Conference Agenda

There has been a ‘participation turn’ in policymaking and a growth in participatory governance and democratic innovations due to many existing democratic processes facing a  crisis of legitimacy (Warren, 2014). Participatory governance is seen to improve representative democratic processes by bringing in more citizen participation to make policymaking more responsive and collaborative (Escobar, 2021; Heinelt, 2018). With more policymakers and institutions interested in participatory governance, it has meant that these approaches have become more institutionalised (Bua and Bussu, 2021).

Scotland has a rich landscape of innovative design work in and around policy, and there is a clear civic participation and open government agenda through recent legislation and initiatives such as the Community Empowerment Act and Open Government Partnership that seek to enable people and communities to have more say over the decisions that affect their lives (Escobar, 2022). Scottish Parliament has a dedicated focus on involving people and community organisations in inquiries to share experiences and insights on the impacts of legislation and has embedded deliberative approaches through their People's Panels (Broadley et al., 2025). Within the Scottish Government, the Office of the Chief Designer is leading on embedding design and participation approaches within health and social care policy, alongside developing and promoting the Scottish Approach to Service Design (Hamilton, 2024; Lyne, 2019; Scottish Government, 2019). Scotland has a visible design leader, design teams within government, a national approach to service design and key participatory governance legislation. How do these different aspects of design benefit and enhance Scotland’s participatory governance agenda? Does this differ to other countries approaches and what can we learn from each other?

Using Scotland as a provocation, this conversation will invite participants to discuss the role of design within participatory governance across the world, bringing their own perspectives to the conversation and identifying synergies and differences between different contexts. We will bring together stories and perspectives from practitioners and researchers working in design and policy spaces in Scotland, England and Northen Ireland, and invite participants to discuss and bring their own experiences to the conversation. By sharing practitioner’s stories, we want to ground the discussions in lived experience of people working within these complex contexts. We hope this conversation will build a community of interested researchers and practitioners and provide critical reflection on the ways that design can/might be applied to participatory governance.