Citizen-driven Initiatives Research Articles

Communication, socialization, and ITC. The psychosocial construction of sustainability.

Over the past two decades, the facets related to environmental crises (in the plural) have grown increasingly intricate. What began as environmentalists' apprehension over nature degradation and the encouragement of citizen-driven initiatives has evolved. The current shift in emphasis and prevailing message strives to foster a culture where citizens refrain from independent initiatives. Instead, the directive is to heed the guidance of the knowledgeable (scientists, politicians, corporations, interest groups, etc.), as substantiated by our investigative findings, which align, in part, with existing literature. Conversely, our exploration into environmental communication, notably the insights gleaned from longitudinal research concerning pro-environmental knowledge, attitudes, and actions, reveals a decline in citizens' effective inclinations toward embracing pro-environmental behaviors. Meanwhile, the escalation of the climate crisis is fueling heightened levels of echo-anxiety and solastalgia. This trajectory is closely intertwined with a growing global disillusionment within society - not just regarding the future - instilling a sense of disillusionment concerning pro-environmental messages and slogans disseminated by governing bodies and corporations. This has led to a state resembling learned helplessness, as articulated by Seligman, or what we prefer to term "induced" helplessness, rather than fostering conditions conducive to empowerment. This article comprehensively examines various reports and our inquiries, revealing how communication management and its constituents lie at the heart of forging novel narratives, fresh cognitive dissonances, and emerging social representations. Notably emphasized is the pivotal role played by information and communication technologies (ICT), particularly through dissemination on widely-used social networks. Since the 2010s, these platforms have assumed a paramount role in shaping socialization processes, surpassing educational institutions and conventional mass media.

Earth System at Risk: Challenging Environmental (In)Justice

Earth System at Risk: Challenging Environmental (In)Justice

Scale Compromise: Three Challenges of Large-Scale but Citizen-Driven Urban Planning

Amongst various urban crises, some fundamental ones require long-term policies and large-scale developments to be effectively mitigated. Since multiple government-led large-scale projects raised more and more public opposition, the question whether such grand endeavors can be approached by citizen-driven initiatives became urgent. However, large-scale urban planning issues are still believed to be too big, too complex, and too difficult to be solved from the bottom up. This paper examines such recurring belief—here termed the “scale compromise”—and conceptualizes it across two essential dimensions of urban planning: spatial and political. The scale compromise is presented twofold, as each side of the compromise is embedded within a separate strand of urban planning practice: large-scale urban planning as traditionally associated with the authority-led approach, and citizen-driven urbanism as traditionally linked with locality. Regarding each approach, respectively, the causes, consequences, and difficulties of the scale compromise are discussed from both perspectives. Finally, by breaking down the resulting compromise across three integral aspects of planning—the socio-economic, organizational, and technical—the “scale compromise” conceptual framework indicates three scale-related challenges. Accordingly, this paper argues why all the three challenges must be met concurrently, as failing at one squanders the efforts made for the others. Finally, some recent experience in the development of urban greenway projects in the U.S. are discussed as promising points of reference for dealing with the scale compromise and for seeking new solutions to fundamental urban crisis.

The management of visibility in digital diplomacy: Infrastructures and techniques

The proliferation of new media has been hailed by academics and practitioners worldwide as a revolution in the conduct of international relations, with dialogical, reconciliatory, and democratizing potentials. Several years later, however, the evidence for such progressive potentialities is scarce. To better understand the actualized role of social media in international politics and deepen our understanding of the potentialities for progressive politics online, this article examines several examples of digital diplomacy initiatives by state and non-state actors. These examples highlight the growing political significance of online visibility management techniques — i.e., the various techno-political interventions by which actors attempt to make their messages accessible on online platforms. While early citizen-driven initiatives, such as the ‘Israel-Loves-Iran’ Facebook campaign, focused on strategic content production as a means to enhance their online visibility, later initiatives, such as the public-private partnership ‘4IL’, directed their efforts towards connectivity manipulation using medium-specific techniques which contest the visibility of others. This article concludes by arguing that fulfilling the progressive potentialities of digital diplomacy in this political terrain would not only require complementing content production with an effective engagement with the visibility arrangements of the platforms, but also a critical analytics of techno-social inclusions and exclusions, which this dual task generates.

