The PRISMA reporting standard is the most commonly used set of guidelines for reporting the literature reviews and meta-analyses (Fink 2014).
Although different case studies of citizen initiatives and their potential outcomes have been performed in various disciplines, (e.g., Aladuwaka and Momsen 2010 Newman 2007), to our knowledge, there is not any literature that compares these studies in order to generate systematic and coherent overview.īased on the above limitations in current research and societal relevance of citizen initiatives, we aim to present a systematic overview of what is known about citizen initiatives in existing studies, by focusing on the following research question: Regarding these topics, the current literature falls short in demonstrating the evidence-based knowledge on outcomes of citizen initiatives and on the factors impacting these outcomes. We therefore need to know more about what citizen initiatives actually are (main characteristics), what they actually perform/bring about and what factors determine their outcomes (cf. Their initiatives become alternatives to governmental public service delivery. However, citizen initiatives take an important part in the world of politics and public administration as in modern society, citizens not only have more capacities and resources (knowledge, time, etc.) to bring public services and deal with public issues, but they also have given more room from governments to organize such services themselves. 2015).Īlthough the self-organizing role of citizens has gained a significant societal relevance, less systematic attention has been paid to this phenomenon in administrative sciences, which is dominated by a focus on mainstream participation processes and coproduction (Edelenbos and Van Meerkerk 2016 Voorberg et al. Citizen initiatives also differ from regular coproduction, because citizens take the lead as initiators, and government acts as follower or facilitator instead of citizens being involved in the production process under (strict) conditions and frameworks set by governments (Brandsen and Honingh 2016 McLennon 2018 Voorberg et al. As such, citizen initiatives differ from the politically oriented, more passive, ballot initiatives, which include public voting or forcing legislative bodies to consider subjects of the initiatives.
#CITIZENS 2.0.17 TRAITS FULL#
In Arnstein’s famous ladder of citizen participation ( 1969), citizen initiatives can normatively be placed at the highest level of citizen power, citizen control, meaning citizens being in full charge of a specific program or institution. In the literature, we see that citizen initiatives are often approached as a specific form of citizen participation (Arnstein 1969) and co-creation (Voorberg et al. In some countries, like the Netherlands and the UK, economic and political uncertainties have led to public retrenchments and receding governments, which at the same time have embraced a political ideology that sees community self-strength as answer for societal problems (e.g., Brandsen et al.
Although in Western Europe the government is still the primary provider of public goods, some governments increasingly aim to shift this responsibility to the community. It is especially the changing role of the state that has increased the current attention for citizen initiatives (cf. They often arise as self-reliance responses to the failure of the state and market to provide public goods (Teasdale 2012) and fill the gap caused by receding governments. Citizens control the aims, means, and actual implementation of their activities, but they often link to governments and other formal institutions, as their work field contains public domain and they, therefore, find themselves in institutionalized settings (Bakker and Denters 2012 Edelenbos and Van Meerkerk 2016 Healey 2015). In this research, we refer to their activities with the concept of citizen initiatives, which is a form of self-organization in which citizens mobilize energy and resources to collectively define and carry out projects aimed at providing public goods or services for their community. 2013), and grassroots initiatives (Ornetzeder and Rohracher 2013). These initiatives are named in different ways in the literature, such as social enterprises (Cheng 2015 Teasdale 2012), self-organization (Anttila and Stern 2005 Van Meerkerk et al. With their initiatives, citizens often have the ambition to form a durable cooperation and they have a hands-on approach (Edelenbos and Van Meerkerk 2016).
They take matters into their own hands by tackling wicked issues, such as urban revitalization, well-being, and sustainability. Nowadays citizens contributing to the provision of public services and goods have become a marked trend in Western states (e.g., Bailey 2012 Healey 2015).
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