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This chapter examines how democratic innovations can strengthen participation in the social housing sector. In Denmark, social housing offers affordable housing to a large number of Danes. The sector is grounded in traditions for resident involvement and engagement, and the democratic model in the sector is unique to Denmark. The residents have the majority say in all decision-making boards, which enables them to influence both the physical surroundings and social initiatives. Despite the positive merits, the sector faces challenges concerning increased segregation, municipalities allocating an increased share of socially and economically marginalised people to the sector, and less participation in the residential democracy. This chapter studies two cases of initiatives that experiment with democratic innovations to enhance participation in local housing associations. The two cases are innovative initiatives in the social housing sector and illustrate the potential benefits of increased participation. The chapter concludes that project-based initiatives might be on the rise and seem to hold considerable potential for enhancing participation. The challenge, then, is still to secure the coordination and strategic direction of the initiatives while combining them with the formal resident democracy.

The purpose of this paper is to assess, empirically, the opinions of local politicians concerning citizen participation in collaborative governance processes. Elected politicians play a key role as gatekeepers when it comes to the political impact of participatory initiatives, and by examining their attitudes, it is possible to get an understanding of perceived challenges from the perspective of elected representatives.

The empirical findings come from an ongoing project studying democratic innovation, the primary objective of which is to understand how local politicians think about efforts to increase or deepen citizen participation in political decision making. The source of data is interviews with 29 members of the executive boards of four Norwegian municipalities.

Although most of the politicians acknowledge that good reasons exist to facilitate greater citizen involvement, they are particularly worried about figuring out how to realise “inclusiveness” and “popular control” as two democratic goods. They appear to think most people are not motivated to participate; thus, they do not think it is possible or desirable to interact more directly with citizens in collaborative processes to develop shared recommendations for new solutions to public problems.

The municipalities in this study are not a representative sample of Norwegian municipalities, as each has expressed an interest in democratic innovation. Thus, they would be expected to have more positive attitudes than the average municipality.

Given that elected representatives decide whether and how to involve citizens in political decision-making processes, their attitudes are crucial to understanding and explaining collaborative governance efforts in western democracies.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how participatory budgeting (PB) as a democratic governance tool has been translated within the Russian public sector by addressing the local specifics of its design and mobilization through the formation of networks.

The paper is based on a case study of one pioneering municipality. Data have been gathered through triangulation of interviews, document search, video and netnographic observations. By relying on ideas from actor–network theory, the study focuses on the relational and rhetorical work of human (allies/inscriptors) and non-human (inscriptions) actors involved in the development of PB in Russia.

The findings indicate that the initial democratic values of PB underwent several stages of translation as a continuous inscription-building process and the formation of networks. The main finding is that putting democratic idea(l)s of PB into practice proved problematic, since PB depended on many “allies” which were not always democratic. Paradoxically, in order to launch democratic practices in Russia, PB relied largely on bureaucratic and even New Public Management inscriptions, which it was originally supposed to fight against. Notwithstanding, while these inscriptions can fog the democratic values of PB, they are also capable of uncovering its democratic potential over time, albeit not for a long time as the “external referee” is needed.

The paper juxtaposes PB development in Russia with the translation literature. Not only does the study emphasize the role of human, but non-human actors as well.

In this paper, the authors focus on participatory budgeting (PB) as an organizational issue in local government. The aim of this study is to analyze the premises of PB becoming institutionalized in local governance by scrutinizing the factors that enable or disable PB as a collaborative innovation process, and that in turn build innovative capacity. The authors study how the collaborative innovation process constructs the innovation capacity of local government and further how this enables PB to institutionalize in local government. With this study, the authors deepen the understanding of PB as a collaborative innovation process that may encounter obstacles and hindrances, but also enablers and drivers for creating and transforming sustainable collaborative practices in local government.

In this paper, the authors present a case study from one Finnish local government, the city of Lahti. The authors employ multifaced empirical data collected from the city of Lahti in two PB rounds between 2019 and 2022. Data include surveys for citizens and employees and municipal councilors and altogether 24 interviews with employees and councilors. The authors also gathered data by observing the PB process in Lahti, taking parts in workshops and meetings between 2019 and 2022. Municipal documents were likewise used as data in this study.

The institutionalization of PB in a local government organization requires organizational innovation capacity, not only individuals who are keen, motived and committed to work on PB. However, the Lahti case shows that successful PB results from the citizens' viewpoint can on one hand be reached while simultaneously the sustainability of PB needs more organizational commitment and support that materializes into managerial activities. The authors found that adequate resourcing is a key question in the institutionalization of PB.

