Given the urgency of global energy transition, small- and medium-sized cities often undergo rapid changes. What is often missing, however, is a better understanding of how residents of those places perceive, and relate to the various aspects of local energy transition process and spatial outcomes. This …

This research aims to offer insight into the perspectives of people from two distinct groups who are concerned about the international social-environmental practices of one company and affected through its factory work and impact on their living environment. One group is the activist citizen initiative, …

Community energy can be conceptualized as a social movement, which aims to develop a sustainable, democratic, and localist energy system. Community energy organizations often take the form of cooperatives and strive for a high level of participation at the neighborhood level. Recently, community energy …

On Saturday the 2nd of July, students and researchers of the NoorderRuimte Research Center organized a participatory event, in collaboration with the local citizen initiative Duurzaam Oosterpark. They exchanged information with local citizens about the main housing types in the district and how they …

Citizens have responded to newcomers in the Netherlands with acts of solidarity and programmes to support integration, often in response to increasingly restrictive government policies. In a previously published study by the primary author, a critical discourse analysis was conducted of texts used in …

In cities worldwide, tools for citizen-centric local initiatives to facilitate collaboration and joint decision-making are deployed as alternatives to the use of large corporate social media platforms such as Facebook. These community platforms often aim to empower users and enable civic participation …

Designed, organized and facilitated a co-creation (online) event with the members of the local citizen initiative "GroeneBruggenBouwers" of Hoogkerk. The main focus of the event was exchanging feedback with the participants on the preliminary results of a Q subjectivity analysis conducted in Hoogkerk, …

In the last decade, the number of local energy initiatives (LEIs) has increased in western European countries. Although several success factors and barriers in the development of LEIs have been studied by other scholars, there has been limited scholarly interest in the overall impact of LEIs so far. …

In the shift towards the Big Society, it is widely proclaimed that citizen participation and citizens’ initiatives are indispensable to maintaining services that used to be run by local or regional governments. Despite the increased interest in citizens’ initiatives, research has scarcely debated what …