Shared roles and responsibilities in flood risk management

The need for communities to be more resilient to flood risk is well recognised, and there is much debate about how this can be best achieved. In her editorial in December 2018, Journal of Flood Risk Management (JFRM) Associate Editor Burrell Montz raised the important question of what a resilient community might look like and how progress towards resilience can be measured (Montz, 2018). The importance of assisting and empowering at-risk communities to understand and manage their flooding has arguably never been greater, with increasing populations residing in flood-prone areas as well as flood risk altering due to climate and land use changes. Furthermore, as well as the long-recognised physical, social, and financial damages of flooding, there is also stronger evidence about the breadth, severity, and duration of health impacts (Waite et al., 2017), thus reinforcing the need for effective flood risk management. In reality, however, in most circumstances, the responsibility for flooding is shared, including between national, regional, and local governments; insurance markets; private individuals; and businesses at risk. Solidarity has long been present within flood risk management; however, despite collective approaches being common and longstanding, the nature of shared responsibilities in many areas is shifting. The nature of risk management has changed, with broader calls for Integrated Flood Risk Management (European Union, 2007, 2013; World Meteorological Organisation, 2009) and with flood risk closely connecting to many other sectors (e.g., water resources, agriculture, housing, incident response) and government priorities (e.g., economic growth, climate change adaptation). There is a greater emphasis on working in partnership between those with statutory or voluntary responsibilities for managing flood risk and preferred approaches being those that are intersectoral and can deliver multiple societal benefits. In many countries, flood risk management continues to become more professionalised, and official roles and responsibilities are expanding to encompass a broader suite of actors, some of whom work at the core of managing flood risk and others at the periphery. A joint approach offers many opportunities to assist those affected by flood risk and shares the burden, but presents additional challenges associated with multiagency and multilevel working and the ability to offer coordinated, rather than contradictory, actions. Many questions are raised about how to effectively and efficiently manage flood risk while accounting for the sharing of responsibilities, such as: are roles and responsibilities for flood risk management clear and understood? What are the most appropriate mechanisms for actors to cooperate? And how do we deliver best multiple benefits when there are competing priorities and timescales? There is a growing body of research that examines flood risk governance (e.g., see volume 11[3] of the JFRM; Djalante, 2012, Ward, Pauw, van Buuren, & Marfai, 2013), which begins to answer these questions and considers processes for joint working and decision-making (e.g., coproduction (Mees, Alexander, Matczak, Gralepois, & Mees, 2018), citizen-driven initiatives (Seebauer, Ortner, Babcicky, & Thaler, 2018), and bridging mechanisms (Gilissen, Alexander, Matczak, Pettersson, & Bruzzone, 2016)). Indeed, two papers in this issue relate directly to this topic; Henstra, Thistlethwaite, Brown, and Scott (2018) explore the understanding of Canadian citizens about how flood risk responsibilities are distributed, whereas Busscher, van den Brink, and Verweij (2018) present recommendations for combined objectives and codesign processes for the better integration of spatial planning and water management in the Netherlands. Flood risk management is clearly one policy area where there is the requirement for effective multilevel governance to better manage shared responsibilities. Importantly, we should be mindful of those who remain at the heart of any management decision: those living with flood risk. How well are they able to navigate this increasingly complex system of flood risk management delivery? There is a need to ensure that individuals are able to understand their own roles and responsibilities, are able to effect decision-making, and are empowered to take action to be more resilient. What is clear is that, despite differences in how flood risk responsibilities are shared and how management is organised, there are many flood risk professionals, other stakeholders, individual residents, businesses, and others tirelessly working to reduce risk and increase resilience in all aspects of flood risk management. It is this broad group that the research presented in the JFRM serves (e.g., from improving flood forecasting (Tomasella et al., 2018) to discussions of recovery support (Ge, Li, Li, & Xing, 2017)). Since the inception of the journal over a decade ago, it has encouraged practice-relevant contributions, and this remains pertinent today with the expanding flood risk management community. I challenge authors to identify and target the growing range of actors interested in flood risk management when making recommendations about the policy or practice relevance of their research.

Bottom‑up citizen initiatives in natural hazard management: Why they appear and what they can do?

