Framing the conversation on Democracy and Participation along six structural gaps to reach democratic resilience

This positioning paper introduces the contributions to the conversation on Democracy and Participation in the light of a triple socio, technical and green transformation. Building on the European Commission Joint Research Centre's identification of interrelated threats to democratic resilience, the paper argues that democratic legitimacy increasingly depends on how digital and civic infrastructures are designed, governed, and institutionally embedded. It singles out six structural gaps to reach democratic resilience: (i) the deliberation–scale–impact dilemma; (ii) the redistribution of epistemic power through AI mediation; (iii) the infrastructural politics of platforms; (iv) the fragmentation across digital, urban, and environmental participation; (v) the development and uneven distribution of democratic competencies and collective agency; and (vi) the persistence of project-based participation over durable participatory infrastructures. On this ground, it maps the selected contributions as situated interventions against these gaps, indicating how participatory design can operate to address and mitigate them.