ABSTRACT
This chapter is about how citizens are contributing to shaping the future of a community and place. They achieve this by creating material goods, services, and regulations and framing ideas about public value for those who live and work in or pass through the place, and for the wider relations within which a place and the people who care about it are situated. It illustrates how active agency struggles to make a difference by pushing and pulling in, around, at, and through the multiple relations which intersect in the place they recognise and care about. I explore the relational dynamics involved through a version of a sociological institutionalist perspective which focuses on authoritative, allocative, and discursive power (rules, resources, and ideas) as these play out in specific episodes and come to interact with institutionalised governance practices and broader dynamics of cultural understandings (Healey 2006, 2018b). The story takes place in a very small town in a relatively remote rural area in Northern England and focuses on three different initiatives in citizen-based collective action which have emerged in recent years, considering their contribution to promoting public value, their wider impact on the governance ecosystem, and their sustainability into an uncertain future.
