Abstract
During the COVID-19 lockdowns in the Netherlands, numerous solidarity initiatives emerged, providing relief to those affected by lockdown measures. These initiatives have an important added value for a society under crisis as they provide instant solutions to timely, crisis-related needs, strengthen connectivity between stakeholders and divide the burdens of the crisis. The durability of these initiatives is however a concern and although the literature on durability of community-based initiatives is growing, there is a lack of understanding how initiatives can sustain under the challenging dynamics of a major crisis. Using a fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis of 14 COVID-19 solidarity initiatives in Rotterdam, this article explores whether conditions for the durability of community-based initiatives in general (social capital, organizational resources, transformational leadership, and government support) also apply during a crisis, with special attention of the configurations of conditions under the challenging context of the COVID-19 pandemic.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1443-1460 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Journal | Public Administration |
| Volume | 101 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Dec 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:For the operationalization of government support, we derived three indicators from the theory: financial support, coordination efforts, and exposure (Igalla et al., 2021 ; Korosec & Berman, 2006 ). Financial support refers to the financial injection given to the initiative from municipal budgets. Exposure relates to the attention the initiative received on municipal‐led internet fora, as well as efforts of civil servants to bring these initiatives under the attention of the local media. This indicator stands for the activities of governmental agencies, who brought the initiative into contact with potential coalition partners. Governmental agencies in this context could be for instance neighborhood councils, municipal neighborhood networkers, or individual employees in municipal departments. This condition was scored relatively different, that is, only one indicator had to be in or more‐in the set to score “present.” This simplified scoring was applied as for each initiative, valuable government support is highly situational, making this hardly quantifiable on a gradual scale. As such, we have chosen for a pragmatic operationalization by indicating whether there was a certain form of support, or not at all.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors. Public Administration published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Research programs
- ESSB PA