Beyond the Spark and High Hopes: Unlocking the Outcomes of Community-led Public Services: A study into the relationships between the (durable) performance of community-based initiatives and key factors

This dissertation focuses on community-based initiatives (CBIs): a form of self-organization in which citizens collectively initiate and implement projects aimed at providing public services for their community. Citizens themselves tackle societal issues and meet community needs. Therefore, in CBIs, traditional consumer-supplier roles are reframed, with citizens – rather than governments – acting as providers of public goods and services. However, CBIs often seek contact with local governments to obtain support, such as subsidies, buildings, and project management. Moreover, Western governments have a growing interest in community-led public services. In periods of cutbacks and decentralization of public service delivery, the expectations of CBIs to deliver public services have risen. Further rooted in a discourse of co-creation and co-production, CBIs have been acclaimed for their innovativeness, problem-solving capacity, and legitimacy.

Despite governments' high hopes for community self-organization and even though CBIs are increasingly delivering public services, research remains limited regarding their actual outcomes and performance factors. Using a quantitative and qualitative mixed-methods approach, this PhD project addresses existing gaps in the literature regarding CBIs, their outcomes/performance, and key factors.

Adopting a holistic approach in the first stage of this doctoral study, the dissertation identifies the outcomes of CBIs and the factors impacting their performance. It, then, examines the relationships between CBIs’ performance and four key factors: CBIs’ social capital ties, their organizational capacity, their leadership, and the support of government. Driven by the empirical findings in the initial stage, the dissertation shifts from a holistic, cross-sectional approach to an in-depth, longitudinal approach in the second phase, focusing on (relationships between) different types of government support and the durable performance of CBIs. Finally, the dissertation discusses the implications of the findings for research and practice, offering recommendations for future work in the field as well as guidelines and policy recommendations for CBIs and local governments to help improve the performance of community-led public services in a sustainable way.