Co-Design of Strategic Plans in the Case of Grassroots Initiatives: Empirical Evidence from a Post-Socialist Country

Grassroots and community-led initiatives are increasingly recognized as important actors of local development, yet their role of “local networkers” capable of co-designing and co-creating solutions remains insufficiently explored, particularly in post-socialist contexts. The aim of this empirical study is to evaluate the depth of participation and the patterns of co-design in the process of strategic planning in grassroots initiatives. The research draws on primary data from 106 grassroots initiatives. To examine stakeholder involvement, we construct six bipartite networks representing actor participation across distinct phases of strategic planning. These networks are analyzed using social network analysis to identify structural patterns, followed by exponential random graph models (ERGMs) to test hypotheses concerning actor-level characteristics such as income, commercial activities, community size, and experience with social innovation. The findings show that the core co-designers in all planning phases are the initiatives’ own communities and volunteers, who consistently dominate the planning, decision-making, and implementation processes. External actors—local governments, NGOs, activists, firms, and universities—participate selectively, mainly during initial information gathering, consultations, and project preparation. Overall, the study demonstrates that grassroots initiatives operate primarily as community-anchored civic networks, with external actors engaged pragmatically around specific collaborative tasks rather than across the full planning cycle.