When the South and East Teach the North: Multidirectional Learning in Local Democratic Innovation

Comparative research on local government has long rested on an implicit hierarchy of knowledge: the Global North is typically portrayed as the source of institutional models, while the Global South, and, similarly, post-socialist and non-Western polities, are framed as recipients or followers of Western templates. This panel challenges these asymmetries by asking: what can established democracies learn from democratic and governance innovations developed in the South and the East?
Our starting point is the concept of multidirectional learning, drawing on scholarship on policy transfer, mobilities and translation (Dolowitz & Marsh 2000; Stone 2012; McCann & Ward 2011; Temenos & McCann 2013), as well as the “Southern turn” in urban and governance research (Watson 2009; Robinson 2006) and efforts to theorise the “Global East” and de-westernise the study of governance (Müller 2020; Tuvikene 2016; Roy & Ong 2011). We focus on the circulation of local democratic innovations along South-North and East-West trajectories that conventional accounts often overlook.
Such trajectories are increasingly visible: participatory budgeting travelled from Porto Alegre to European municipalities (Sintomer, Herzberg & Röcke 2008; Baiocchi & Ganuza 2017; Cabannes 2004), while civic-tech innovations associated with Estonia, Taiwan and South Korea have informed practices elsewhere. Likewise, Central and Eastern European experiences of democratic stress offer important lessons to older democracies.
We invite comparative contributions examining how local, regional and national levels interact in processes of policy learning, translation and adaptation. Particular attention is given to regional and intermediate tiers as mediators of policy mobility (Hooghe & Marks 2003), and to the conditions under which innovations emerging from institutional constraint, informality, post-socialist transformation or democratic uncertainty become sources of learning elsewhere (Smith 2009; Elstub & Escobar 2019).
The panel asks: When does South-to-North and East-to-West learning occur? Who enables it? What is transformed through translation? And can multidirectional learning foster a more plural understanding of local democracy and multilevel governance? Rather than simply reversing conventional policy-transfer hierarchies, we seek to rethink the geography of democratic knowledge itself and challenge the assumption that theory and innovation radiate from a single Western core (Gagnon & Abrams 2025; Chakrabarty 2000).