Online Conference "Parliaments and Democratic Innovations"

In December, INTER PARES was delighted to organize the international online conference Parliaments and Democratic Innovations: Adapting the capacities of parliaments to changing democracies in collaboration with the European Parliament and the European Commission. This conference brought together 20 prominent speakers from parliaments, academia, the media, and civil society to share and discuss their ideas with the event’s 750 participants.

The three conference sessions explored the challenges being faced by parliaments and representative democracy around the world, explored the innovations in deliberative democracy that can deepen the effectiveness and responsiveness of representative democracy, and examined how Covid-19 has forced changes in how parliaments work, and whether some of these ‘innovations by necessity’ can form the basis of new practices to include citizens in parliamentary work and decision-making.

The conference partners will create a working group to take forward the ideas on democratic innovations that were profiled and discussed, to share them more widely with our partner parliaments in developing democracies around the world, and to include innovative tools for citizen participation and deliberative decision-making in our capacity development work.  

If you missed the conference, you can watch the recordings of the sessions on Youtube:

• A role for parliaments in changing representative democracy
• Deliberative democracy: Impact on parliaments
• Covid-19 and the future of parliaments