Domestication or contestation? How the discourse of co-creation meets local experiences of green transition

A discourse of co-creation or co-production has recently gained importance within several governance areas, including the field of environmental communication. Central features of the discourse are notions of mutual responsibility between citizen and authorities, commitments to participation, and an alleged loosening of power relations (Voorberg, Bekkers & Tummers, 2015). However, the concrete implications of the discourse, not least for environmental communication, are yet to be explored, This paper examines the interplay between the discourse of co-creation and local experiences in a green transition project involving four municipalities in Scandinavia. The protect participants are in charge of their own local cases, for instance on electric cars or solar panels, but they meet regularly and exchange experiences within the overall framework of ‘co-creational green transition’. The paper is guided by two complementary research questions: 1.How does the discourse of co-creation enable the participants to make sense of their experiences in the different local green transition projects? 2.How is the discourse of co-creation challenged by the local experiences of the partners? The two questions address each side of the dialectical relation (Fairclough, 2010) between so-called big ‘D’ and small ‘d’ discourses (Keenoy & Oswick, 2004). This dialectic relation is theoretically well established in the field of discourse analysis, but has been less pursued empirically. As for data, the paper relies on transcripts of presentations and discussions at workshops for the project partners, where they represent and share experiences from their local cases and relate them to the overall framework of the project. Analytically, the paper focuses on conceptualizations and evaluations. For RQ1, it is analyzed how concepts and ways of evaluating, stemming from the discourse of co-creation, are employed in the articulation of events, actors and processes from the local cases. Concerning RQ2, it is analyzed how concepts and ideals from the discourse of co-creation are explicitly or implicitly questioned or contested in the articulation of local events, actors, and processes. At a higher level of detail, analytic devices (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009) such as lexis, semantic relations of causality, and epistemic and deontic modality, are drawn upon.