ABSTRACT
Often portrayed as self-organised, hands-on, do-it-yourself organisations, community-based initiatives (CBIs) manifest a well-documented trend within which citizens have been taking an increasingly active role in functions that traditionally have been considered the sole responsibility of the state. Despite a somewhat adversarial portrayal, it is now well-accepted that CBIs aim at facilitating capacity for joint action with government and often invest efforts to associate with governmental organisations both for public funding and for official legitimisation. Moreover, the portrayal of CBIs as striving for governmental approval and as responding to a governmental failure implicitly imply that CBIs comply with current policy arrangements. Shifting the focus to noncompliant CBIs, which mobilise resources and exercise activities that challenge existing policy status quo, this chapter suggests that CBIs occasionally not only challenge current governance arrangements, but they may also reshuffle current ideas, practices, institutions, and discourses so that governance capacity expands to unexpected avenues, termed here as governance capacity expansion. To illustrate this overlooked contribution of CBIs, this chapter focuses on a well-known phenomenon in Israel within which parents set up schools for their children. Notably, unlike many Western democracies, there are no charter laws in Israel that regulate initiatives to start schools. Rather, regulation of such initiatives is indirect, through basic laws that provide schools with permits and/or licensing. Because there is no private school system in Israel, parents who start schools are often dissatisfied with the currently available public school options. This action reflects direct noncompliance with current educational policies, as evidenced by constant de-legitimisation and struggles by the Ministry of Education to block these initiatives. Distinguishing and focusing on noncompliant CBIs makes a twofold contribution: analytical accuracy that further demonstrates CBIs as a source of innovation and increasing emphasis on the role of noncompliance as a social driving force that may trigger policy change.
