The Forum Presents “Policymaking, Governing & Thinking as if Democracy Matters” at the Dupont Summit

In 2023, The Forum on Citizen-Centric Democracy partnered with the Policy Studies Organization’s Dupont Summit to present a four-part track exploring a fundamental question: What would policymaking and governing look like if the health of democracy were treated as an essential consideration in their design?

The track, “Policymaking, Governing & Thinking as if Democracy Matters,” was presented at the Dupont Summit on December 1, 2023, in Washington, D.C. The annual summit brings together participants from academia, government, business, and civil society for interdisciplinary conversations about policy and contemporary challenges.

The Forum issued a Broad Area Announcement inviting scholars, practitioners, organizations, and others to contribute ideas, methods, tools, case studies, and examples of innovative practice. Rather than focusing solely on individual policy problems, the initiative asked participants to consider governance as a whole system—and to examine how institutions, citizens, policies, and their environments interact over time.

Read the Original Broad Area Announcement

Re-discover

The first panel returned to the original design of the American experiment in self-government.

What ideas represented a genuine departure from the political systems that preceded it? What did the founding generations understand about citizenship, representation, self-governance, power, and the relationship between the people and the institutions created to govern?

The discussion also considered what can—and cannot—be carried forward from those ideas as democratic societies confront very different 21st-century conditions.

Re-think

The second panel turned to the dynamics shaping democracy today.

Participants were invited to look beyond isolated problems and examine the larger patterns connecting government, business, civic institutions, communities, and citizens.

Among the questions: What contributes to the weakening or strengthening of democratic institutions? How can systemic patterns be identified before they become entrenched? And what does policymaking mean when the health of the larger democratic system is considered alongside immediate policy objectives?

Re-imagine

The third panel explored new approaches to social, political, and institutional change.

The Forum was particularly interested in methods drawn from systems thinking, cybernetics, complexity, design, and related fields that can help illuminate the relationships between people, institutions, information, and their environments.

The central challenge was not simply how to solve individual problems, but how to develop better ways of understanding the systems that continually produce them—and how that understanding might inform more effective approaches to governance and civic life.

Re-build

The fourth panel moved from analysis toward practice.

How might citizenship play a more meaningful role in democratic governance? How can communication between institutions and the people they serve be strengthened? What practices can help communities engage across differences, identify common ground, and participate more effectively in public life?

The panel sought examples, experiments, and models that could contribute to the continuing work of strengthening democratic institutions and citizen participation.

From Ideas to Practice

The Broad Area Announcement was designed to solicit more than completed academic research. The Forum also sought promising questions, practical experiments, methods, and emerging approaches that might contribute to what it describes as better governance by design.

Abstracts were invited for the four panels, with selected contributors brought together in advance of the summit to connect ideas across disciplines and presentations. The Forum envisioned the December gathering not as an endpoint, but as part of a broader effort to develop conversations, publications, tools, and networks around democratic governance.

The resulting four panels—Re-discover, Re-think, Re-imagine, and Re-build—were presented by The Forum at the Dupont Summit on December 1, 2023.