Beyond One Size Fits All: How Rotterdam is Customizing Citizen Participation

What are you researching and why?

Individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are underrepresented in citizen participation for various reasons. Generally, the idea prevails that these citizens refrain from participating due to a lack of time or resources. However, Vivian Visser showed in her dissertation that there’s more to it. A lack of trust in institutions, contempt for bureaucratic red tape, and feelings of inferiority can affect willingness to engage. Recognizing these challenges, we identified a call for tailored participation. Thus, we research how civil servants tailor participation today and what it could look like to create more equitable involvement in the future.

Who needs to change?

Our project focuses on how civil servants can change their behaviour and intentions, as well as the overall design of participation processes to better meet and accommodate the needs, expectations, and life worlds of citizens. This contrasts sharply with interventions designed over the past years as these frequently concentrated on citizens – which unofficially meant getting them to fit into the mould of status quo approaches. A suitable example is the participation workshop aimed at teaching citizens the ‘proper’ way to engage. This not only often fails to achieve its goals but, in our view, is also derogatory. Instead of teaching people how to conform, we believe it’s crucial to structurally redesign participation processes to be more accessible and inclusive, embracing the diverse ways in which people from different socioeconomic backgrounds engage.

How do you research it? 

Our focus is on two different neighbourhoods in Rotterdam, Kralingen and Carnisse, where we attend team- and neighbourhood meetings and events. While we talk to citizens to get insight into how they experience participatory processes, our primary focus is civil servants and their ways of working. People, especially communities living in the south of Rotterdam, have been ‘cases’ for social science research for years. Often, researchers only extract data, vanish after their project is finished, and give nothing back to communities. Citizens got tired of this, and considering this research fatigue, we wanted to move away from ‘bothering’ citizens. We aim to collaborate with civil servants (and citizens): we listen to each other, think about solutions together, and try to truly create lasting change.

What have you noticed so far? 

We started with the idea to develop tools with and for public professionals to tailor the citizen participation approach. However, we were humbled the minute we entered the field – the municipality is already, almost naturally, engaged in customizing a lot of participation. One time, at a citizen meeting, a civil servant prepared two slideshows: one providing in-depth technocratic information about a project and another allowing more participant input. He personally knew the citizens living in the neighbourhood so based on which ‘types’ would predominantly appear at the meeting he would choose either slideshow. Thus, civil servants themselves construct groups of citizens based on social characteristics and engage with each group differently. This resonates with the municipality’s policy regarding tailor-made participation: although tailoring is encouraged, there is a complete lack of guidelines on how to do it.

Thus, through observing, we conclude that it is not so much a lack of tailoring but rather its ad hoc and subjective nature which might obstruct more inclusive participation. On the one hand, tailoring can contribute to fitting and fair participatory processes. The civil servant we mentioned above, right before presenting, chose the slideshow containing a lot of space for questions and remarks. Namely, while scanning the room for the type of participants walking into the meeting that night, he saw citizens who were less interested in extensive information with many details and primarily came to share their points of view. At the end of the night, people mentioned they felt heard and left the meeting feeling content. 

On the other hand, stigmatization, stereotyping, or biases can get in the way of equitable participation. For example, at a social networking event in Kralingen, a civil servant mentioned “the obvious difference” between the already active citizens attending and a group of less active citizens – from ostensibly lower socioeconomic backgrounds – who had provided the food and were not present at the gathering. While this could be positively interpreted as at least involving the less active citizens who would otherwise not participate through having them cook, it could also be stigmatizing as the civil servant could assume these people only want to participate by preparing food instead of physically being there and truly engaging – possibly in a way that they might be more comfortable with. 

This led to a change in direction of our research. Currently, we aspire to make the implicit knowledge that civil servants have about and apply to the different groups of citizens explicit: based on what characteristics are citizens categorized in which groups? Exposing this would eventually help us make the process of tailoring more systematic which will reduce the chances of thinking in and acting on stereotypes and biases. Namely, as long as civil servants’ knowledge regarding citizens remains implicit, stigmatizing and stereotyping will most likely go unnoticed. 

What do you hope to accomplish?

Our ultimate goal is to create a more equitable and inclusive framework for tailoring citizen participation in Kralingen and Carnisse based on the knowledge of the neighbourhood managers and networkers. Eventually, we want this to be utilized in other neighbourhoods in Rotterdam as well and perhaps even in other cities in the future. By exposing potential biases and assumptions that may influence how different groups are engaged with, we hope to prevent stigmatization and ensure that all citizens – regardless of socioeconomic status – have a meaningful opportunity to participate.

For now, we are working on creating a practical intervention that would help civil servants reflect on why and based on what they make certain choices about specific citizens through for example a mixing console or a workshop. Also, through this research, we got inspired for an idea for a follow-up project. In the future, we want to explore the role of emotions in interaction between civil servants and citizens during participation processes, focusing on how these dynamics impact social inequalities.