Towards a sustainable landscape: Constructing identities and ambitions in a citizen initiative in the making

Abstract

The recent proliferation of citizen initiatives that aim to contribute to sustainable landscape transition prompted us to study how members of such an initiative in-the-making try to position themselves in their environment in order to make a meaningful contribution. We use a single case study in the east of the Netherlands to study how members discursively construct identities and ambitions through the inclusion of people and ideas over time. We applied an interactional framing analysis to 20 audio-recorded and transcribed meetings of the citizen initiative. The results show that various actors and ideas were included over time, resulting in the construction of different ambitions and identities over time. Ambitions changed in response to new event and changing circumstances. To justify these changing ambitions, the members constructed new identities during their conversations, using different interactional framing strategies. The study reveals that the process of finding an ambition and identity continuously changed direction, paradoxically, due to a lack of direction that hindered the members in making coherent and sustainable decisions. We conclude that a citizen initiative should actively interact with their relation groups to find a direction that supports the process of effectively positioning their initiative and contributes to the shared goal of improving the quality of the living environment.