Beyond Engagement and Participation: User and Community Coproduction of Public Services

In recent years, there has been a radical reinterpretation of the role of policy making and service delivery in the public domain. Policy making is no longer seen as a purely top-down process but rather as a negotiation among many interacting policy systems. Similarly, services are no longer simply delivered by professional and managerial staff in public agencies but are coproduced by users and their communities. Th is article presents a conceptual framework for understanding the emerging role of user and community coproduction and presents several case studies that illustrate how diff erent forms of coproduction have played out in practice. Traditional conceptions of service planning and management are now outdated and need to be revised to account for coproduction as an integrating mechanism and an incentive for resource mobilization — a potential that is still greatly underestimated. However, coproduction in the context of multipurpose, multistakeholder networks raises important public governance issues that have implications for public services reform.

[1]  S. Arnstein,et al.  Ladder of Citizen Participation , 2020 .

[2]  Gordon P. Whitaker.  Coproduction: Citizen Participation in Service Delivery , 1980 .

[3]  Elaine B. Sharp,et al.  Toward a New Understanding of Urban Services and Citizen Participation: The Coproduction Concept , 1980 .

[4]  E. Ostrom,et al.  CONSUMERS AS COPRODUCERS OF PUBLIC SERVICES: SOME ECONOMIC AND INSTITUTIONAL CONSIDERATIONS , 1981 .

[5]  J. Brudney,et al.  Toward a Definition of the Coproduction Concept , 1983 .

[6]  S. Percy,et al.  Citizen Participation in the Coproduction of Urban Services , 1984 .

[7]  R. Normann,et al.  Service management: Strategy and leadership in service businesses , 1984 .

[8]  William R. George,et al.  Developing new services , 1984 .

[9]  M. Rosentraub,et al.  Citizen Participation in the Production of Urban Services , 1987 .

[10]  Lewis Gunn,et al.  Public management: A third approach? , 1988 .

[11]  K. Eisenhardt.  Building theories from case study research , 1989, STUDI ORGANIZZATIVI.

[12]  David H. Brunell.  Developing New Services in Library Networks , 1989 .

[13]  Christopher Pollitt,et al.  Managerialism and the Public Services: The Anglo-American Experience , 1990 .

[14]  C. Hood.  A PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR ALL SEASONS , 1991 .

[15]  John P. Kretzman,et al.  Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets , 1993 .

[16]  Amitai Etzioni.  The Spirit Of Community , 1994 .

[17]  M. Moore.  Creating public value : strategic management in government , 1995 .

[18]  Solveig Wikström,et al.  The customer as co‐producer , 1996 .

[19]  L. Kirsch.  The Management of Complex Tasks in Organizations: Controlling the Systems Development Process , 1996 .

[20]  Hanne Niss,et al.  Country of origin marketing over the product life cycle , 1996 .

[21]  E. Ostrom.  Crossing the great divide: Coproduction, synergy, and development , 1996 .

[22]  C. Ciborra.  The Platform Organization: Recombining Strategies, Structures, and Surprises , 1996 .

[23]  R. Stacey.  Complexity and Creativity in Organizations , 1996 .

[24]  W. Arthur,et al.  Increasing returns and the new world of business. , 1996, Harvard business review.

[25]  R. Chambers.  Whose Reality Counts?: Putting the First Last , 1997 .

[26]  R. Rhodes.  Understanding governance : policy networks, governance, reflexivity and accountability , 1997 .

[27]  J. Alford,et al.  A public management road less travelled: Clients as co-producers of public services , 1998 .

[28]  C. Hood.  The Art of the State: Culture, Rhetoric, and Public Management , 1998 .

[29]  R. Ramírez.  Value co-production: intellectual origins and implications for practice and research , 1999 .

[30]  M. Mort,et al.  The new management of community care : user groups, citizenship and co-production. , 1999 .

[31]  Robert D. Putnam,et al.  Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community , 2000, CSCW '00.

[32]  Gianpaolo Baiocchi.  Participation, Activism, and Politics: The Porto Alegre Experiment and Deliberative Democratic Theory , 2001 .

[33]  Gerry Stoker,et al.  Bringing citizen voice and client focus into service delivery , 2001 .

[34]  Michael Barzelay,et al.  The New Public Management: Improving Research and Policy Dialogue , 2001 .

[35]  J. Alford,et al.  Defining the Client in the Public Sector: A Social‐Exchange Perspective , 2002 .

[36]  Marilyn Taylor,et al.  Public Policy in the Community , 2003 .

[37]  H. Schachter,et al.  Educating Administrators to Interact with Citizens: A Research Note , 2003 .

[38]  Mike Crawford,et al.  User Involvement in Change Management: A Review of the Literature , 2003 .

[39]  Central-Local Relations in an Era of Multi-Level Governance: The Case of Public Participation Policy in England, 1997-2001 , 2004 .

[40]  Edgar S. Cahn,et al.  No More Throw-Away People: The Co-Production Imperative , 2004 .

[41]  Richard Simmons,et al.  User Power: the participation of users in public services , 2004 .

[42]  T. Basok,et al.  Community government: voluntary agencies, social justice, and the responsibilization of citizens1 , 2004 .

[43]  Anuradha Joshi,et al.  Institutionalised Co-production: Unorthodox Public Service Delivery in Challenging Environments , 2004 .

[44]  Paula Hyde,et al.  Service design, culture and performance: Collusion and co-production in health care , 2004 .

[45]  Bob Jessop,et al.  Multi-level Governance and Multi-level Metagovernance Changes in the European Union as Integral Moments in the Transformation and Reorientation of Contemporary Statehood. , 2004 .

[46]  Henrik Paul Bang,et al.  Among everyday makers and expert citizens , 2005 .

[47]  Chris Skelcher,et al.  Jurisdictional Integrity, Polycentrism, and the Design of Democratic Governance , 2005 .

[48]  S. Driver,et al.  Parents, Power and Public Participation: Sure Start, an Experiment in New Labour Governance , 2005 .

[49]  F. Fischer.  Participatory Governance as Deliberative Empowerment , 2006 .

[50]  T. Bovaird.  Developing New Forms of Partnership With the `Market¿ in the Procurement of Public Services , 2006 .