Co-Production and Co-Creation

Engaging Citizens in Public Services

Taco Brandsen, Bram Verschuere, Trui Steen, Taco Brandsen, Bram Verschuere, Trui Steen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351792561
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

Co-production and co-creation occur when citizens participate actively in delivering and designing the services they receive. It has come increasingly onto the agenda of policymakers, as interest in citizen participation has more generally soared. Expectations are high and it is regarded as a possible solution to the public sector's decreased legitimacy and dwindling resources, by accessing more of society's capacities. In addition, it is seen as part of a more general drive to reinvigorate voluntary participation and strengthen social cohesion in an increasingly fragmented and individualized society.

"Co-Production and Co-Creation: Engaging Citizens in Public Services" offers a systematic and comprehensive theoretical and empirical examination of the concepts of co-production and co-creation and their application in practice. It shows the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest both to students at an advanced level, academics and reflective practitioners. It addresses the topics with regard to co-production and co-creation and will be of interest to researchers, academics, policymakers, and students in the fields of public administration, business administration, economics, political science, public management, political science service management, sociology and voluntary sector studies.

Part 1

Co-Production and Co-Creation

Definitions and Theoretical Perspectives

1 Co-Creation and Co-Production in Public Services

Urgent Issues in Practice and Research

Taco Brandsen, Trui Steen and Bram Verschuere

The Revival of Interest in Engaging Citizens

The involvement of citizens in the creation and production of public services is one of the major topics in current public administration and public management research. Academics from all over the globe seem to have joined forces in international scientific networks where citizen engagement in the public domain is the main focus of research. This should not come as a surprise, as also governments worldwide re-discovered the citizen as an important actor with a responsibility in the design and implementation of public policies and public services. To a certain extent, public administration and public management practice and research go hand in hand: (local) governments embrace citizen engagement, as they consider it as a valuable way to overcome some real or perceived challenges they are confronted with like the need to make public service delivery more efficient, effective and democratic, and to restore trust in and satisfaction with government and politics. Academics then have the responsibility to observe and evaluate this trend in a critical and scientific way. They focus on questions like: When citizens take a greater role in the design and implementation of public services, does this actually improve the services? Does co-production increase the democratic level of service delivery? Why would citizens want to make the effort of engaging in co-creation or co-production? And are public servants in turn interested in involving them? Answering these questions is not only relevant from a fundamental scientific point of view, but is potentially also helpful for practitioners that are in a constant need to improve the administrative practice of public policy making and public service delivery. Especially as citizen engagement gradually turns from marginal thoughts to mainstream practice, we need answers to these basic questions.

In this book, we explicitly focus on co-creation and co-production, roughly defined as a joint effort of citizens and public sector professionals in the initiation, planning, design and implementation of public services. For a more elaborate definition, we refer to chapter 2 by Brandsen and Honingh, in which also the conceptual distinction is made with classical types of citizen participation (in policy making, e.g.) and with partnerships between government and civil society organizations. Co-creation and co-production are different from classical citizen participation in policy making, as they focus on the output-side of the policy cycle: the provision of public services, with varying degrees of tangibility (services ranging from the creation of a public garden, to more abstract products like ‘health’ or ‘safety’). The difference with government-civil society partnerships is that co-creation and co-production focus on the contribution of (groups of) individual citizens rather than organizations.

It is easy to forget, now that the participation of citizens is fashionable, that it was for long considered undesirable or unimportant; often, it still is. After Elinor Ostrom and her team published the first work on co-production in the 1970s, there was an initial surge of interest in the topic, which died down in the 1980s. It is clear to see why: it was simply not in tune with the times. Although there remained widespread support for more choice in public services, this took the shape of market-inspired reforms, in which citizens were cast as consumers. Although there is room for co-creation and co-production within such a perspective, it is different from one fostered in a paradigm of participation and collaboration (see chapter 4 by Victor Pestoff to this volume). After market-inspired reforms fell out of grace academically (although in practice they are still very much alive), interest in co-creation and co-production gradually revived. In public discourse, co-creation and co-production at the individual level still remain relatively less significant compared to classical types of individual participation and to partnerships between government and civil society. However, this may change as the former become more viable and the limits of the latter become more apparent.

