Toward a Theory of Fourth Sector Involvement

Rising cynicism towards political participation has resulted in decreasing levels of political activity in traditional party politics, including voting turnout and party member affiliations. This is not to say, however, that citizens’ interest in political matters would have decreased. Rather, political activism is currently seeking radically new forms, largely facilitated by the emergence of new Internet platforms and Social media tools that help converging even loosely tight interest coalitions together in emphemeral moments of political activity. In this paper we will focus on the emergence of so-called ‘fourth sector’ which has been defined generally as ”an emerging field, composed of actors or actor groups whose foundational logic is not in the representation of established interests, but rather, in the idea of social cooperation through hybrid networking (Rask et al. 2018).” By the fourth sector we refer to such phenomena as urban activism (Faenhle et al., 2017), chaordic organisations, social enterprises, cross-sectoral partnerships and community interest corporations (Sabeti, 2009), and ‘one-to-one’ helping (Williams, 2002). The fourth sector has been welcomed by many academic observers and urban designers as a new, empowering channel that help transforming the negative and reactive social force of NIMBYism toward more positive and proactive political force of YIMBYism, useful for example in such urban planning that takes better into account the real needs of citizens. In this paper we will provide a comprehensive review of academic literature on the ‘fourth sector’ as well as explore the expressions and roles of fourth sector participation in the following domains: health & wellbeing, safety & security and research & innovation. We concur with most recent scholarly observers that the ‘fourth sector’ is developing intensively, introducing inventive such new ways and capacities to public participation that help addressing effectively topical societal challenges. Unlike some other observers who even define fourth sector as a positive social force, we pay attention on some important challenges and restriction to its capacity to support democratic governance. Such challenges include, in particular, continued biases in political activity, limited accountability of decision processes involving the fourth sector as well as inadequate safety or ‘resilience’ of fourth sector actors, who take part in public activities through different constellations of public-private-people partnerships. To address these difficulties, we end up the paper by discuss opportunities to combine fourth sector participation based on doing-centric civic engagement with more talk-centric deliberative approaches. References Faehnle, M. Mäenpää, P., Blomberg, J. and Schulman, H. (2017). Civic engagement 3.0 – Reconsidering the roles of citizens in city-making. Yhdyskuntasuunnittelut – The Finnish Journal of Urban Planning, 2017:3 vol. 55. Rask, M, Mačiukaitė-Žvinienė, S, Tauginienė, L, Dikčius, V, Matschoss, K, Aarrevaara, T and d’Andrea, L (2018). Public Participation, Science and Society: Tools for Dynamic and Responsible Governance of Research and Innovation. Routledge, London UK and New York, U.S. Sabeti, H. (2009). The emerging fourth sector. Executive Summary. Washington: Aspen Institute. Williams, C. C. (2002). Harnessing voluntary work: A fourth sector approach. Policy studies, 23(3), pp. 247-260.