Democratic innovations and social tipping points: Can citizens’ assemblies create systemic change?
Name of applicant
Mads Ejsing
Title
Postdoctoral Fellow
Institution
Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University
Amount
DKK 1,020,000
Year
2024
Type of grant
Internationalisation Fellowships
What?
The DemStip project aims to explore how new forms of deliberative processes, such as citizens' assemblies, can help foster new social norms and eventually lead to more systemic transformations. The main research question is: Under what conditions can new forms of democratic participation help trigger social tipping points that might push social systems into new and more sustainable equilibria?
Why?
The DemStip project is both timely and important, since new forms of citizen participation are needed in order to cultivate new social norms, remove political barriers, and spread information that can enable system-level change, which has hitherto been considered impractical or downright impossible. How and when such changes happen, however, is still underexplored in the research literature.
How?
The DemStip project is a comparative case study that investigates the rise of climate citizens' assemblies across Denmark and Sweden with a particular focus on social tipping point dynamics and their system-changing potentials. The project utilises a mix of social science methods, including ethnographic participant observation and qualitative interviews with both participants and practitioners.