Mapping the Participatory Democracy Movement: The Urgent Need for People Power

A post by Oli Whittington from Our House and Linda Doyle

The far right is on the rise, and we’ve seen that when political extremists get into power, they dismantle existing systems of governance and accountability. In its next election in 2029, the UK could elect a far-right government for the first time in its history.

We believe that the rise of the far right isn’t just caused by deepening inequality, it’s also because our democratic system is failing. That’s why people from 12 organisations working to build a people-powered future at the local and national levels gathered to map the participatory democracy movement with the Movement Ecology Collective and the Movement Research Unit, including:

This blog post sets out our learning: that despite the threats to democracy and the numerous organisations driving change, the movement is under-resourced and stretched. This is a call to mobilise, organise and resource the movement, to build a better democracy rather than simply propping up one that isn’t working.

A diverse and pluralistic movement

We started with a broad definition of the participatory democracy movement – those working towards distributing power beyond our representative electoral democracy. And we mapped a lot of organisations – 96 of them in about 2 hours. For a movement with limited resources and media attention, this raised questions: Do we have too many organisations doing similar things? Should we seek to centralise or align efforts?

To build a genuinely participatory movement towards a people-powered democracy, we need a diverse and pluralistic approach. People-power will look different for different people, and the movement needs to have many different points of entry – whether that be around local issues, shared struggles, or shared identities and values. However, our diversity as a movement is also leading to two key challenges: A lack of collaboration and connecting tissue across the movement, and concentration and competition over limited resources.

A lack of collaboration and connecting tissue across the movement

While there are a lot of organisations in the movement, each one is largely made up of one or two people, and/or a wider group of volunteers. This means that it’s easy to get to know each other, but beyond occasional conversations, there are very few collaborations on tangible challenges, projects or campaigns. This can also result in a lack of coordination around funding opportunities for similar efforts.

Local organisations struggle to connect with the wider movement because they are either unaware, lack resources, or are stretched by requests from different national organisations. With democracy at a local or community organising level, the biggest challenge is connecting local issues (e.g., an NHS canteen closing down) to bigger, systemic ones (e.g., NHS funding).

Concentration and competition over limited resources

The democracy sector is relatively small. The largest and most resourced organisations are those working for institutional change, while those dreaming up and trying out new ways of doing democracy with communities are often partially or entirely volunteer-led. Given the growing threats to democracy and demand for systems change, there is an urgent need to invest in the movement to build a new, people-powered democracy.

There is broad alignment within the movement that we need transformational change – to embed citizen participation, such as citizen assemblies, participatory budgeting and legislative theatre, into our systems of governance. However, there are many different theories for how we achieve it.

Many of these theories reflect the core capabilities of each group – for example, believing in the need to share stories that inspire, versus those who believe we need to disrupt the status quo. We need to move away from criticism of theories of change and build a movement ecology approach to leverage all capabilities towards harnessing our collective power to build a truly participatory democracy.

What’s next?

Having mapped the emerging movement, we see a need for deeper collaboration and connectivity at the local and national levels. It won’t be a single organisation, campaign or idea that will distribute power and transform democracy. We need to build a connected and resilient movement that supports a diverse approach to system change, and we need to act now.

As the participatory democracy movement, we’re focusing on our strengths and deepening our collaborations. But to face this generational threat to democracy, we need to move from project and organisational funding to a connected and resourced movement.