Postdoctoral research:

Guilds and local citizenship have suffered bad press over the last two centuries, as monopolists (or monopsonists)  tried  to capture  rents  on protected  markets  for raw materials,  labour  and consumer products. This paradigm is now under scrutiny and being revised, not least because there is enough evidence to suggest that the strict rules were not necessarily stringently applied. The parallels  with modern  practice  come to mind. Historical  studies  can help us to unravel the underlying mechanisms of such behaviour and weigh the costs and benefits of systems of protected  interests,  which are an important  dimension  of citizenship.  A systematic  and comparative study of who gained access, first to apprenticeship  and subsequently  to membership  of guilds, can build on much important research that has been undertaken over the past 25 years in various European countries.

Wat is nu precies waar van de veronderstelling dat het Nederlandse poldermodel teruggaat op het waterbeheer in middeleeuwen en vroegmoderne tijd? Heeft de noodzaak tot intensieve samenwerking om wateroverlast in het lage, natte land te voorkomen geleid tot een cultuur van consensus, compromissen, inspraak en overleg? Het onderzoek wordt geplaatst in het veel grotere debat over de functie van corporatieve instellingen in het creëren van een welvarende samenleving. De Nederlandse waterschappen worden gebruikt als een micro laboratorium om te zien of het waterbeheer inderdaad gunstig beïnvloed werd door grotere betrokkenheid van de belanghebbenden. Daartoe worden vergelijkingen gemaakt met het waterbeheer elders in het Noordzeegebied (Vlaanderen, Duitsland en Engeland).
Het project is een samenwerking van het Huygens ING, de Universiteit Utrecht en de Vrije Universiteit.

The vitality and sustainability of institutions are under constant pressure in a globalizing world. This does not only call for changes within these institutions themselves, but also for new roles for citizens. In a series of seminars, Utrecht University’s interdisciplinary research group ‘Institutions: Understanding the Dynamics of Open Societies’ aims to critically address the new functions, roles and challenges for citizens in the 21^st century in terms of responding to some of the many problems they are facing (e.g. poverty, unemployment, housing problems, welfare decline and socio-economic problems, financial crisis, global environmental crisis) and the development of political, social and economic democracy. The seminars are organized in cooperation with and under the aegis of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in Amsterdam.

Each seminar is designed as a multidisciplinary event and will focus on a different dimension of Citizenship 3.0, viz. Cooperation, Participation, and Governance. The focus of the first dimension, Cooperation, was on the growing prevalence of informal, horizontal forms of cooperation by active, self-organizing citizens who seek to promote the collective interests of the participants in the absence of any government intervention. The Participation dimension focused on the new and increasingly direct ways in which groups of citizens are participating in democratic processes with a view to influencing governmental policies so as to further their interests. In the Governance dimension, the focus will be on the growing role for citizens, whether individually or collectively, when it comes to protecting or promoting public interests in a more institutionalized manner.

The final conference of the Citizen 3.0-project will take place on March 13, 2015. For more information, see: http://www.uu.nl/en/events/citizenship-30