Between Participation and Collective Action—From Occasional Liaisons towards Long-Term Co-Management for Urban Resilience

Elisabeth Schauppenlehner-Kloyber and Marianne Penker
Additional contact information
Elisabeth Schauppenlehner-Kloyber: Department of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna 1180, Austria
Marianne Penker: Department of Economics and Social Sciences, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna 1180, Austria

Sustainability, 2016, vol. 8, issue 7, 1-18

Abstract: For resilience building, cities need to foster learning and innovation processes among all actors in order to develop transformative capacities of urban governance regimes to manage extraordinary situations as well as continuous change. A close collaboration of urban governmental actors and citizens is, therefore, of high importance. This paper explores two different discourses on urban governance: participation and self-organized collective action for the management of the commons. Both address the involvement of citizens into governance, albeit from different perspectives: on the one hand from the viewpoint of the government, selectively handing some of its power over to citizens, on the other hand from the perspective of citizens who self-organize for a collective management of urban commons. Based on experiences in the Austrian city of Korneuburg, it is argued that the collective action literature may help overcome some of the self-criticisms and shortcomings of the participation discourse. More specifically, Elinor Ostrom’s design principles for the management of the commons provide valuable input to overcome restrictions in thinking about citizen participation and to effectively design institutions for long-term urban co-management.

Keywords: cities; participation; urban resilience; urban commons; collective action; collaboration agreements; urban planning; self-organization; co-management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/7/664/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/8/7/664/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:8:y:2016:i:7:p:664-:d:73862

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().