The challenge of innovating politics in community self-organization: the case of Broekpolder

This article explores whether political innovations are realized in introducing community self-organization in local government and which role conflicts local politicians may experience. We conducted an in-depth, longitudinal case study of a citizen initiative to investigate if it resulted in the emergence and consolidation of new roles and practices for politicians. The case study shows that politicians had difficulty in adopting new roles, and eventually fell back to more traditional roles. Explanations found in the case are the historically grounded structure of the political system, the incompatibility of roles, a lack of boundary spanning leadership in the political arena and the lack of trustful relationships. It turns out that the adoption of innovative roles by politicians to accommodate innovate governance practices in the context of community self-organization is difficult and provides a key challenge for those pursuing such innovations.