Unleashing or domesticating the vitality of citizens' initiatives? The paradoxical relationship between governments and citizens' initiatives in the energy transition

In their quest to create vital cities, West European city governments stimulate citizens to self-organize in citizens' initiatives. This trend it accompanied by conflicting scientific and governmental discourses: on the one hand, citizens' initiatives are praised for giving ‘power to the people’, on the other hand, citizens' initiatives are understood as mere ‘tools’ to roll-out government policies. By adopting a critical-constructive perspective, this study sets out to better understand the paradoxical attitudes of local governments toward the potential of CIs for stimulating urban vitality. We do so by uncovering patterns that explain the opening and closing of spaces for citizens to develop their initiatives. To this end, we conducted an in-depth case study into the relation between the local government and citizens initiatives in the energy transition in Rotterdam (the Netherlands). Our findings reveal that a configuration of different explanatory mechanisms leads to the ‘domestication’ of initiatives, which jeopardizes their unique transformative potential that can contribute to the vitality of cities.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Organisation & Governanc

Un-Dutching the Delta Approach: network management and policy translation for effective policy transfer

This study identifies network management as a facilitator of effective policy transfer. We reconstruct the unconventional collaboration between Dutch private-sector experts and national governments of Vietnam and Bangladesh to develop multi-sectoral, long-term strategies (‘delta plans’). We identify the network management strategies used by the Dutch actors and use these to explain how problem perceptions of state and non-state actors were aligned in order to define solution pathways. Based on these cases, we argue that network analysis is a tool for policy transfer studies. This paper further concludes that the ‘soft’ nature of the transferred policy (in the form of principles, norms and ideas) increased its transferability, as being ambiguous and abstract left room for interpretation and translation to the local context.Organisation and Governanc

De Pilotparadox: De keerzijde van succes

Policy Analysi