Between Big Ideas and Daily Realities – The roles and perspectives of Danish municipal green space managers on public involvement in green space maintenance

Abstract

Public involvement (PI) in green space maintenance activities has increased during the past decades. The various (potential) benefits of PI have been recognised. Denmark, however, has no established tradition for such activities, despite its well-established tradition of volunteering. Local authorities have traditionally been the sovereign entity within public green space management, reflecting a hierarchical mode of governance. Yet, an increased call for new forms of local democracy and for new governance modes has resulted in growing attention for PI practices. Hence more knowledge is needed, for example on ongoing changes in governance arrangements regarding municipal green space.This paper thus aims to gain insight into (a) current governance arrangements with respect to municipal green space maintenance as well as temporal changes in these and (b) the consequences of the former for governmental actors and municipal managers in particular. An analytical framework based on governance theory and the Policy Arrangement Approach was developed to meet these aims. Data was collected by means of selected semi-structured interviews with green space managers from ten Danish municipalities.Findings show that green space PI occurred in all ten municipalities and thus that governance arrangements had started to include non-government actors, signalling a possible shift to co-governance from more common hierarchical governance modes. Green space managers felt themselves often ill-prepared for new governance arrangements and PI, e.g. in terms of lack of training and expertise. They based themselves strongly on their own experiences and preferences. More responsibility had been allocated to citizens, but often only to a select group of those who were already organised and/or had good connections with local authorities (i.e. closed co-governance). Green space managers listed a number of benefits of PI, generally adhering to the prevailing discourse of more co-governance. However, they also noted a number of challenges, including discrepancies between current maintenance practices and more PI. These, as well as a wider understanding of changing governance arrangements in green space management and maintenance, need to be addressed in future research.