In the face of increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather events due to climate change, merely top-down governance approaches are increasingly found inadequate and ineffective. Recent climate change adaptation policy strives to promote bottom-up, citizen-driven initiatives to improve local resilience. How and under what conditions citizens may engage in collective action remains unclear, however. We employ a mixed-methods approach in Eastern Tyrol, Austria, combining stakeholder workshops with a survey of 216 citizens at risk. Results show that bottom-up citizen initiatives can provide multiple benefits, such as increasing risk awareness and local adaptive capacities. While citizens are open-minded to assuming a broad range of activities and responsibilities, local stakeholders in natural hazard management prefer to limit civic engagement to support roles, mostly during recovery from a natural hazard event. Citizen initiatives tend to emerge in communities with weak institutional capital. This may lead to conflicts with existing institutions over allocation of competences and power. Contrastingly, social and human forms of capital support the formation of initiatives; however, low willingness of citizens to assume leadership positions may be a bottleneck for sustained initiatives. Public administration and emergency organisations should address current institutional barriers. They should empower and allow citizens to act autonomously.

Infiltrating citizen-driven initiatives for sustainability

ABSTRACTTo examine how citizen-driven initiatives for sustainability strive to bring about change and spread their practices, efforts to link social movement, grassroots innovation and green-consumption movements theory are built upon. Göteborg’s citizen-driven waste-prevention initiatives, such as food waste recovery, creating common reuse spaces in housing blocks, exchanging used toys and repairing abandoned bicycles, are considered with data from observations, workshops, documents, social media communications and in-depth interviews. Citizen-driven initiatives succeeded in mobilizing material resources, displaying and reframing various rationales, and creating collaborative local networks to develop their waste-prevention practices. These practices infiltrated the municipal administration, matching incipient institutional mandates to minimize waste. By so doing, they bring within mainstream institutions radical rationales that can become activated in the future, contributing to diachronic change.

Abelhas, drones e outras Coisas no espaço público: fazendo estratégias na cidade

In this article we explore some emerging strategizing practices that citizens use for the development of their immediate urban fabric. We make use of our experiences and engagements with two citizen-driven initiatives in Helsinki, the capital of Finland. The first case attempts to rethink uses and actors of public space by creating viable conditions for the emergence of urban gardening in public spaces. The second initiative is engaged in a political discussion of the boundaries of participation, cultural appropriation and ownership of city space. We discuss and reflectively analyze some of their strategizing practices, as forms of infrastructuring, commoning and patchworking. The cases shed light on forms of designing that are enacted collectively through mobilizing particular concerns and caring approaches. We conclude by highlighting aspects made visible in the cases that can give a sense of direction for exercising forms of continuous, open-ended design that are attentive to the collective construction of Things. Keywords: city-making, citizen participation, infrastructuring, patchworking, commoning.

One way traffic: The open data initiative project and the need for an effective demand side initiative in Ghana

In recent years the necessity for governments to develop new public values of openness and transparency, and thereby increase their citizenries' sense of inclusiveness, and their trust in and confidence about their governments, has risen to the point of urgency. The decline of trust in governments, especially in developing countries, has been unprecedented and continuous. A new paradigm that signifies a shift to citizen-driven initiatives over and above state- and market-centric ones calls for innovative thinking that requires openness in government. The need for this new synergy notwithstanding, Open Government cannot be considered truly open unless it also enhances citizen participation and engagement. The Ghana Open Data Initiative (GODI) project strives to create an open data community that will enable government (supply side) and civil society in general (demand side) to exchange data and information. We argue that the GODI is too narrowly focused on the supply side of the project, and suggest that it should generate an even platform to improve interaction between government and citizens to ensure a balance in knowledge sharing with and among all constituencies.

Una crítica general a las reformas político-electorales de 2014 "constitucionales y legales" y una referencia específica a la democracia participativa que regulan

El artículo describe los orígenes de las reformas estructurales en México, abordando temas como la economía, el modelo neoliberal y los acuerdos comerciales internacionales y su afectación en ámbitos como la seguridad nacional, la política exterior, la política de defensa, la seguridad pública, la educación, la política laboral, la polí- tica penal, las telecomunicaciones, la energía, las reglas electorales, etcétera. El autor argumenta que estos temas se subordinan a los organismos internacionales y a las decisiones que se adoptan desde el exterior. De forma más específica se aborda la última reforma constitucional polí- tico-electoral, para lo cual se exponen sus características generales, como el papel del INE, la reelección, las minorías parlamentarias, los medios electró- nicos, la reforma energética y el modelo de desarrollo neoliberal. También se explican las características de las reformas electorales secundarias, y de manera más particular, las características de la Ley General de Partidos. Finalmente, se enfatiza en la democracia participativa, analizando la participación del órgano electoral en las consultas, iniciativas ciudadanas y candidaturas independientes.

