Community energy can be conceptualized as a social movement, which aims to develop a sustainable, democratic, and localist energy system. Community energy organizations often take the form of cooperatives and strive for a high level of participation at the neighborhood level. Recently, community energy …

On Saturday the 2nd of July, students and researchers of the NoorderRuimte Research Center organized a participatory event, in collaboration with the local citizen initiative Duurzaam Oosterpark. They exchanged information with local citizens about the main housing types in the district and how they …

In this paper, we apply a civic perspective and social innovation theory to examine how residents of a Dutch village experiencing rural depopulation and austerity reforms evaluate a civic initiative aimed at improving liveability, and what explains their evaluation. Using multivariate statistical analysis, …

Citizens have responded to newcomers in the Netherlands with acts of solidarity and programmes to support integration, often in response to increasingly restrictive government policies. In a previously published study by the primary author, a critical discourse analysis was conducted of texts used in …

In cities worldwide, tools for citizen-centric local initiatives to facilitate collaboration and joint decision-making are deployed as alternatives to the use of large corporate social media platforms such as Facebook. These community platforms often aim to empower users and enable civic participation …

Dutch citizens collaborate more and more together, and the number of (small) initiatives are increasing. Due to this increasing number of initiatives, the relationship between citizens’ initiatives and the (local) government becomes more necessary and creates new possibilities and opportunities. The …

After the arrival of refugees in the Netherlands, many citizens wanted to act and help the social inclusion of refugees. Community initiatives emerged where some of the initiatives even grew into potential Social Enterprises. In this research we investigated the main issues initiatives around refugees …

"In recent years, the former Dutch welfare state has been transformed into a participation society [1]. As support from the government decreases, citizens are increasingly expected to be self-managing. Since not everyone is able to be self-managing, there is an increasing demand for help offered by volunteers. …

Emerging during the negotiations for the unratified Constitutional Treaty and officially launched with the Treaty of Lisbon, the European Citizens' Initiative allows citizens to invite the European Commission to propose legislation to the European Parliament and the Council based on an idea which gathers …

In the shift towards the Big Society, it is widely proclaimed that citizen participation and citizens’ initiatives are indispensable to maintaining services that used to be run by local or regional governments. Despite the increased interest in citizens’ initiatives, research has scarcely debated what …