IOS Platform Bottom-up Initiatives for Societal Change organised a research day at Utrecht University, facilitating the interdisciplinary sharing of expertise on their main research topics and to help to create (new) networks and collaborations. During the first session, several researchers presented their work on entrepreneurship-led sustainable development in Africa, which was followed by a ‘World Café: Building Change from the Bottom Up.

Professor Tine De Moor gave a lecture, titled ‘From grassroots to governance: the maturation of citizen collectives in the Netherlands’. In the lecture, she explored how these initiatives have grown into a diverse and influential movement shaping energy, housing, care and food systems through democratic governance, local stewardship and long‑term community orientation. Their evolution shows that such collectives are not a temporary trend, but a vital complementary governance form whose impact on just and sustainable transitions is increasingly visible across Dutch society.

On November 13, Steunpunt Energietransitie Nijmegen organized the event ‘The Rediscovery of Community.’ As part of the program, Professor Tine De Moor gave a lecture in which she outlined what a “commons” society, one with a major role for communities, could look like. Do citizen collectives embody degrowth or postgrowth as a serious alternative to consumer capitalism and the neoliberal dynamics of our time?

Systemic change cannot be achieved through technology alone. You also need a different institutional logic.