Rural areas in Europe are frequently marked by limited economic opportunities, poor job prospects, and declining infrastructures, which sometimes stand in stark contrast to urban living conditions. In the new German federal states, rural areas are highly diverse, with significant variations in population density, proximity to major cities, and socio-economic conditions. Citizens living in these areas have been part of major social upheavals and needed to rebuild and reorganize civil society activities and infrastructures after the German reunification.

Despite these challenges, some of these areas have increasingly become hubs for social innovation, where diverse groups of actors collaborate to develop creative responses to local and regional challenges. However, despite growing political interests in these activities, the legitimacy of civil society initiatives in new rural governance arrangements remains contested and ambiguous.

Initiatives often lack local support. Significant efforts are required from civil society initiatives to showcase their relevance to local and regional actors and thus legitimize their ways of organizing, doing and thinking.

Drawing on concepts linked to transformative social innovation, legitimation processes, and governance beyond the state, this study examines legitimation as part of social innovation processes between multiple actors and their translocal networks in rural areas and asks how they shape social changes in regional developments. Empirically, the study builds on case study work that was conducted in the Harz in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. The paper brings to the fore that legitimation is not merely a success factor or part of an empowerment process but a crucial prerequisite for civil society initiatives to drive change in new governance arrangements and institutionalize new ways of thinking, doing, and organizing.

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