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.

Join the next SEICA Seminar with prof. Ismael Vaccaro

On June 23, Prof. Ismael Vaccaro (CSIC) presents his research about the history of Catalan Commons. The presentation is titled “The Legal Transformations of the Commons in the Catalan Pyrenees: from the Middle Ages until the twenty-first century”.

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Ismael Vaccaro will give the lecture from Campus Woudestein in Rotterdam. Would you like to attend the lecture in person and then chat afterwards during drinks at the Paviljoen? Please contact us via collective-action@rsm.nl. There is limited space on location.

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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.

Vacancies – join the ECCO project as a postdoc researcher

Research project ECCO has officially started! ECCO stands for Empowering Citizen COllectives in societal transitions. We have received a lot of interest in the PhD positions, and now we are looking for three postdoctoral researchers. However, this is not your average postdoc position! The three postdocs will form a collaborative leadership team that works closely with the project leader, the project manager, and the CollectieveKracht team to co-manage the scientific and organisational development of ECCO. Rather than focusing on a single narrow research task, they will play a central role in shaping the direction, collaborations, and outputs of a large, interdisciplinary research programme.

Interested? Make sure to complete your application, including the survey, before 19 April.

Apply now

If you know graduated PhDs who want to combine excellent research with societal relevance, to grow as a scholar and as a research leader, please refer them to the vacancy. 

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.”

Looking back on achievements of CollectieveKracht in 2025

Knowledge exchange platform CollectieveKracht, one of our SEICA projects, celebrated several big achievements in 2025. For example, the first Citizen Collectives Monitor became a reality! In addition, as part of the ECCO consortium, we secured substantial funding for research into the roles that citizen collectives play in societal transitions. CollectieveKracht organized 5 in-person events and 7 webinars, expanded the knowledge base with over 50 items, and welcomed the 500th citizen collectives’ member.

Watch the recap in less than 3 minutes:

Join our research group with ECCO PhD position

Research project ECCO (Empowering Citizen COllectives in societal transitions) has currently 10 PhD positions open. Professor Tine De Moor will be the promotor of the PhD position: Identifying prosocial effects of participatory decision-making in citizen collectives. This trajectory investigates whether citizen collectives function as “schools for democracy.” It explores how participatory decision-making within citizen collectives influences members’ civic engagement beyond the collective, examining whether democratic practices in cooperatives foster broader pro-social and democratic tendencies in society.

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Citizen Collectives Monitor maps the development, resilience, and challenges of Dutch initiatives

Dive into the data from the first Citizen Collectives Monitor by CollectieveKracht (Dutch publication). Based on information from 431 initiatives, the monitor shows how citizen collectives are increasingly developing into important actors in the public domain.

The first copy was presented on 8 December to Claartje Brons, Programme Manager for Democracy at the Ministry of the Interior. Brons: “When I visit citizen collectives, I see people who want to make a difference, who want to do something meaningful or good, and that happens across many sectors. It is a richness in the Netherlands that is very important and that we can tap into even better. The monitor can help us with that.”

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