Citizens Differ from Organizations: Modeling a Specific Citizen-Centered Collaborative Capacity

This article discusses the various challenges that public organizations face resulting from collaboration with different types of actors. Building on studies from the public and private sector, the characteristics of collaboration between citizens and public organizations are discussed and measures to address these characteristics are proposed. Based on these findings, different dimensions of an organizational citizen-centered collaborative capacity are identified. The result of this study is a conceptualization of such a collaborative capacity, which includes the dimensions of structuring, motivating, applying, and assessing. It is further argued that the ability to motivate external participants is especially important for citizen-centered collaborative capacity.