In co-production processes, citizens and professionals both contribute to the provision of public services and try to enhance the quality of the services they produce. Although government offers several opportunities for co-production, not all citizens decide to actually take part. Current insights in citizens’ individual motivations offered by the co-production literature are limited. In this article, we integrate insights from different streams of literature to build a theoretical model that explains citizens’ motivations to co-produce. We test the model using empirical data of Dutch neighborhood watches.

Dutch local government is more and more regarded as a ‘first government’. Vision documents of the association of municipalities and national policy plans stress the importance of local government for improving public governance. This ‘new localism’ builds upon two conflicting perspectives to local government: the modernization model and the political community model. As a result, local governments are becoming overloaded by many new and conflicting demands. A debate about how both perspectives to the ‘first government’ can be balanced, is therefore needed.

Based on the experience of citizens initiatives in Antwerpen (Belgium), Dortmund (Germany) and Rotterdam (the Netherlands), this article explores the roles of citizens in these projects. The initiatives were not started by already active citizens, but by inactive citizens who were triggered to take action by an event in their direct surroundings. The cases studied show that many small, simple and everyday strategies, which are often overlooked by researchers, are meaningful for successful citizenship. The will to participate is not so much ideologically or democratically driven, but driven by a perceived practical need for action. Governments should aim to support and facilitate these initiatives without aiming to canalize these activities according to their own political or democratic rationality.

The report Confidence in Citizens by the Dutch Scientific Council for Government Policy dominantly supports increased room for citizen participation. Based on many examples, the report shows how society benefits from the many citizens’ initiatives and how government interference can hamper or even obstruct these initiatives, which do not fit the logic of civil servants. The report gives four, rather general suggestions of how policy makers could respond to these citizens’ initiatives. The generic character of these recommendations can be ascribed to a weak problem analysis and a biased understanding of how government actions negatively interfere with citizens’ initiatives. The Council could have asked more critical questions with regards to citizens initiatives and how they should respond to the logic of government.

Amidst the turbulence of recent crises, governments’ capacity to govern and to deliver public value is under serious pressure. Public institutions are working hard to come up with new and improved schemes for dealing with complex and wicked policy issues that have emerged or just wont go away. But government alone cannot solve most of these issues. Governments already attempted to make ‘better, smarter policy’ in the hopes of raising performance. They also invested heavily in ‘participation’ of citizens, by inviting them to ‘co-create’ policy or ‘join-up’ with government agencies. However, this image of collaboration is one-sided. Besides the efforts initiated by governments themselves, there is a wide array of emerging activities. In these practices, it is not the government that takes action, but society takes ‘public matters’ into its own hands. Just as in many other countries, in The Netherlands groups of citizens have started to organize certain services, tasks or activities that used to be provided by the central or decentralized governmental institutions by themselves (and in most cases, for themselves). This article conceptualizes these emerging practices and analyses how they affect the world of policy making and what they may mean for public administration research.