Existing infrastructure that gives CoCon a head-start

Learn more about the existing infrastructure that provide CoCon with an unusual combination of longitudinal historical evidence, contemporary organisational data, and sustained relationships with institutions for collective action.

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CollectieveKracht

CollectieveKracht is (since 2022) an established national stakeholder-dialogue and knowledge-exchange platform connecting citizen collectives with researchers, policymakers, financiers and other actors supporting citizen collectives. It facilitates sustained exchange between research and practice, enabling citizen collectives to share experiences, institutional knowledge and governance challenges, while researchers and other stakeholders contribute evidence and expertise. In doing so, the platform identifies shared knowledge needs, promotes learning across sectors and organisational forms, and strengthens the capacity of contemporary collectives to contribute to societal transitions.

For CoCon, CollectieveKracht provides the principal interface with contemporary citizen collectives and the present-day endpoint of the Cooperative Continuum. Its network will support dialogue with collectives across multiple domains, help identify and contextualise contemporary governance practices and organisational histories, and facilitate participatory archiving of successive versions of rules, statutes and other governance documents that are often dispersed across ephemeral digital environments. CollectieveKracht will also provide a structured setting for exchanging CoCon’s historical findings with practitioners and confronting emerging interpretations with contemporary experience. It thereby supports CoCon through stakeholder dialogue, knowledge exchange, participatory archiving and societal reflection, while continuing to serve its broader community and mission independently of the project

Find out more about CollectieveKracht.

Repository building for ICAs

The memory project developed innovative approaches for capturing, preserving, and mobilising the knowledge generated by Dutch citizen collectives. By strengthening institutional memory and facilitating knowledge exchange between citizen initiatives, researchers, and policymakers, it explored how experiential knowledge can be transformed into a lasting public resource that supports learning and innovation across the sector.

This project provides direct experience with participatory knowledge preservation among contemporary citizen collectives. Its relevance lies in CoCon’s participatory-archiving strategy: identifying, contextualising and preserving successive governance documents so that institutional trajectories do not terminate artificially at the historical-contemporary divide. CoCon then analyses these materials within the Observatory and L-IG; the knowledge-brokering project itself does not reconstruct genealogies or test transmission.

Find out more about repository building for ICA’s in the impact explorer report.

Common Rules Database

Rules shape how institutions govern participation, collective decisions, resources, conflicts and enforcement. Yet comparing historical regulations is difficult because institutions and countries used different terminology and administrative traditions. The Common Rules Database (CRdb) addresses this challenge by transforming regulations into structured, comparable data. Treating the individual rule as its basic unit, the CRdb enables researchers to compare how Institutions for Collective Action (ICAs) addressed similar problems across regions and periods. Its aim is not to explain institutional evolution, but to facilitate systematic comparative research on institutional rules.

The Common Rules Database shows how historical governance provisions can be transformed into systematically coded institutional statements and compared across cases. CoCon extends this static semantic and substantive rule coding longitudinally: rules are linked across successive regulations, organisations and periods to reconstruct persistence, modification, disappearance, branching, merging, recombination and candidate genealogies. Common Rules supplies part of the analytical language; CoCon adds the longitudinal and inferential architecture required to test institutional inheritance against convergence.

Find out more about the Common Rules Database.

Data & source inventories

The Common Rules project and subsequent projects have produced a large dataset on which CoCon can build. A brief, preliminary search has revealed that there are many additional rule sets available that can be used within CoCon.

Data and source inventoriesDownload

SEICA Standard Operating Procedures

Together with the partners of the ECCO research project, we have designed procedures to streamline collaboration between academic and societal partners. With contextual adaptations, these Standard Operating Procedures can be applied to future research projects.

  • Data sharing
    Data and data-sharing play a central role in our research projects. This SOP outlines why it is crucial that data is shared in a fair, responsible and timely manner. Key principles guiding data sharing are: transparency, fair use & attribution, useability & synergy, and timely data sharing.
  • Remuneration of societal cooperation partners
    In our research project, we often work with societal parties. This SOP has the intention to stipulate the conditions under which organisations can be remunerated. It provides the framework and conditions regarding eligibility, activities, reasons, amount and process.
  • Management structure
    In collaborative research projects, we choose a value-centric governance approach. To ensure clarity and transparency, we decide in the early stage which kinds of decisions are taken at which level, and how they are logged.
  • Approaching citizens to participate in research
    There are several reasons to be very careful in communication and collaboration with external parties and explicitly citizen collectives. The aim of this SOP is to coordinate communication, so we can prevent research fatigue among societal partners and choose the right communication style.
  • Remuneration of representatives of citizen collectives
    This SOP has the intention to stipulate the conditions under which representatives can be remunerated. In order to value the contribution of citizens to knowledge development, research validation, social interpretation and strengthening the social impact of science, a SOP for a fair remuneration of time, effort and the use of resources and community networks is appropriate and necessary. This also removes financial barriers to participation and, at the same time, recognises experiential knowledge as a valuable contribution.

Examples of above SOPs, for example in the context of the ECCO project, can be requested by email: collective-action@rsm.nl