Governance assessment of hybrid co-creation: framework development and application in Leuven, Belgium

Digital technologies promise to enhance participation, yet they also risk reinforcing social exclusion. In response, cities increasingly adopt hybrid co-creation processes that combine digital and analogue instruments to broaden participation and foster innovative solutions. Despite the growing diffusion of hybrid approaches, the governance conditions influencing their implementation remain unclear. This study addresses this gap by asking: how does the governance context enable or constrain the implementation of hybrid (digital–analogue) co-creation in cities? To answer this question, we have developed the governance assessment framework for implementing hybrid co-creation, which integrates five governance principles and five governance dimensions to systematically identify enabling and constraining conditions. The framework is applied to the front-runner city of Leuven, Belgium, as a critical case for examining governance dynamics in hybrid co-creation. The findings demonstrate that the governance context plays a decisive role that can either enable or constrain implementation. The contribution of this study is twofold: (1) an assessment framework that enables the identification of governance bottlenecks in hybrid co-creation processes and (2) a set of theoretically informed propositions on how governance arrangements shape hybrid co-creation in urban contexts, providing a basis for future comparative and longitudinal research.