From incidental to integral: strategies to advance to higher levels of design integration in public organizations

Around the world, public organizations are experimenting with design to address presentday’s complex societal issues. These experiments are generally conducted in a lab or by external design agencies, i.e. separated from the daily operations of the organization. The impact of these experiments has thus far been limited. One of the reasons for this is that these experiments essentially sideline design from the get-go, thereby curbing its potential impact. Correspondingly, it is increasingly recognized that the potential of design is better realized if it becomes a more integral part of the way of working of public organizations. Although there are several models and perspectives on what design integration actually means, there is little knowledge about how to achieve this. In this study, a set of strategies was identified to support the advancement of design to higher levels of integration in public organizations. As such, this study offers theoretical and practical insights that are essential for realizing the potential of design for public issues

Diverging Ambitions and Instruments for Citizen Participation across Different Stages in Green Infrastructure Projects

Both theory and practice increasingly argue that creating green infrastructure in order to make cities climate-proof requires joint public service delivery across the green infrastructure’s lifecycle. Accordingly, citizen participation in each green infrastructure project stage is required, but the type of participation may differ. So far, limited research has been conducted to detangle how participation in green infrastructure projects is operationalised along the different project stages. This article, therefore, presents a comparative case study of nine European green infrastructure projects, in which we aim to determine: (1) how participatory ambitions may differ across green infrastructure project phases; and (2) which instruments are used to realise the participatory ambitions for each phase and whether these instruments differ across stages. The cases demonstrate different participation ambitions and means in the three project phases distinguished in this article (i.e., design, delivery, and maintenance). The design and maintenance stages resulted in high participation ambitions using organisational instruments (e.g., living labs, partnerships with community groups) and market-based instruments (e.g., open calls). In the delivery phase, participation ambitions decreased significantly in our cases, relying on legal instruments (e.g., statutory consultation) and communicative instruments (e.g., community events). Altogether, our exploratory study helps to define participation across the green infrastructure lifecycle: Early stages focus on creating shared commitment that legitimises the green infrastructure, while later stages are also driven by instrumental motives (lowering management costs). Although theory argues for profound participation in the delivery stage as well, our cases show the contrary. Future research can assess this discrepancy