Longing for Wikitopia: The study and politics of self-organisation

Abstract

Self-organisation is an idea whose time has come. As an explanatory concept, self-organisation is central to complexity theory, which is quickly becoming a powerful and perhaps even dominant paradigm in both the natural and social sciences. As a political ideal, self-organisation is filling the void that is opening up as both the state and market are increasingly perceived as undemocratic, unjust and inefficient. Drawing on observations from the Dutch city of Rotterdam, this paper argues that self-organisation indeed is an inspiring ideal but that it is often misunderstood and may produce adverse consequences when used as a policy guide. While self-organisation is too inspiring to abandon, its harsh realities need to be accounted for if we want to think and work with it.

The ‘green’ and ‘self’ in green self-governance – a study of 264 green space initiatives by citizens

“…We cannot assess how our sample relates to the total population of green self-governance practices in the Netherlands as this population remains unknown. We consider it likely that our inventory is slightly biased towards well-documented and visible initiatives (see also Uitermark, 2015), as smaller and less visible initiatives are more difficult to find in our data sources. In this, our research is not unlike questionnaires with a non-response bias, where those who respond often do not fully match certain characteristics of the wider population (Søgaard, Selmer, Bjertness, & Thelle, 2004).…”

The Impact of International Cooperative Initiatives on Biodiversity (ICIBs)

“…Nevertheless, they acknowledged that they haven't been able to capture all existing examples in the Netherlands. In general it is likely that the inventory will be somewhat biased towards well-documented and visible initiatives, while smaller and less visible initiatives stay below the radar as they are more difficult to find (see also Uitermark, 2015).…”

“…While most initiatives work on small patches of 1 ha or less, the biggest example in the database tries to protect 6000 ha. Furthermore, as Uitermark (2015) has suggested, smaller initiatives will usually be less visible and documented. As such, our sample of initiatives will have a bias towards larger initiatives.…”

“…It only holds for CIs autonomously developed outside government programs, not for initiatives initiated by governments as a kind of outsourcing. As such, current governmental focus in several countries on decentralisation, devolution and self-governance has been criticized as a form of neo-liberalisation (Uitermark 2015), characterised by retreating governments and a transfer of responsibility to the market and civil society. Such a retreat is then legitimised by the assumed rise in self-governance.…”

“…co-governance (Uitermark 2015;Crowe, Foley, and Collier 2016). Alternative concepts related to the contributions of organised active citizens to the common good refer to self-organisation (Uitermark 2015), self-governance (Sørensen and Triantafillou 2009), Do-It-Yourself democracy (Crossan et al 2016) or bottom-up governance (Waterton et al 2015).…”