Category: Presented 2026

Lecture on Citizen Collectives and Societal Resilience

As part of program for the ‘Week of Resilience’ at the Rotterdam-Rijnmond Safety Region (VRR) Professor Tine De Moor gave a lecture on the role of citizen collectives in enhancing regional resilience, titled: “Society as First Responder: Citizen Collectives as Critical Infrastructure for a Resilient Netherlands?”. They examined how initiatives such as energy cooperatives, care collectives, community enterprises, and neighborhood networks contribute to addressing crises and broader societal challenges.

According to De Moor research shows that resilience is not solely contingent upon the capacity of governments, emergency services, or technical infrastructures. Equally important is the social infrastructure embedded within communities, which enables the rapid identification of emerging challenges, facilitates coordination and collective action, and supports recovery processes in times of disruption.

De Moor’s central argument was that efforts to strengthen the resilience of the Netherlands should extend beyond investments in physical and technical infrastructure. They should also encompass sustained support for the communities and collective institutions that cultivate social trust, cooperation, and shared responsibility, thereby providing an essential foundation for societal resilience.

Inspiring Research Day by IOS Platform Bottom-up Initiatives for Societal Change

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.

Presenting our practices: how do citizen collectives contribute to the monitor?

During the National Commons Assembly in Belgium on 7 March, our research group hosted a workshop on the importance of involving citizens in research at every step (extreme citizen science). Lukas Held explained how this takes shape at CollectieveKracht and the role citizen collectives played in data collection, which led to the first Citizen Collectives Monitor last December. Check out the monitor here.

Before that, Professor Tine De Moor (Erasmus University Rotterdam) gave a lecture on citizen collectives as alternative organizations. “There are three principles that enable mechanisms leading to the resilience of these organizations: reciprocity, solidarity, and sufficiency.”