Kim onze Duitse stagaire heeft onderzoek gedaan naar Volunteers 2.0. Ze heeft haar masterthesis erover geschreven. Onderstaand haar samenvatting en hierbij ook de link naar haar hele thesis.  Zie: Menssingmaster’s thesis

Germany as well as the Netherlands experienced huge changes in their citizen distributions in the last years. Processes like urbanisation and demographical transition, where the ever less young population moves from rural areas to the big cities, led to sparsely populated spaces with an increasingly older population. This development then starts new challenges for local infrastructure, since different age groups have different demands and needs that need to be faced. At the same time, fewer people mean less financial resources to pay for the maintenance of such infrastructure or welfare services. Following Giddens’s structuration theory, this already led to changes in the provision and the provider of welfare services. Nevertheless, such developments are often the reason for increased fees and cut back in services as well as their quality, thus creating a downward spiral where even more people leave an area.

To stop this spiral, local liveability has to be maintained. When considering the Community Capitals Framework, increasing the political capital seems to be the most promising in this case. For the municipalities this means giving citizens a voice to be heard and initiatives the chance to engage. Thereby a motivation for the volunteers is not only to ensure the provision of such services, but to have a saying in what is happening and how. But not all forms of participation are the same, as can be inter alia seen with Arnstein’s famous participation ladder. If the cooperation between local governments and volunteers is not executed in the right way, the process itself is not sustainable and the alleged solution turns out to be none. In that aspect Löffler and Timm-Arnold argue that co-production is the most sustainable form of cooperation.

But for this co-production to work in a sustainable way, it is important to analyse, which aspects exist on the side of the volunteers, as well as on the municipalities side that benefit or hinder such cooperation, so that the city representatives can (re-) act at an early stage. On the volunteer’s side such influences are inter alia of geographical, demographical, or technological nature, or even depending on their live situations. Cooperating with volunteers then not only bears benefits, such as increased social capital that leads to increased liveability, but also risks. Examples thereof are volunteer burnout or the non-representativity of initiatives for the whole community.

Employees of the municipal administration not only need to consider all these aspects for their part of the cooperation, but they are also themselves dependent on underlying structures, such as the compilation of the budgets they can spend to support the initiatives, or the way they have to have to answer to higher hierarchical levels respectively being more or less independent from them in their work.

In addition to this rather theoretical approach the INTERREG VA project Volunteers 2.0 brought more praxis into the topic. To gain more insight, representants of the 10 participating municipalities were interviewed. On the basis of the interviews it was analysed that the municipality experts do act in many cases verry similar, but that they also differ, from municipality to municipality, but also across the border. The biggest country wise difference thereby is that Dutch municipalities mainly support in a financial way, whereas German municipalities focus on non-financial support. On the basis of these country-specific approaches it was analysed how much more or less municipalities in the Netherlands and Germany tend to use co-production or not. The main conclusion out of that thereby was that it is easier for citizens in the Netherlands to start initiatives than it is in Germany but that both systems have different advantages and opportunities for improvement.