Holding Democracy Together - Policy Workshop

INNOVADE invites a selected group of policymakers operating at local, national, and European level, together with partners from policy-oriented institutions, to discuss the latest policy brief, INNOVADE Holding Democracy Together: A common European baseline for trustworthy digital democracy in Europe (https://zenodo.org/records/21026681) issued by the consortium on the basis of its research findings. The workshop offers a space for practical, grounded dialogue between researchers and policymakers, in which the brief's ten recommendations can be tested against real institutional constraints and their implications for regulation, implementation, and democratic engagement can be examined directly with the people who would put them into practice.

The timing responds to a wider policy conversation that has, in recent months, confirmed rather than merely echoed INNOVADE's own findings. The Joint Research Centre's study Impact of Citizen Engagement on the impact of citizen engagement concludes that achieving genuine impact depends on assembling the right combination of tools, resources, and institutional capacity — and identifies unmet expectations, delayed or invisible outcomes, and the absence of clear follow-up mechanisms, compounded by unclear procedures and limited transparency about institutional constraints, as recurring sources of citizen frustration and disengagement. That finding sits very close to what INNOVADE's own research describes as the "black box effect", and to the case made in the brief for mandatory impact accountability.

A second, more recent development reinforces the brief's foundation conditions. In June 2026, the European Parliament's Special Committee on the European Democracy Shield adopted its findings and recommendations, with a plenary vote on the 15th of September. Among its conclusions, the committee argues that the EU must urgently reduce its dependence on foreign-controlled technology — naming both US-based technology providers and Chinese hardware suppliers — and calls for a balanced "buy European" approach to investment in critical infrastructure, alongside diversification towards more reliable suppliers of critical raw materials. This runs directly parallel to the brief's recommendation to invest in public-service, commons-based, and open-source alternatives to dominant commercial platforms.

Taken together, these developments confirm that INNOVADE's recommendations are arriving at a moment of genuine institutional appetite for this agenda, and that the brief has something concrete to offer to instruments already in motion, including the European Democracy Shield and the European Centre for Democratic Resilience. 

Agenda