Delineating Active Citizenship: The Subjectification of Citizens' Initiatives

The ‘green’ and ‘self’ in green self-governance – a study of 264 green space initiatives by citizens

“…Authorities seem to have a preference to deal with initiatives that have objectives corresponding to their own policy aims (van Dam et al, 2015), described as 'cherry picking' by Edelenbos (2005). Initiatives that potentially contribute to these aims will be more likely to receive subsidies, while we see that initiatives engaged in protest are much less likely to do so.…”

“…Besides, current debates on the role of citizens in governance often imply a notion of 'active citizenship' (Moro, 2012;van Dam, Duineveld, & During, 2015). These citizens are not seen as passive subjects of policy, but as actively pursuing their interests.…”

“…However, as van Dam et al (2015) and also show, we have to be aware that authorities and citizens might have conflicting objectives. Our findings underline that citizens might articulate different visions than authorities or even protest against certain policies, which regularly happened.…”

“…Simultaneously, a bigger emphasis on the roles and responsibilities of citizens in green space management arose (ibid.). There is currently more focus on local ownership and active citizenship (van Dam et al, 2015) in the green domain. This puts green self-governance in the spotlight of current policy debates about nature conservation in The Netherlands.…”

Civic initiatives in urban development: self-governance versus self-organisation in planning practice

“…Portugali, 2010;De Roo & Silva, 2010;Batty, 2013;Innes & Booher, 2010) calls for a more profound discussion on the nature and scope of what can be called a complexity-based understanding of self-organisation. More importantly, being able to better distinguish self-governance and self-organisation processes diminishes the possibility that planners will a) undermine the potential of self-organisation processes with plans and policy that lack the capacity to adapt (Zhang et al, 2014), or b) frustrate the potential of self-governance processes by inadequately accommodating these practices (Van Dam et al, 2014, Oude Vrielink & Wijdeveld, 2011. This paper is structured as follows.…”