Our Mission

Engaged Scholarship and Informed Practice
for a Democratic World

Democracy as theory has triumphed over its adversaries. Yet as the 21st century begins, democracy as practice faces daunting challenges. In America and abroad, in established as well as emerging democracies, even as it becomes the only acceptable game in town, the meaning and the fate of democracy have grown uncertain.

The challenges to democracy, especially in times of international violence and economic difficulty, are manifold:

• How can citizen sovereignty compete with consumer sovereignty in a privatizing world dominated by markets?
• How do we protect children, the environment, and labor standards where national competition mandates a "race to the bottom"?
• How will the threat of terrorism, and our response to it, impact civil liberties and an open society?
• How can we accommodate the needs of first world job protection and third world development?
• How do we respond to growing racial and ethnic tensions?
• Can the diverse barriers which block participation be reduced at home and abroad?
• Are democratic practice and effective civic engagement possible without workplace democracy and democratic economic participation and ownership?
• How does a professionalized and specialized higher educational system remain pertinent to education for democracy?
• Is a bottom-up political system possible in a globalizing, top-down political world?
• How are citizens to be decision-makers where technical questions of science and finance dominate the political agenda and economic decisions are made behind closed doors?
• Can centralized power be made accountable to local participation and civic engagement?

The Democracy Collaborative aspires to address these democratic dilemmas in theoretical and practical ways. It brings together an international consortium of more than 20 of the world's leading academic centers and citizen engagement organizations, hosted and sponsored by the University of Maryland and the leadership of a group of eminent scholars with extensive civic and political experience in the real world. With funding and counsel from major philanthropic and civic institutions, The Democracy Collaborative is developing into a global, free-standing, nonprofit institute committed to strengthening democracy and civil society locally, nationally, and globally.

Programs and projects already underway include a survey of democracy's status in selected areas across the world; an examination of global civil society as impacted by technology, the arts, markets, and governance that extends across two working roundtables in Washington and Berlin; a new training and education program that brings together scholars and democratic activists; a national civic education project; an initiative to develop a framework for a Public Telecommunications Service which could support public uses of new technologies and ensure that major areas of cyberspace are reserved for public and civic uses; a conference on persistent domestic and international wealth gaps among different races and classes of people and mechanisms and policies for assuring substantive opportunities for all citizens to participate in wealth accumulation; and a survey of "what works" in encouraging higher levels of civic engagement in communities.

The mission of The Democracy Collaborative is defined first of all by the belief that, as practice must inform theory, theory must also inform practice; and that the democratic deficit is in part the consequence of a deficit in progressive democratic imagination. Third way thinking, private-public partnerships, community-level institutional innovation, ideals of global governance, business-friendly models of public justice compete as fresh avenues of thought. But they do not yet constitute a new democratic paradigm capable of sustaining citizens in an age of globalization, north/south inequalities, and a network society dominated by technology and the new information economy. The conceptual and practical work involved in establishing and testing a fresh democratic paradigm is one of the defining objectives of the Collaborative.

A fundamental goal is to catalyze and dramatize a powerful vision of what can be done, and the power that might be unleashed, when the university – one of the most important institutions in every society – works with renewed commitment hand-in-hand with engaged citizens. For this vision to be realized, the work of the Collaborative depends on developing and helping further a conception of the university that regards itself as a resource not only for its faculty and students but for the local, national, and global communities that constitute its civic environment. The University of Maryland's commitment to modeling itself as an "engaged university" is a key premise of our work.