Mobilizing Design for Governance

This Research Topic aims to develop the relationship between political science and design. It examines how public design, design-led governance and policy interventions are mobilized across regions and governance contexts, and how their political meaning is reshaped through processes of adaptation and institutionalization. Design approaches such as co- design, service design, systemic and transition design, and public design are increasingly embedded within public sector innovation, civic participation initiatives, and institutional experimentation. To understand their governance effects, it is critical to examine how design interventions are adopted, adapted, and transformed as they move across institutional and political contexts.Situated within the scope of Frontiers in Political Science, this Research Topic positions design as a political practice that actively participates in shaping governance structures and systems over time. Public design interventions are mobilized through networks of institutions, experts, funders, and civic actors, where they are selectively reconfigured. These processes reveal how interventions evolve over time, as their meanings and forms are negotiated within different governance settings. It asks how design practices carry implicit political assumptions and how those assumptions are upheld, transformed, subverted, or resisted in new settings. In some cases, design-led governance interventions expand civic capacity, seek depolarization, and increase institutional learning. In others, they become absorbed into managerial logic, obscure real participation, and reinforce existing power asymmetries. Contributors are invited to explore how public design interventions are mobilized across regions and scales, from local municipalities to national or transnational governance arrangements. For example, participatory processes established under one political administration may be retained by subsequent regimes but redirected toward different political priorities, altering their democratic function. Similarly, participatory methods developed in grassroots contexts may be adopted by public institutions in ways that preserve their form while diluting their redistributive intent. Therefore, we encourage submissions that examine the circulation of participatory governance models, civic technologies, arts and community civic projects, climate policy prototypes, public service reforms, or institutional design experiments. Comparative work is particularly encouraged, including historical analyses that trace design interventions across multiple sites or examine uneven outcomes between the Global North and Global South.The issue welcomes theoretical and methodological contributions that engage democratic theory, design theory, comparative politics, political economy, science and technology studies to advance new ways of studying governance in motion through design. Examining how design interventions are translated, reshaped, and operationalized across contexts reveals how their governance effects depend not only on their structure, but on the relational, institutional, and political conditions in which they are embedded.Questions and Provocations for Authors• How do design-led policy interventions reconfigure power, authority, and legitimacy as they are mobilized across regional and institutional contexts?• What political assumptions about democracy, participation, and expertise are embedded in public design practices, and how are these assumptions contested or transformed across regions?• When does the mobilization of design strengthen democratic capacity, and when does it contribute to depoliticization or managerial capture?• How do experimental civic interventions become institutionalized within governance systems?• How do situated actors adapt, resist, or strategically reinterpret externally developed design frameworks within existing and emerging governance systems?• What methodological approaches from a political science perspective develop to study governance as a set of design practices continually in motion? • What are cases of design interventions that have changed as they move across political, cultural, and institutional contexts, and what are the implications for designers working in public design?• What new methodological approaches are needed to study governance as an evolving and distributed design process? Topic editors: Sofia Bosch Gomez, Erica Dorn Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/78419/mobilizing-design-for-governance