Spaces for Democracy

Democratic societies depend on a plural public and free spaces. A functioning civil society opens up opportunities for citizens to freely express culturally and politically. Its spaces enable individuals to experience their self-efficacy as free people by successfully participating in public life together with others and contributing their interests and visions to public discourses and decision-making processes. Democratic civic culture is condition and result of the vivid interaction between individuals, institutions and decision-making structures.

Civil or Democratic Resilience

Civil Resilience refers to the resisting power of democratic civil society and its ability to bring about democratic change. It can therefore also be seen as a key indicator for describing the specific civic culture of a society. Furthermore, democratic resilience describes the ability of specific organizations to internalize and share democratic principles, attitudes and processes.

Resilient civil society organizations create spaces in which trust can be practiced and developed in a stable manner. They empower citizens to express themselves publicly and to get involved proactively and purposefully in the community. In this way, they help to shape their society and through them, bottom-up engagement leads to change at a systemic level.

Democratic resilience describes an organization’s ability to live democratic principles, processes and attitudes, as well as to embrace and share them in an environment of social change. It expresses how organizations shape democratic civic culture.

In this sense, from a systemic perspective, resilience combines persistence with the ability to change oneself and the system environment.

  • Persistence
  • Adaptability
  • Transformability

These three capabilities are not mutually exclusive, but “resilience” means thinking of them as elements of a balance that should be sought through organizational development or the creation of the appropriate conditions

Organisational Development

Resilience-conscious management

Just as the term “organisational development” encompasses both a static (organisation) and a dynamic (development) aspect, the navigation of organizations aims to strengthen structure while simultaneously opening it up. In addition to the aforementioned persistence, adaptability, and innovation, a fourth capability is vital for many democratic organisations: developing and maintaining their own political and funding independence.

Because persistence, adaptability, and the ability to change interact from a resilience perspective, conditions must be created to ensure that these areas of competence are systematically and equally taken into account in management decisions.

Bridging Function

Organisations are bridges between the systemic level and individual attitudes towards democracy. From this perspective, it becomes clear that they are not an end in themselves, but that a strong and diverse network of organisations is indispensable for democracy – this gives rise to opportunities but hints on obligations that should play a role in organisational development too. Internal aspects (how an organisation sees itself, defines its mission or how it works) are intertwined with external aspects (e.g. how it achieves its impact on society, with whom it networks and from whom it distances itself, how it practises solidarity, its image/appearance).

Social Space

organisations also play an important role for individuals in a democracy as containers or frameworks for civic engagement and social interaction. Therefore, organisational development should be organised based on analysis and reflection from both ends.

Because organisations are also social spaces and structures for those who participate in them, the challenge and opportunity for leadership is to bring together the indviduals’ competences (skills, knowledge, attitudes/behaviours) in such a way that the organisation and individuals benefit, that steering is ensured and, at the same time, space for innovation and development is provided and made use of. An appropriate learning and development culture that works with systematic competence-oriented tools and approaches to internal development can support this.

Public Engagement and Learning as Key Factors

Democratic resilience begins with the initiative and engagement competence of individuals and groups and is formed in civil society organizations and the public. As a source of impulses for social innovation, it serves in particular those NGOs that are located at the interfaces to other social subsystems and thus capture impulses from the environment as well as having an impact beyond their own radius.

From this perspective, new spaces for (cross-sectoral) dialogue, learning and organizational development can help to strengthen democratic actors and civil society as a whole and enable social innovation.

Resilient Democracy

However, we also know how fragile democratic civil society can be if its self-governing structures are damaged. When forces working towards overcoming democracy occupy the public sphere. When critical and pluralistic diversity in society is muted by powerful coalitions. This is why democratic resilience also includes an attitude of solidarity, the will to resist and the courage to change social conditions.

Today’s Challenge: Shaping Transformations Democratically

The major transformations of our time extend beyond our own local horizons. Whether climate change or digitalisation, shaping society is only possible by learning to perceive interdependencies, connections and feedbacks. We in Europe have the opportunity to address the challenges associated with these transformations in a way that is oriented toward democratic values, while other societies are primarily exposed to them. But being able to seize this opportunity also requires broader systems thinking and a more comprehensive competence for transformation. Democratic resilience in this sense contains transformative and systemic thinking.

Civil society organizations make democratic practice tangible and play a key role in creating spaces for a democratic public sphere.

Articles