Co-Creating Green Transition: How Municipality Employees Negotiate their Professional Identities as Agents of Citizen Involvement in a Cross-Local Setting

ABSTRACT

Citizen involvement plays an important role in many governmental and municipal attempts towards green transition, reflecting a departure from a deficit model of public communication towards participatory ambitions of engaging citizens. Recently, the notion of co-creation or co-production has gained importance as a way of conceptualizing and organizing citizen involvement. The current study examines how four municipality partners in Sweden and Denmark embark on a common project on citizen involvement and co-creation as an avenue to green transition, addressing private decisions of individual citizens or families where the municipality has no legislative competence. By analysing how several local authorities with different but similar challenges negotiate and jointly identify themselves as agents of citizen involvement, the study offers an upscaling to what may be termed the plura-local level. Analytically, the study takes a discourse approach, combining close readings of texts and talk with an interdiscursive and diachronic analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizen involvement
• co-creation
• co-production
• professional identity
• environmental communication
• discourse analysis

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. He is also grateful to the municipal project participants and to his colleagues from Aalborg University: Ellen Christiansen, Pernille V. K. Andersen, Sandra G. Hansen and Søren Lindhardt.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 From now on, both terms will be referred to as “co-creation.”

2 Studies of professional identity have been pursued in relation to, for example, journalism, nursing, teaching, and social work (Yam, 2004; Wiles, 2013; Nygren & Stigbrand, 2014). Across methodological differences, a specific constellation of knowledge, competences, and values is often viewed as characteristic for a professional identity.

3 For a short, but concise working definition of a discourse, see Hajer (2009), who refers to a discourse as “an ensemble of notions, ideas, concepts, and categorizations through which meaning is ascribed to social and physical phenomena, and that is produced in and reproduces in turn an identifiable set of practices” (Hajer, 2009, p. 60).

4 This predominance can be seen in the context of the application genre and the EU Interreg-programme, within which the project gained financial support. The programme supports initiatives towards “green economy.”

5 If not otherwise stated, the translations into English are my own.

6 The translation is identical with the presentation of the principles in an English folder about the project. The numbering has been added for the sake of easier reference.

7 At a more general level, the articulations also have some similarity with a discourse of dialogue in which mutual exchange and the curbing of power relations is a central value (Phillips, 2011). This raises the wider question of the relationship between the discourse of co-creation and other similar discourses of dialogue, citizen involvement, or user-driven innovation. The discursive complexity is partly due to the diverse origins of the discourse of co-creation as well as its proliferation into different social contexts. To clarify overlaps and differences and to map out ramifications between these discourses is an important task, which, however, goes beyond the scope of this article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the EU Interreg project “Samskabende Grøn Omstilling” [project number 20200803].