Sharon van Geldere’s research while affiliated with Utrecht University and other places

Pretty pictures don’t make for good participation. A design study into the strategic alignment of the digital twin for citizen participation More and more governments are using a ‘digital twin’ (DT), an advanced digital 3D representation of physical reality. With the many modelling, visual and interactive options, DTs could support citizen participation. In this way, DTs can contribute to ‘smart anticipation’. The question, however, is how can DTs be of value for citizen participation? This first requires strategic coordination of DTs with the internal and external environment. In this article we answer this question based on design research into the DT of the Dutch municipality of Almere (a recently built city close to Amsterdam in the province Flevoland). Based on the design science methodology, we study the DT’s commitment to citizen participation in a process of two interventions and validate our design. We argue that adopting a hospitable attitude is essential for shaping dual coordination to appropriately deploy DTs within a citizen participation process. The research contributes to the management science literature on the strategic alignment of digital technologies with organisational processes and contexts. Based on this research, we formulate concrete recommendations to governments that use, or would like to use, DTs to strengthen citizen participation.

Ideally, interest groups form a link between citizens and politics. However, this link is often flawed in practice. Many citizens also feel that the average citizen is not heard and that special interests exert undue influence on policymaking. One proposal to address this problem is the stimulation of so-called citizen lobby: Ordinary citizens can use lobbying strategies to achieve influence on decision-makers. This can benefit both policymakers and citizens as it can empower citizens to make their voices heard and it can help policymakers to build perceived legitimacy among citizens that are dissatisfied with existing decision-making processes. Formal channels for citizen lobby often exist but remain underused. However, what happens when governments actively engage with citizen lobby? We conduct two survey experiments in the Netherlands (N=1,218) and show that engagement with citizen lobby has no systematic effect on internal political efficacy but has robust positive effects on political support.