Enhancing Democratic Governance in Europe (EDGE)
EDGE responds to the imperative to identify innovative solutions that deliver new ways of political decision-making that help both effectively tackle real-world challenges to democracy and strengthen European democracies. EDGE builds from the team’s expertise on innovations in participatory and representative democracy, and on climate change and intersectional inequalities as two of today’s key challenges that democracies face. It engages with a prominent new development in the field - the ‘affective turn’ - by fully recognizing affect and emotions as undergirding political choice and behaviour. EDGE brings together researchers from various research groups – POLI (the VUB Political Science Department), BSoG (the VUB Brussels School of Governance), RHEA (Research Center on Gender, Diversity, Intersectionality), BRIO (Centre for Information, Documentation and Research on Brussels) and BIRMM (Brussels Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Migration and Minorities) to collaborate in three complementary Work Packages: WP1 Climate, Sustainability, and Democratic Innovations: investigating deliberative and participatory democratic innovations to address problems posed by climate and broader environmental crises;
WP2 Enhancing Representative Relationships: re-designing relationships between citizens and the central actors and institutions of representative democracy;
WP3 Intersectional Inequalities and Democratic Innovations: re-thinking, from a minorities' perspective, intersectional inequalities and ways of politically addressing them.
Although the three WPs each have a specific focus, a set of integrative activities and a collaborative organizational framework are designed to ensure that EDGE jointly meets the shared research objective: going beyond describing the problems of current democracies, and critically studying solutions from and across different models of democracy, while acknowledging affect as a key driver of political action.
