A. Introduction: Co-Production in a Participatory State
Social and welfare services in most developed countries face a complex and partly contradictory mix of financial, social and political challenges. Fiscal constraints combined with New Public Management agendas have resulted in severe cutbacks and calls for greater efficiency in public services that provoked a growing concern about service quality. This collection of essays explores the possibility of addressing these issues from a new perspective that emphasizes greater user participation. It is based on the idea that citizens can play a more active part in the provision of their own care services. It explores how public services can be provided when professionals and service users/clients act as âpartnersâ and where the two parties co-produce the service through their mutual contributions. Some management scholars argue that co-production makes an important contribution to the debate on public management that goes to the heart of both effective public services delivery and the role of public services in achieving societal endsâsuch as social inclusion and citizen engagement (Osborne et al., 2013: 145). Moreover, they state that âby taking a service-dominant approach, co-production becomes an inalienable component of public service delivery that places the experiences and knowledge of the service user at the heart of effective public service design and deliveryâ (ibid.: 146). However, this volume recognizes the potential danger of the concept being misused or misappropriated as a reason for making further cuts to public funding, requiring citizens to bear even more of the burden of an inadequate social safety net, often under the guise of empowerment.
Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom states that co-production attributes citizens an active role in producing public goods and services of consequence to them (1996: 1073). Co-production is considered a partnership between citizens and public service providers that is essential for meeting a growing number of economic, political and social challenges in the 21st century. Neither the government nor citizens can solve them on their own. These challenges include, among other things, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of public services in times of financial strain; increasing the legitimacy of the public sector after decades of questioning its ability with the spread of New Public Management; and finding viable solutions for meeting the growing needs of aging populations in many parts of the world. Co-production promises both greater efficiency and effectiveness in public services, as well as more citizen influence in the design and delivery of public services by facilitating their participation in the provision of these services.
Failing to understand the new trends in public service management and the demands of citizens for high quality public services they depend on in their daily lives can also pose a populist threat (Pestoff, 2008a). This alarm came on the heels of the Social Democratic defeat in the 2006 Swedish Riksdag election that opened the door to right-wing populism combined with anti-foreigner rhetoric, even in a staunch Scandinavian welfare state. Ignoring the growing desire of many citizens to play a more active role in the provision of important public services, like childcare, primary and secondary education, health care, eldercare, handicap care, etc. alienated many voters who previously supported high quality public services in return for high taxes. Many of them also wanted to participate in the co-production of such services for themselves and their loved-ones.
Today, 10 years later, many European countries are facing populist challenges by issues related to social inclusion and cultural pluralism, in increasingly diverse societies, at a time when millions of refugees and immigrants are on the move. Tackling the threat of burgeoning populism following the rise of anti-immigrant and anti-global parties in recent European elections underlines the urgency of considering co-production not only as a way of curtailing public expenditure for major public services, but also from the perspective of citizenship, governance and public service management. In short, active citizen participation in the provision of public services they rely on in their daily lives can also help preserve and renew democracy when it faces serious populist challenges in many advanced societies.
This volume compiles over half a dozen moderately revised articles, most published between 1994 and 2016, plus a few new ones. Most of them are stand-alone articles, but some unnecessary repetition has been eliminated to improve reading. However, some overlap remains for the consistency of the argument in the context in which they were first prepared. These chapters address issues related to the successful development and implementation of a policy shift toward greater citizen participation in the design and delivery of the public services that they depend on in their daily lives. Greater citizen involvement can facilitate the resolution of some of the most tenacious problems facing governments across the globe and help win popular support for such measures.
A seminal Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report on co-production calls for rethinking traditional public service delivery in a new socio-economic environment (2011). Existing models of public service provision are not only tenuous, but they are not affordable in the long-run. This lends greater urgency to developing alternative models that focus on citizen participation in public service delivery. The OECD also notes that co-production takes place at different stages in the policy process, from planning through delivery and review. However, it warns that co-production is more than mere consultations or simply giving citizens/users a say in and/or more responsibility for the design, provision or evaluation of public services (ibid.: 18). It involves citizens/users in more systematic exchanges with the paid staff who create and deliver public services. Therefore, co-production transforms the relationship between service users and providers, ensuring the former greater influence and ownership. Moreover, providing citizens and users with more influence over public services, particularly about service quality, may prove crucial for evoking their participation as co-producers in the most labor-intensive and enduring services like health care and social services. Herein lies both the challenges and opportunities posed by co-production, but the devil is often in the details.
