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Paper short abstract

This contribution examines collective care arrangements in the Netherlands as prefigurative experiments in collective self-reliance (samenredzaamheid). It explores how communities organise care and how participatory design-based methods can help imagine more sustainable and just futures of care.

Paper long abstract

Amid increasing welfare residualisation and a decentralisation of care responsibilities – from national government to municipalities and from municipalities to citizens – communities in the Netherlands are increasingly called upon to become more samenredzaam, i.e. collectively self-reliant. Yet how collective care practices emerge, and how they might be sustained, remains underexplored.

Taking existing care initiatives as prefigurative sites of experimentation (Botha et al., 2025; Monticelli, 2021; Schiller-Merkens, 2022), we explore how such initiatives attempt to enact alternative caring relations and infrastructures in the present. These initiatives not only respond to changing welfare arrangements but also actively imagine and experiment with possible futures of care.

We present findings from an exploratory study mapping such initiatives in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, examining how they understand and organise care collectively, and how their efforts are shaped by existing policy and governance frameworks. Building on this empirical groundwork, we outline a forthcoming study that will employ participatory design-based methods, including participatory futuring and backcasting (Quist & Vergragt, 2006). In collaboration with care initiatives and municipal policy actors, this study will explore how alternative arrangements of care might be scaled beyond prefigurative initiatives.

By bringing together research on prefigurative care arrangements and design-based methods, this work contributes to debates on how communities and institutions might collectively imagine and cultivate more caring futures.

Key words: collective care, collective self-reliance, prefiguration, participatory backcasting