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