A significant part of the COLDIGIT project has been dedicated to exploring how to address barriers to mainstreaming the use of democratic innovations. This has been done through learning from projects on Participatory Budgeting and Citizens assemblies delivered by Nesta's partners in Gothenburg, Helsinki and Trondheim, interviewing leading experts on democratic innovations and studying successful, as well as failed, attempts at mainstreaming in other cities and public institutions around the world.

In Democratic innovation and digital participation (2022) researchers brought together lessons from this work and analysis into their framework of the main barriers to mainstreaming and the different interventions and activities that can address these. In this report, they build on this analysis and look in more detail at what policy-makers and funders can do to create the right conditions for mainstreaming and scaling the use of democratic innovations, and what to prioritise when doing this. The authors build the recommendations on three new pieces of research – a review of evidence and best practice, a survey of local government and public perspectives on citizen engagement, and barriers to doing this well.

Key survey findings:

• a lack of funding and bureaucracy are the biggest barriers to using and scaling democratic innovations
• enabling citizens to influence decision making, building trust and being more inclusive are the most important reasons for using democratic innovations
• tackling climate change and reducing poverty and inequality are seen as the most important challenges to involve the public in.