The Kooiman Prize is awarded each year for the Best Article published in the previous year in the public administration top journal, Public Management Review. For the year 2020, the editorial board of the journal decided to award three public administration scholars from the Erasmus University: PhD candidate Malika Igalla MSc, prof. dr. Jurian Edelenbos and dr. Ingmar van Meerkerk, for their article ‘’What explains the performance of community-based initiatives? Testing the impact of leadership, social capital, organizational capacity, and government support’’.
The article develops a model that explains the performance of community-based initiatives (CBIs) by testing the relationships with four key factors. CBIs are a form of self-organization in which citizens collectively initiate and implement initiatives aimed at tackling societal issues in providing public services for their community. Though CBIs are thriving in Western countries and have been acclaimed for their innovativeness, problem-solving capacity, and legitimacy, large quantitative studies on the performance of CBIs and its antecedents, are lacking. Therefore, the researchers have collected large N data on CBIs in the Netherlands and tested relationships between four factors and performance of CBIs. They found that transformational and connective (boundary spanning) leadership styles within CBIs, the organizational capacity, social capital ties and government support, contribute (directly and/or indirectly) to the performance of CBIs.
The article is part of the PhD research of Malika Igalla for which she received the NWO Research Talent Grant together with her promotor, Jurian Edelenbos. In her research, Malika Igalla uses a quantitative and qualitative mixed-method approach to explain the durability and performance of CBIs by examining relationships with key factors, including an in-depth focus on the factor support of local government.
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