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The activating welfare state often frames recruiting ordinary people as ‘local’ co-producers of residence-based welfare provisions as the antidote to standardised bureaucracy. This article demonstrates that their enrolment in the delivery of public services in the Netherlands constitutes not an antidote, but another variant of standardisation. To do so, it introduces the concept of ‘intimate standardisation’, a set of tactics and techniques that draw from and seek to evoke intimacy, rather than bureaucracy as a standardising mechanism. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in the knowledge practices of third sector professionals who enrol ordinary people in residence-based welfare delivery across the Netherlands, the article demonstrates how intimate standardisation produces and circulates qualifications of ‘local’ citizenship from one locale to another. In conclusion, I discuss the dynamics of power and politics at play in intimate standardisation to reflect upon the governmentalisation of local people in the broader context of the activating welfare state.

Intimate standardisation: how the activating welfare state localises citizens and standardises welfare