Co-production comprised one of two core research areas for Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom and her research team in Indiana in the 1970s and early 1980s (Parks et al., 1981; Ostrom, 1996), the other being governing common pool resources. Initially, it resulted in a flurry of interest, but it was overshadowed by New Public Management (NPM), which dominated thinking about public sector reforms for the next two decades. However, in the wake of heavy criticism of NPM in recent years, the concept of co-production gained renewed interest in Europe and elsewhere and it is now used by researchers in many parts of the world (Pestoff et al., 2012; Brandsen et al., 2018). At the turn of the century there were two main alternatives to continued governmental growth. One alternative was the marketization of public sector activities, through privatization and contracting out, etc., known as âmanagerialismâ and later as New Public Management (NPM). The other alternative was based on the participation of citizens, clients, customers, volunteers and/or community organizations in producing public services, as well as consuming or otherwise benefiting from them. The latter became known as New Public Governance (NPG) (Alford, 2009; Hartley, 2005; Osborne, 2010; Pestoff et al., 2012). Co-production is often motivated in the public sector by cost reductions and higher quality services (Parks et al., 1981; Alford, 2009). More recently the focus has grown to include new opportunities for citizens to influence the provision of important public services (Ostrom, 1996, 2000a; Fung, 2004; Pestoff, 2009). A third alternative to government growth now seems to be coalescing around ideas of greater volunteering and community responsibility for the provision of basic public services of all types, in light of massive cutbacks in public funding. The latter is called a âCommunitarian regimeâ herein for lack of a better word. (See Chapters 9 and 10 for more details.)
About the same time as the renewed academic and professional interest in co-production by promoting citizen participation in public service provision, Peters (1994, 1996) discussed the emergence of four alternatives to the traditional model of public bureaucracy: the market model, the participatory state, flexible government and deregulated government. Given its affinity to co-production, we will focus on participatory public sector management. In a participatory state, groups normally excluded under more hierarchical models are permitted greater involvement. This approach concentrates power in the lower echelons of the administration, the workers as well as the clients of the organization. It recognizes that the workers and clients found closest to the actual production of goods and services in the public sector have the greatest amount of information about the programs. If the energy, talents and ideas of those groups are harnessed government will work better; i.e., it will become more efficient, effective and productive. However, it calls for greater empowerment and self-government by such groups, which has clear implications for management of the public sector as a whole. Both workers and clients become more directly involved in managerial decisions and governance of the service (ibid: 13), often through a greater dialog between and among them. A multi-stakeholder dialog places the experience and knowledge of the service users at the heart of effective public service design and delivery (Vidal, 2013).
Although the prescriptions of neo-liberals and those proposing a participatory state may bear some similarities, they are definitely not the same. Rather than a means of creating competition among service providers in order to facilitate the market, decentralization in the participatory model is intended primarily to channel control to a different set of bureaucrats, and/or to the clients (Peters, 1994: 16), through new direct democratic or participatory institutions. The goal of the participatory state might, therefore, be called participatory public management. We will return to this topic in greater detail in Chapters 5 and 12.
B. Growing Interest in Co-Production in Europe
In the 1990s the concept of co-production was probably influenced more by business administration than public administration in most European countries. In Sweden, for example, the business perspective was based on changing the perception of customers as passive recipients of goods and services to one where they became active and knowledgeable participants in a common production process (Wikström, 1996). This was often motivated by the uncertainty in businesses transactions and the potential benefit accruing to them by eliminating it (ibid.: 363). This line of reasoning was adopted by a project on cooperative childcare at the beginning of the 1990s. First, a conference paper on co-production and the third sector was published (Pestoff, 1994). Then, it was used to analyze the main results of the Work Environment and Cooperative Social Services (WECSS) Project, in the book Beyond the Market and State (Pestoff, 1998). It was first a few years later that the pioneering efforts of Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues were introduced through the work of Professor John Alford (2002).
Annual meetings of workgroups focusing on co-production at the European Group on Public Administration (EGPA) and International Research Society of Public Management (IRSPM) were instrumental in promoting the comparative study of co-production during the first decade of the 21st century. The results of these workshops were brought together in a special issue of Public Management Review, âCo-Production, the Third Sector and the Delivery of Public Servicesâ, (Pestoff & Brandsen, 2006) that was later reprinted as an edited volume by Routledge in 2008. Continued comparative research under the auspices of the EGPA and IRSPM resulted in a second edited volume, New Public Governance, the Third Sector and Co-Production (Pestoff et al., 2012). Due to her continued teaching responsibilities Professor Ostrom could not attend these EGPA or IRSPM meetings, but she graciously contributed a Foreword to the 2012 volume. A selection of the chapters from that volume were then published in Voluntas in 2012. A third volume has just appeared, Co-Production and Co-Creation: Engaging Citizens in Public Service Delivery (Brandsen et al., 2018). Today, the IIAS Study Group on Co-Production meets annually to discuss research into this topic. These meetings provide an inspiration to scholars from many parts of the world who study this phenomenon.
