Introduction to the volume

In recent years, we have witnessed increasing and explicit interest among grassroots groups in adopting deliberative and participatory practices to engage with institutions and widen the scope and reach of democracy (della Porta and Felicetti 2019, 2022; Bua and Bussu 2021). The new emphasis on this social movement- and grassroots-led approach to participatory governance, or what we call “democracy-driven governance” (DDG) (Bua and Bussu 2021), is a response to increasing concerns that recent practice of participatory governance has tended to focus on top-down approaches, where the commissioning organisation controls both the process and the agenda (Chambers 2009; Papadopoulos 2012; Lee 2015). We contextualise and problematise these developments and, through introducing the various contributions to the volume, we explain how DDG acts as a bridge between grassroots politics and institutions, making visible the everyday democracy that is often invisible to political institutions (West et al. 2019). The aim is to expand the scope of democratic regulation through institutional reforms inspired by prefigurative politics.