All together now! community initiatives engaging in sustainability transformations in the Netherlands

This dissertation explores how community initiatives engage in sustainability transformations. It uses the lenses of self-organization and collective intentionality to understand how community initiatives, formally and informally, formulate their goals, decision making and create everyday governance mechanisms and what that means for the institutional world around them. While community initiatives may not operate fully according to a fully conscious plan and are subject to self-organizational and emergent processes, individuals can be reflexive regarding their norms, values, and beliefs, leading to a collective process of shared wayfinding. Thus, this dissertation shows how initiatives can find their way and remain close to their core norms and values. In doing so, it illustrates how society, in general, can better interact with community initiatives.
A key insight of this research is that community initiatives transform the ways of thinking about sustainability for both participants and those interacting with them while also instigating new feelings and actions regarding the pursuit of sustainability. In addition, community initiatives contextualize what sustainability transformations could mean pragmatically, as they, for example, produce their own energy, reconnect with nature, or prevent food waste. At the same time, the processes within community initiatives show how those engaged in initiatives often navigate a sea of opinions and meanings associated with an initiative, its possible role in pursuing sustainability, how it came to be what it is, and how to proceed in the future.