Advances in technology and cultural changes have made co-production and co-creation far easier to implement now. In Elinor Ostrom’s time, communication was a practical problem that made co-production time-intensive and costly. Simply getting people’s personal contact details could require major effort. Now it is far easier for public employees to interact with citizens, both collectively and individually. As more sophisticated technologies become available, services that were hitherto dominated by professionals leave more room for individual input (see chapter 10 by Lember in this volume). For instance, it has become easier for people to assess their own health, to an extent that was until recently considered impossible. By implication, this changes patients’ interactions with medical professionals.

Simultaneously, cultural shifts have created an environment in which co-creation and co-production have become more feasible and in which the potential of new technologies could be realized. Generally, individualization and the decline of traditional authority have changed the position of professionals in society (see chapter 8 by Steen and Tuurnas in this volume). It has become more accepted for citizens as non-experts (or, as others argue, experts on themselves) to take more responsibility for the services they or their dependents receive. Likewise, there is now more recognition among governments that citizens need to be involved in the design and implementation of policies. Co-creation especially has become a popular catch-phrase for all such efforts. However, the actual extent of citizen involvement still differs strongly between types of services, organizations and cultural contexts. If there is a movement towards a new type of service delivery, it is a slow and checkered one, even if the public discourse suggests a rapid transformation.

At the same time, it has become evident that participation is in itself not a panacea. It has been believed that new types of participation would help solve the so-called democratic deficit. Yet attempts by governments to engage citizens have often been dogged by disinterest, mutual frustration and limited representation. The reasons for this are various. The fact that policy makers and professionals are not prepared or able to follow up on the input of citizens certainly plays a part. Citizens may have unrealistic expectations of what governments can achieve. But the shape of participation also determines its effectiveness. If alternatives to representative democracy resemble the institutions of representative democracy, then they will also mirror its ills. Many types of participation copy the features of policy and politics: in their emphasis on certain (official) settings, a specialized discourse, the need for certain skills. Citizens without the necessary cultural capital are still likely to be excluded, even if the format is partially changed. This realization has encouraged the search for more radical alternatives, which include self-organization and co-production. Yet whether these alternatives function better, and under what conditions, still remains to be seen.

The State of the Research

Developments in research have reflected these broad trends in society. Following the first steps by Ostrom c.s., it consisted of early explorations of co-production in public services—particularly associated with the work of Brudney and England (1983), Pestoff (1998), Alford (2002) and Bovaird (2007). In subsequent years, these were accompanied by a number of mostly small and qualitative cases demonstrating the relevance and potential benefits of this type of participation (for instance, those bundled in Pestoff, Brandsen and Verschuere, 2008; 2012). More recently, there were efforts to make research in this area more systematic and rigorous. One of the explanations is that the research community has also become much more coherent, with the emergence of stable platforms for research on these topics (e.g. through the EGPA, IIAS, IRSPM networks). To a certain extent, research into co-creation and co-production has moved from agenda-setting to fact-finding. The data that are collected by researchers have improved in quality, and a number of methodologically more diverse and sceptical studies emerged examining specific aspects of co-production. This has begun to open up areas that were until recently black boxes. These include the motives for citizens to engage in co-production (for an overview see chapter 7 by van Eijk and Gasco) or its effects, for instance on trust (see chapter 19 by Fledderus) and inclusiveness (see chapter 18 by Verschuere, Brandsen and Steen). We now thus have more research that is providing first answers to the key questions of why, how, and with what effects co-creation and co-production take place (or not). But we also observe more attention for the uneasy and critical questions about the dark side of co-creation and co-production: although many practitioners still see participation as something that is mainly good practice, research also increasingly discusses and shows (potential) pitfalls and drawbacks in terms of unequal participation opportunities, quality of services and unequal benefits of co-produced public services (see chapter 21 by Steen, Brandsen and Verschuere on the dark side of co-creation and co-production).

