Boosting Economic Democracy

FEPS, in partnership with Open Society Foundations, has launched an initiative on Economic Democracy with the aim of exploring and spreading best practices and strategies to build people power in the economic domain.  

The initiative will study experiences of democratic transformation in economic, employment and public administration domains in order to understand the driving factors and successful strategies that result in the transfer of economic power to people – to build up a “theory of change” and to identify economic policy strategies that put economics at the service of the society.

The seminar was devoted to the discussion of the conceptual part of the study and of potential case studies.

The seminar discussed: 

• What are the features of economic democracy? How do we distinguish democratic economic policies from the rest? 
• How to make economic policies transformative by changing power relations?
• Who should drive the democratic economic transformation and how to organize it?
• How should governments and public authorities adapt their processes to ensure more democratic oversight and participation in key socio-economic areas? 

The study was presented by the team of researchers from the University of Glasgow: Dr. Andrew Cumbers (Professor of Political Economy), Dr. Karen Bilsland (Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour) and Dr Robert McMaster (Professor of Political Economy).

For more information about this event, please contact Thainá Leite, FEPS Project Officer, at thaina.leite@feps-europe.eu and Anna Kolesnichenko, FEPS Policy Analyst on Economy, at anna.kolesnichenko@feps-europe.eu.