The austerity dialogue in Zeist: How the Municipality of Zeist harnesses the ideas of ‘citizen-experts’

Like many other municipalities in Europe the City of Zeist in the Netherlands was faced with the challenge of achieving budget savings. Based on the belief that citizens have expertise, experience and skills to find new solutions, the City of Zeist launched a citizen engagement process to close a fiscal gap of €6m. During a period of three months, two hundred ‘citizen experts’ discussed new solutions related to eight topics, based on their personal expertise. As a result of this targeted co-commissioning process, ninety-five per cent of all citizen proposals were adopted by the local council without changes.