Socio-Centered Democratic Experimentations in the Ontoepistemic Expansion of Politics Experienced in Everyday Life

In Brazil as in other Latin American countries, national specificities aside, periods of so-called progressive governments encourage the use of institutionalized action tactics that incorporate social movements and their political agendas. Despite advances, such tactics have proven incapable of capturing the demands of vast segments of a traditionally excluded population and of empowering participatory institutions.

In this paper, we will reflect on the concept of socio-centered democratic experiments (SDE), which are constructed outside of institutionality, revealing the path of onto-epistemic expansion of the notion of politics that led us to identify them as experiences of radical and substantive democracy in the daily life of community. SDE´s encompass a set of emerging and insurgent practices that are autonomously constructed and managed, based on counter-hegemonic epistemes and alternative deliberative formats (Giannella and Ferrarini, 2024).

In addition to a broad bibliographic review of authors from the epistemic South (some from the geographic North) in the political field and democratic experimentalism, the methodology consists of a multiple case study of SDE´s in the context of the global South, notably in Latin America, involving nine ESDs in four countries: Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador and Cuba. The identification, categorization and preliminary analysis of the SDE´s revealed the existence of three types, with their specificities: contemporary collectives; popular struggles and social movements; and traditional communities.

We conclude that SDE´s, by not orbiting around the State, remain invisible or undervalued in their potential for democratic expansion. However, they simultaneously create, restore and reinvent practices and knowledge of a lived substantive democracy, reveal ways of strengthening local democracy and indicate political powers and public innovations for new participatory cycles.

GIANNELLA, V.; FERRARINI, A. V. (2024) Cocriação de espaços políticos entre diferentes: uma experimentação democrática em Porto Alegre. Revista Brasileira de Políticas Públicas e Internacionais, v. 9, n. 1 (in press).