Having now written two dozen published articles on co-production and edited two books on this topic, my own perspective on the importance of studying co-production stems from its potential to facilitate greater citizen participation in the provision and delivery of all types of public services. However, my research focuses on traditionally mainstream, enduring welfare services, like social services and health care. Given that they are so labor intensive, co-production has a potential to provide significant economic and social benefit, if managed in a fashion that facilitates citizens/users participation in complementary and/or essential tasks, rather than the core ones.
Furthermore, it has been argued that co-production can eventually lead to a more democratic regime of governance (Pestoff, 1998, 2008a, 2009; Becker et al., 2017). But, we need to stop and ask, what is democratic governance? Hirst defines governance as âa means by which an activity or ensemble of activities is controlled or directed, such that it delivers an acceptable range of outcomes according to some established social standardsâ (2000: 24). He points to the need to rethink democracy and find new methods of control and regulation of the big organizations that dominate life both in the public and private sectors (ibid.). Can co-production potentially qualify as a new method of control and regulation of big public organizations? Does democratic governance imply greater citizen participation and influence in the provision of public services, particularly those services that directly impact their daily life and/or that of their loved-ones? The following chapters argue that it does and that co-production can, therefore, contribute to promoting democratic governance.
Research on parent participation in European childcare and preschool services helps to illustrate the development of such new methods of control (Pestoff, 2006; Vamstad, 2007). For example, in France, Germany and Sweden, parent participation in public financed third sector childcare is manifested in their responsibility for the management and maintenance of these services. A work obligation for parents not only provides them with crucial insights into details related to the daily operation of services, but also gives them a sense of belonging and âownershipâ of the services (Pestoff, 1998, 2006). Moreover, it also comprises a new method of control. The boards of cooperative childcare facilities are comprised of parents who are responsible for hiring the staff and the facilityâs economic stability, as well as deciding important issues like its opening and closing hours, the availability of service on holidays and during summer vacations, etc. Such issues are no longer decided by distant politicians or bureaucrats, who are mainly interested in curtailing public expenses. So, service users can gain more control over them, particularly over service quality. Thus, co-production promotes greater citizen participation and influence in the provision of public services, and thereby can qualify as a new method of control and regulation of public organizations. This not only empowers citizens but also helps promote participatory democracy.
This book addresses a number of central topics related to the study of co-production, and it combines theoretical discussions and important conceptual issues with empirical research that can help corroborate these discussions and issues. Building on ideas of Hirschman, it maintained that co-production provides a strategy for moving beyond exit and voice, particularly in collective forms. It then confronted these ideas with unique empirical material from parents using various third sector providers of childcare in Sweden in the early 1990s, which by and large confirmed these theoretical considerations. Ten years later, employing the ideas of Ostrom, my research returned to this field in a second empirical study that compared parent participation in preschool services in eight European countries. Parents with children in third sector providers participated more actively than those in public or private for-profit services. It also illustrated different types or dimensions of participation, economic, political and social, as well as a service specific dimension. A few years later, this body of research was corroborated by a newer study that focused on different providers of these services in Sweden, parent and worker co-ops, public services and small for-profit providers (Vamstad, 2007). A âglass ceilingâ was noted for parent participation in both public and for-profit providers, while both types of co-ops facilitated their involvement in co-production to a greater or lesser degree (Pestoff, 2008a, 2009).
Public policies can either crowd-in or crowd-out desired behavior by citizens, and co-production is not an exception to this rule. The above-noted research on childcare and preschool services in Europe leads to three main conclusions. First, there are different forms of citizen participation in the provision of public financed social services, namely economic, social, political and service specific participation. Second, a higher level of citizen participation is noted for third sector providers of public financed social services, because it is based on collective action and direct client participation, as illustrated by parent co-op childcare in France, Germany and Sweden. Third, some citizen participation is also noted for public provision of childcare services, but parents are encouraged to contribute more sporadically or in a limited fashion, like the Christmas or spring parties. However, they seldom have the opportunity to play a more active or significant role in managing the services or having d...
