Sustainability challenges are urgently demanding societal agents join forces and steer the fragmented efforts that they are setting in motion. However, governmental institutions in modern social democracies have been suffering from a legitimacy crisis for years, and there is growing interest, within academia as well as society, in the role of community-based initiatives (CBI) in facing sustainability challenges. However, communities and the local scale are not a panacea. They often remain fragmented and temporary, and are by no means guaranteed to represent the wider public interest. Therefore, the state cannot simply be excluded and any effort towards both sustainability and institutional change will involve encounters between governmental agents and CBIs.

This project investigates the diversity of state-community encounters in the context of sustainability-related initiatives in the Netherlands. Using exploratory desk research, this research first builds a 'living' map of sustainability-related CBIs in the Netherlands and abductively classifies different types of relationships between CBIs and the state. Second, a small number of in-depth case studies explore the relational processes in government-CBI encounters, and the activities, interactions and understandings these processes generate. The focus on practice and interaction allows for a grounded understanding of the problem beyond state- or community-centric perspectives. From this, we aim to identify the drivers triggering certain types of encounters, as well as the actors’ imaginaries about state-community relationships that are shaped within encounters. Zooming out again, the final part of the project will situate these insights into the wider processes of sustainability transitions and institutional change.

• environmental sustainability
• state-society relations
• transdisciplinary research