In the present study, the authors approach the often-neglected topic of PB from the professional viewpoint in public administration. The originality of the empirical setting is the multifaced data collection during the first two rounds of PB in Lahti. It is highly relevant to analyze PB in its early stages as the organizational difficulties and resistance are at the time at their highest. This study offers a unique perspective on to the initialization of a novel participatory method in a city where no such efforts on this scale have been implemented before.

This paper offers a critical commentary on Mark Bevirʼs recent book A Theory of Governance from the perspective of normative political philosophy. It explores three ways in which Bevirʼs analysis can be brought into dialogue with political philosophy. First, it considers the role of generalizations in successful explanations of social phenomena. Second, it explores how a decentred theory of governance can help identify solutions to important social problems. Third, it explores the relation between Bevirʼs account of governance and theories of deliberative democracy.

This paper aims to unpack the sets of policy ideas underpinning the use of social innovation, thus permeating the allegedly politically neutral language of the concept.

Drawing on Daigneualt (2014), this paper adapts a four-dimensional approach to investigate the sets of ideas underpinning different conceptualisations of social innovation, particularly in relation to who the actors driving social change are, the nature of the problems addressed, the objectives pursued and the means used to achieve these objectives.

Applying the four-dimensional approach to a corpus of literature, this paper found evidence of two different perspectives along each dimension, namely, a radical empowerment approach and an incremental market-oriented one.

A limitation of the study is the focus on academic literature, whereas a broader focus on policy discourse may give further insights. However, this paper argues that this study can be the ground for future research to investigate whether and how the two approaches identified have been adopted in different institutional and policy contexts.

The paper contributes to the development of social innovation research by boosting and encouraging further investigation on how different sets of ideas underpin social innovation discourse and its use as a policy concept.

This concluding chapter summarizes the critical insights that changemakers ought to consider in their attempt to lead and manage cocreation processes and enhance their impact. The chapter also addresses three crucial challenges to the advent of a sustainable future: the need to rethink the assumptions of mainstream economics, the need to secure political stability in times of rapid societal change; and the demand for the deepening democracy. Finally, the chapter argues that local efforts to build a sustainable future will only succeed if key economic, political, and democratic challenges are effectively dealt with at the global and national levels.

Although Danish democracy is not currently facing the same decline in the trust in politicians and government as seen in other countries, it faces some of the same destabilising forces as do other ‘old’ representative democracies. While the various forms of citizen participation introduced in the 1980s and 1990s enhanced politician–citizen tensions, we are currently witnessing a wave of highly innovative, hybrid forms of democracy that both integrate representative and direct forms of democracy and push elected politicians towards an interactive political leadership style. These hybrid forms provide occasion for citizens and politicians to meet and debate pressing political matters. Although we are still in early days and dilemmas remain to be addressed, this development holds considerable potential for democracy in Denmark and elsewhere.

In 1989, the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre initiated a model of budget participation known internationally as "participatory budgeting." In this process of diagnosis, deliberation and decision-making, city residents directly decide how to allocate part of a public budget, typically at the level of municipal government. During the past two decades, hundreds of cities in Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa have adapted this model of participatory democracy to their own contexts. In this article, we explore one of the first Canadian experiments of participatory budgeting. In Guelph, Ontario, a civil society organization called the Neighbourhood Support Coalition uses participatory budgeting to allocate of public and private funds. We discuss the Canadian context for this experiment, as well as the history and evolution of participatory budgeting in Guelph. Based on four years of interviews, ethnographic observation, and primary and secondary literature, we identify several lessons learned through the Guelph process, as well as the conditions that have enabled its development and posed challenges for its success.

This study aims to explore whether adopting a sustainability narrative in city branding and urban development strategies results in more inclusive governance arrangements (process) and a more pluralistic approach to generating sustainability value (outcome), in line with the triple bottom line approach advocated by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The authors argue that a necessary step to enable meaningful sustainable urban development is to rethink the way in which “value” and “value creation” are being interpreted in urban development policies and city branding narratives.

Mixed-methods case study of New York City’s (NYC) urban development and city branding strategies (2007–2019) combining analysis of academic and grey literature on NYC’s urban development and city branding, value hierarchies in NYC urban development strategic plans and local media reports covering NYC’s development and branding processes.

Despite claiming commitment to urban sustainability, NYC’s urban development and branding narratives reveal a clear dominance of interpreting “value” primarily as “exchange value”, thus prioritising economic growth.

In the authors’ view, a systemic, systematic and structured approach to generating “sustainability value” is necessary if city branding is to become a governance tool to support sustainable urban development. A “tetravaluation” approach is recommended as a practical, structured framework that can bridge across the ideas of “sustainability value” and “pluralistic governance”, ensuring effective implementation. Further investigation in additional urban contexts is required.

The research contributes to current scholarly debates towards more balanced and pluralistic conceptions of “value” and place branding as a more holistic, participatory and democratic governance model for sustainable urban development.