Speaker
Description
As cities worldwide face growing social challenges such as socioeconomic segregation or climate injustices, engaging citizens in urban planning and development is considered increasingly important. Involving local communities not only leads to better understandings of local needs and potentially more effective plans, meaningful citizen-planner dialogues might also to help to foster trust and to enhance social cohesion (Othengrafen et al, 2024). A common challenge of participatory practices, however, is that they remain situational and need to be scaled up to sustain and to make a wider impact. One potential solution is to shape institutional conditions that support sustainable citizen engagement within broader governance structures.
While various studies reporting on institutional conditions for citizen engagement depart from public perspectives, contemporary European urban transformations often involve both public, private and civic actors. Although market actors are often seen as actors merely incentivized by maximizing profit, regulatory frames such as ESG policy at the European level motivate investors and financers in urban development to create social value or ‘to make a social impact’. This shift has led market parties such as real estate developers, housing developers or housing associations developing programs in which they operationalize livability, resident wellbeing or social equity goals – often through citizen engagement approaches. However, given that citizen engagement is relatively new to many market parties, the question occurs to what extent they possess sufficient institutional capacity to practice citizen engagement in an inclusive and meaningful way.
This article presents an in-depth analysis of two cases of citizen engagement practice in the Netherlands in which multiple public, private and civic actors collaborate with citizens to address urban livability aspects. The cases comprise a neighborhood evaluation project initiated by a real estate and construction company on the one hand, and a neighborhood upgrading program initiated by a housing association (in the Netherlands: a non-for-profit market party) on the other hand. The analysis explores how institutional capacity of the various public and private actors involved affect citizen engagement by distinguishing knowledge resources, relational resources and mobility capacity (Healey et al., 2003; Innes & Booher, 2003). Findings reveal how ‘formal’ capacity aspects such as policies, funding, administrative structures, and assessment methods influence the way that collaborations and citizen engagement are performed but also emphasize how ‘informal’ capacity aspects such values, beliefs and habits play a significant role in terms of meaningfulness. By empirically observing the role of market actors in citizen engagement amidst other public and civic actors, this article provides a better understanding of collaborative governance as a way forward in increasing the social value of cities.
References
Healey, P., de Magalhaes, C., Madanipour, A. & Pendlebury, J. (2003) Place, Identity and local politics: Analysing initiatives in deliberative governance, in: M. Hajer (Ed.) Deliberative Policy Analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network Society, pp. 60–87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Innes, J. & Booher, D. (2003) Collaborative policy making: Governance through dialogue, in: M. Hajer (Ed.) Deliberative Policy analysis: Understanding Governance in the Network Society. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Othengrafen, F., Herrmann, S., Pencic, D., & Lazarevski, S. (Eds.). (2024) Social Cohesion and Resilience through Citizen Engagement: A Place-Based Approach. Edward Elgar Publishing.
| Keywords | institutional capacity, participatory approaches, citizen engagement, collaborative governance, private actors |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
