Community Formation and Grassroots Governance Under Institutional Voids: Evidence from Slovakia

Grassroots organizations increasingly represent important actors of community development and participatory governance, particularly in environments characterized by institutional deficiencies and weak public responsiveness. This study examines the role of communities in the emergence and developmental trajectories of grassroots organizations in Slovakia. The research is based on a qualitative research design informed by Straussian grounded theory, using questionnaire surveys, semi-structured interviews and grounded theory coding procedures. Empirical data were collected from 106 grassroots initiatives operating across different thematic and territorial contexts in Slovakia. Using open, axial and selective coding, this study identifies dominant mechanisms of grassroots community formation, institutional voids stimulating civic mobilization and recurrent trajectories of grassroots evolution. The findings demonstrate that grassroots initiatives most frequently emerge in response to absent community infrastructure, insufficient public services, environmental governance failures and weak civic participation. Community mobilization is primarily driven by informal social networks, collective volunteering, place attachment and activist engagement. The analysis identifies five dominant models of grassroots emergence and demonstrates that grassroots initiatives frequently evolve from informal civic mobilization into more stable governance arrangements.