Co-Creating Green Transition: How Municipality Employees Negotiate their Professional Identities as Agents of Citizen Involvement in a Cross-Local Setting

Abstract

ABSTRACT Citizen involvement plays an important role in many governmental and municipal attempts towards green transition, reflecting a departure from a deficit model of public communication towards participatory ambitions of engaging citizens. Recently, the notion of co-creation or co-production has gained importance as a way of conceptualizing and organizing citizen involvement. The current study examines how four municipality partners in Sweden and Denmark embark on a common project on citizen involvement and co-creation as an avenue to green transition, addressing private decisions of individual citizens or families where the municipality has no legislative competence. By analysing how several local authorities with different but similar challenges negotiate and jointly identify themselves as agents of citizen involvement, the study offers an upscaling to what may be termed the plura-local level. Analytically, the study takes a discourse approach, combining close readings of texts and talk with an interdiscursive and diachronic analysis.