What Makes for Successful Citizens' Initiatives? 1

Throughout the Western industrialized world the current economic crisis has contributed to a reconsideration of the balance between state and society. Perhaps this is most strikingly illustrated by the “Big Society” catch-phrase that the British Conservative Party started using during the run up to the 2010 UK general elections. The Conservative party leader David Cameron in his speeches emphasized the need to “say goodbye to big government and welcome instead the active citizen” (Cameron, 2009). In such a vision citizens' initiatives (CIs) can contribute to a “post-bureaucratic age” in which power from the central state will be redistributed to “individuals, families and local communities” (Cameron, 2010). CIs – in which people in communities collectively engage in the provision of collective or quasi-collective goods and services – are considered as an attractive alternative for big government. This is not only the case in the UK. In the Netherlands for example three major advisory boards of the national government in 2011/2012 published reports about the promises of CIs (WRR, 2012; Boer & Lans, 2011; ROB, 2012). And in 2013 the new Dutch King, on behalf of the current coalition government of prime-minister Mark Rutte, in his first speech from the throne expressed trust in the capacity of active citizens’ to take responsibility for their own fate and for the future of their communities. Citizens, individually or collectively, should be entrusted with the responsibility for their own future and be allowed to make decisions about their own life and their living environment.