Does an Active Use of Mechanisms of Direct Democracy Impact Electoral Participation? Evidence from the U.S. States and the Swiss Cantons

This article investigates the consequences that frequent uses of mechanisms of direct democracy have on electoral turnout, contrasting evidence from the Swiss cantons and states in the United States. It contributes to the existing literature in two senses. First, it constitutes the very first cross-national comparative study on the topic and, therefore, it allows for examination of hypotheses the literature previously advanced for single cases (mostly, but not wholly, confined to the U.S. and Switzerland). Second, in contrast to previous research, it delves into the world of direct democracy and shows that not all MDDs are the same, nor do they have the same political effects in terms of electoral participation. I demonstrate that the previous U.S.-based knowledge does not resist empirical testing when contrasted with Swiss evidence: active use of citizen-driven initiatives have no statistically significant effects on turnout. Nonetheless, voter turnout rates are significantly lower in states and cantons with more top-down measures on the ballot.

MSJAMA. State ballot initiatives for health care reform.

THROUGHOUT THE LAST DECADE, PHYSICIANS IN SEVERAL STATES have used ballot initiatives as a way to become politically active in campaigns intended to return to them some degree of control over their practices and the patientphysician relationship. Ballot initiative campaigns also provide medical students unique opportunities to work with physicians to affect health policy and hone their political advocacy skills. The initiative process, available in 24 states, allows citizens to circumvent the slower legislative process to adopt laws and amend state constitutions. In recent years, the initiative process has been used to advance controversial policies that at times have been blocked or ignored by legislature. In most states, an initiative must be affirmed by a simple majority of voters to carry the force of law. Of the more than 70 citizen-driven initiatives on election ballots in 2000, 11 addressed health care issues, including allocation of tobacco settlement funds, legalizing physicianassisted suicide and medical marijuana, and universal health coverage. One such campaign was the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Ballot Initiative of 2000. This ballot initiative grew out of the discontent of Massachusetts physicians with the use of financial incentives to limit patient care and control costs, the pressure to increase patient volumes as a means to increase profits, and policies that restrict a patient’s freedom to choose or change his or her physicians. A group of 2300 physicians and health professionals drafted a ballot initiative calling for universal health care access, managed care reform, and a moratorium on the conversion of nonprofit hospitals and health plans to for-profit status. In addition to participating in political strategizing and canvassing, medical student interns worked alongside physicians and other volunteers to collect more than 100000 signatures from voters in Massachusetts to secure placement of the initiative on the November 2000 ballot. The measure, despite minimal fundraising and organization, narrowly failed at the polls, with 48% of the vote. In a poll taken about a month before voting, 72% of respondents reported that they supported the initiative. The opponents, including health maintenance organizations, several Massachusetts lawmakers, business associations, and other insurers, spent $5 million on an advertising campaign that portrayed the reforms as flawed, bureaucratic, and costly. The proponents, on the other hand, invested only $100000 in their campaign. Although the initiative did not become law, it helped renew legislative interest in health care reform. Its popularity, combined with other polling data, indicated that health care reform was important to the citizens of Massachusetts and thus prompted the Massachusetts legislature to enact a managed care reform bill that had been stymied in the legislature for more than 3 years. The bill passed by the legislature affirmed the autonomy of physicians to make clinical treatment determinations for their patients which had been restricted by managed care organizations. In addition, it strengthened protection from gag clauses that prevented physicians from discussing with patients the provisions of their health plan. The managed care bill addressed many of the issues cited as contributing to physicians’ perceived erosion of autonomy and dissatisfaction. Although the Massachusetts Health Care Reform Initiative failed at the polls, it was indirectly successful. A wellcrafted and organized initiative campaign may serve as the impetus for lawmakers to more expediently enact important health care legislation. Medical students have also participated in similar ballot initiative campaigns in California in 1994 and Washington in 2000. In the face of corporate interests that usually dominate the initiative process, physicians and medical students have the unique advantage of direct health care experiences. These can be integrated with the political expertise of professional campaign staff to build coalitions, fundraise, advertise, and reach out to voters. Initiatives can be an efficient method for physicians and medical students to influence health care legislation, advance health care reform initiatives, and draw attention to policy issues that affect medical practice and patient-physician relationships.