Niche-regime relations in local co-production programmes: empowerment by design?

This paper investigates empowering mechanisms in public programme design, more specifically the social city programmes in Lisbon and Berlin. The goal of both programmes is to enhance living conditions in disadvantaged neighborhoods through improved infrastructure, education and employment opportunities, working with multiple stakeholders like local institutions, administration, citizens, non-profit, cultural and market-based organisations. An important aspect is to harness bottom-up innovation by citizens and civil society organisations that is both supported (financially and professionally) and mediated (through infrastructure that allows co-definition of development needs and activation of local actors).
We combine insights from the democratic stream of co-production research with theoretical aspects of transformative social innovation research to better understand how such programmes seek to promote empowerment (objectives, design and mechanisms) and how it aligns with participants’ experience through multi-stakeholder and multi-level analysis.