When Engagement Shapes Transformation: “Revierpionier” and Local Engagement in Structural Change – Opportunities, Limits, and Tensions

Our collaborative project with the organisers of the Revierpionier ideas- competition in Saxony-Anhalt (Metropolregion Mitteldeutschland GmbH) addresses these and related questions. Together, we focus on civil-society engagement in the context of structural change and the conditions under which participation, self-efficacy, and democratic experiences emerge locally.

Within the project, we work closely with the Revierpionier team. Since 2021, the ideas competition has provided low-threshold support for volunteer-based, locally rooted projects in southern Saxony-Anhalt—particularly informal initiatives and individuals who often fall outside the reach of conventional funding programs. We are interested in this format because it exemplifies how structural change can be shaped “from below”: experimentally, locally anchored, and driven by civil society.

As part of the collaboration, a project-based research seminar took place in the summer semester of 2025. Together with master’s students from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, we conducted qualitative interviews with past Revierpionier winners and accompanied regional events. The focus was on experiences, expectations, and challenges of volunteer engagement, as well as questions of recognition, participation, and justice, and the role of local projects in the broader context of structural change. At the same time, the project created space for research-based learning and critical reflection on power relations, funding logics, and governance structures.

The analysis is currently ongoing, but early results already indicate that the competition opens important spaces for action, enhances self-efficacy, and strengthens places of encounter. At the same time, tensions become apparent—for example, between low-threshold support and long-term impact, or between engagement and structural overload. These findings will be further explored within the project and fed back into research and teaching.

Through this collaboration, we aim to make local engagement in structural change more visible, to take its potential seriously, and at the same time to critically discuss its limits.