The methods, traditionally single case studies, have further expanded to cross-national comparative case studies (e.g. Voorberg, Bekkers and Tummers, 2015; Bovaird et al., 2016; van Eijk, Steen and Verschuere, 2017), experiments (e.g. Jakobsen, 2013) and longitudinal studies (e.g., Fledderus, 2015). Although case study research with mainly qualitative data is still dominant in the field, we thus observe an increasing number of research that applies quantitative and even experimental methods.

Finally, given the potential of increased citizen participation to mitigate the effects of the big societal issues of our time (e.g. climate and environment, poverty, migration), researchers increasingly recognize that relying only on public administration paradigms and theories will not suffice to understand the benefits and risks of co-creation and co-production of public services for and with people that suffer from the effects of these issues. Multi- and interdisciplinary approaches in which public administration scholars cooperate with scholars from other disciplines will need to be developed further (see chapter 14 by Moretto and Ranzato and the accompanying case studies by Mees and by Ranzato).

Despite these recent advancements in the field, there are still challenges to tackle as a research community. Most pressing, the diverse uses of the terms co-creation and co-production, combined with the prevalence of highly particular case studies, have hindered meaningful comparisons between different studies. In terms of scope and dynamics, individual participation in health care is quite different from the collaboration between local NGOs and municipalities, yet the co-production and co-creation labels have been used to cover all. Also, there were studies in which these terms have been stretched to cover any individual action directly or indirectly contributing to the effectiveness of public services. Anyone watching over their property might be regarded as co-producing public safety. Although individual contributions to the public good are undeniably essential, extending co-production to cover all of them brings us back to the weakness of functionalist theory: useful when carefully applied, but meaningless when stretched. Any phenomenon can be construed as having a function for society. Likewise, anything can be construed as public (to paraphrase Bozeman), which, as there is nearly always some connection to public services, implies that there would always be some element of co-production or co-creation. That makes the terms useless as academic concepts.

Various scholars have in recent years tried to tighten the definition of the co-production concept (Brandsen and Honingh, 2016; Osborne, Radnor and Strokosch, 2016; Nabatchi, Sancino and Sicilia, 2017), to strengthen the cumulative nature of studies. There have also been some efforts to link the previously separate concepts of co-production and co-creation (Voorberg, Bekkers and Tummers, 2015; chapter 2 by Brandsen and Honingh in this volume). It is unlikely that such initiatives will lead to a unified use of these terms. However, what can already be seen is that scholars are more explicitly positioning themselves among the different definitions, which will hugely benefit the comparability of empirical findings.

With this book, we have the ambition to present the advanced state-of-the-art in co-creation and co-production research by assembling chapters by leading scholars in the field. Though a successor to earlier collections (Pestoff and Brandsen, 2006; Pestoff, Brandsen and Verschuere, 2012), it is less a collection of separate cases and more a thematically structured overview. In this book, co-creation and co-production are examined along a number of important dimensions. By distinguishing between these dimensions, we recognize that:

• What we—as public administration scholars—call co-creation and co-production might be called something else in other disciplines although we are actually talking about the same phenomena. Therefore, in the first part of this book, we give an overview of different theoretical and conceptual foundations in different social science disciplines.
• Co-creation and co-production in the public spheres come with many issues that need to be taken into account: the relation between volunteers and professionals, leadership in co-production, the role of ICT and legal issues, only to name some. Therefore, in different chapters, we chose to discuss the state of the art in co-creation and co-production research with regards to these issues.
• The practice of co-creation and co-production might differ between different types of services (e.g. co-producing safety, health, communities, education, natural resources). It comes with different challenges, opportunities and practices, depending on the specificities of the service concerned. Therefore a set of thematic chapters are presented in the book to do justice to these differences.
• Co-creation and co-production of public services might come with positive and negative effects of various nature: trust in government, empowerment of citizens, service quality and effectiveness, access of vulnerable groups to the benefits of the service may all increase or decrease. Therefore a set of chapters is devoted to the potential effects...