure to scale ‘out’: these solutions have limited geographical reach and fail to make to reach a large enough number of citizens, with many R&I projects focusing on the development of solutions for specific challenges, making replication difficult. 

Third, a failure to scale ‘deep’: they may not talk to citizens’ hearts and minds as they do to researchers and practitioners. Too niche, or perhaps too technical, a successful solution is also one that can easily become part of the psychological and cultural layers of society. 

Fourth, a failure to scale ‘in’: these initiatives and their results may have not yielded the expected positive outcomes because of procedural design flaws. This could notably be the case for projects which under-budgeted the costs of their implementation or fail to adapt them to new contexts. 

ScaleDem aims to fill in all four scaling gaps by better connecting research offers and societal needs. At the project's launch, Nora Allavoine, European Commission Research Office at the Directorate General for Research and Innovation stated: 

‘ScaleDem is a new kind of project, intended to be the missing link between research and society. Many R&I results remain too disconnected from the reality of social practices and politics, or simply unknown to those who would need them. With the Democracy Shield upcoming, this work of bridging research and society is more important than ever, but it needs to become always more concrete. People are looking for actionable solutions to protect and strengthen democracy: ScaleDem is here to help them bring these solutions to life on the ground, and scale those that we know are working’ 

Building a Scaling Infrastructure 

ScaleDem is designed to support the impact of solutions aiming at strengthening citizen participation developed in other R&I projects by boosting their scalability. As such, it does not seek to duplicate dissemination and exploitation activities that are part of these initial projects but to build a scaling infrastructure to boost their exploitation. This infrastructure is built on three core pillars: 

Knowledge Consolidation: ScaleDem will develop an empirically grounded Theory of Scaling, based on insights from past projects and research, which will allow future end users to systematically explore and support the scalability of R&I-based democratic innovations. This pillar will not only build a solid foundation for ScaleDem scaling infrastructure, but also pave the way for future research and policy initiatives on innovative democratic governance. 

Knowledge Translation: ScaleDem will act as a nexus to translate this Theory into context-specific practices and policy roadmaps through a Translation Hub, involving a large community of end users to take stock of the actionability and replicability of a limited set of democratic innovations from earlier R&I projects. This pillar will create safe spaces for critical self-reflection on research results and for “reversing the gaze” on democratic innovations, integrating the knowledge from the ‘Global South’ in the definition of societal and translation needs. 

Knowledge Uptake: at the core of ScaleDem are its two Scaling Grounds, to empirically test the actionability of theoretical solutions (Pilot Programme) and the replication of already-tested solutions in new operational contexts (Twinning Programme). Two open calls will be published in 2026 to support third parties in real-life experimentations of these solutions. 

Planning for impact 

ScaleDem will run for 42 months, and the work has only just started. The Consortium, led by Missions Publiques, and composed of 12 leading organisations in the field of democratic innovations, is already pro-actively seeking to build strategic partnerships with other EU-funded projects and relevant R&I initiatives. This notably includes ScaleDem’s sister project, the Nets4Dem and DemoReset networks.

Next steps include the setting up of Advisory Boards and roadmaps for cooperation with these strategic partners to create as much synergies as possible between ScaleDem and the projects it aims to support. Beyond communication actions, these synergies could include regular exchanges between project coordinators on issues of common interest, joint capacity-building and dissemination activities, such as conferences or workshops, and of course, concrete support to the exploitation of projects’ key outputs through ScaleDem Scaling Grounds.

ScaleDem does not yet have a website, but feel free to reach to the contact details below if you would like more information.

More information on ScaleDem and its Consortium is available on the CORDIS Platform. 

Contacts  

Project coordinator:  
Camille Dobler, Head of Research at Missions Publiques: camille.dobler@missionspubliques.com  
Communication:  
Jelena Lazic, PMO, ICONS: jelena.lazic@icons.it