Chapter 13
Coproducing Public Services with Service Users, Communities, and the Third Sector
Tony Bovaird and Elke Loeffler
Around the world, public managers and policy makers are turning to coproduction of public services with citizens and communities. This chapter sets out why coproduction matters in public services and public policy, its benefits compared to traditional service planning and delivery, its current extent and potential in different public services, the mechanisms that can be used to promote it, and its implications for the public sector and civic society.
Coproduction is not a new concept. It was the subject of intense interest in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the United States, sparked by a group of scholars working with Elinor and Vincent Ostrom (Ostrom & Ostrom, 1977). Shortly afterward, it was at the heart of one of the classic texts in service management (Normann, 1984), which pointed out that a key characteristic of services is that the client appears twice, once as consumer and again as part of the service delivery system. What is new, however, is the increased interest in recent years by public, private, and third sectors in exploring different approaches to involving users and communities in services.
Scholars and practitioners have offered various definitions of coproduction. Brudney and England (1983) in their seminal article defined coproduction as the joint production of public services by regular producers (e.g., service agents, public administrators) and consumers (e.g., citizens and neighborhood associations). This does not stress the most distinctive aspect of coproduction: its emphasis on citizens adding value to the activities of the public sector. In the United Kingdom, the definition of the new economics foundation (Boyle & Harris, 2009) is often used: “Co-production means delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals, people using services, their families and their neighbours.” While the intentions behind this definition are widely shared, it would mean, if taken literally, that there is virtually no coproduction anywhere, since “equal and reciprocal” relationships are rare. Moreover, it focuses on codelivery. In this chapter, we therefore use the definition that coproduction is “public service professionals and citizens making better use of each other's assets, resources and contributions to achieve better outcomes or improved efficiency” (Bovaird & Loeffler, 2012, p. 1121).
The increasing attention to user and community coproduction highlights one of the key characteristics of services in the public and private sectors: the production and consumption of many services are inseparable. The creation of quality in services can occur before, during, and after service delivery, in the interaction between the customer and provider, rather than just at the end of the process as in manufacturing. Consequently, the contributions of service users, and often the community in which they live (including their family, friends and support networks), are essential to the success of public services. If this is not recognized and systematically managed, this contribution may be wasted.
The definition of coproduction given above deliberately excludes some meanings of the term found in the literature. First, it excludes coproduction as interorganizational relations (e.g., as used for collaboration between film and television companies); the long-established terms partnership and collaboration (treated in detail in chapter 3, this volume) seem quite adequate here. We therefore confine the word coproduction for relationships between the public sector and citizens, particularly service users and their communities. The rationale is that it is generally overblown to give the name partnerships to these public sector relationships with citizens, and citizens normally realize straight away that their relationship with public services is not a full partnership. Consequently, it is valuable to have a different word, like coproduction, for such relationships.
Second, this definition excludes purely self-help activities by citizens or self-organizing activities by communities. Where there is no input from public services it seems odd to call an activity coproduction. This is not to underestimate or undervalue such activities; indeed, we believe they are huge in extent and of enormous value in enabling important social outcomes. However, our theme is co-producing public services, so citizen self-help and community self-organizing lie outside this remit.
We should note some remaining disputes in relation to the definition of coproduction. Some authors (Ostrom, 1996) see coproduction primarily as individual action, whereas for others it implies long-term relationships between state agencies and organized groups of citizens. More typical, however, are Brudney and England (1983), who accept both possibilities, seeing coproduction as active participation beyond the normal requirements of citizenship by either individuals or groups in the delivery of municipal services intended to raise the quality or amount of their provision. Moreover, two distinct criteria are found in the literature to distinguish individual and collective coproduction: whether the outputs are collectively supplied and whether the inputs are collectively enjoyed. Given our definition above, it is the former criterion that is employed in this chapter.
Again, for some authors, coproduction involves only voluntary contribution to services (Brudney & England, 1983) or, as Alford (2009, p. 183) puts it, “clients taking positive actions which contribute to organizational purposes,” while other definitions (including ours) also cover coerced compliance, e.g. with ordinances and other legal duties.
A range of benefits from coproduction have been suggested for different stakeholders, many of which have been highlighted in interesting case studies, although some of them have yet to be substantiated by rigorous evaluation research:
- For service users: Improved outcomes and quality of life; greater self-esteem and political self-efficacy through empowerment; higher-quality, more realistic, and sustainable public services as a result of bringing in the expertise of users and their networks
- For citizens: Increasing social capital and social cohesion; offering reassurance about availability and quality of services for the future; greater self-esteem and political self-efficacy through empowerment
- For frontline staff: More job satisfaction from working with empowered and satisfied service users
- For service managers: Limiting demands on the services; behavior change; making services more efficient
- For politicians: More votes through more satisfied service users; less need for public funding and therefore lower taxes
The rest of this chapter sets out the current state of knowledge about user and community coproduction of public services, exploring the characteristics and motivation of people who coproduce, theories of effective practice, and the evidence on the impacts of coproduction on outcomes and service costs.
What We Know about Effective Practice in Coproduction
This section sets out the current state of knowledge on coproduction, covering its theoretical and conceptual foundations, the various forms of coproduction in practice, research evidence on coproduction, and factors relevant to effective practice of coproduction.
Theoretical and Conceptual Foundations
The concept of coproduction had a number of conceptual origins. A key source was the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis in the late 1970s, where Elinor Ostrom (1996) recalled, “We struggled with the dominant theories of urban governance underlying policy recommendations of massive centralization.” It was to counter this hitherto unchallenged assumption of economies of scale from larger public sector providers that the group around Ostrom and Ostrom developed their coproduction models, based on the specifics of heterogeneous provider-user relationships rather than standardization. They showed that coproduction can allow citizens to provide complementary inputs to those of public officials, thus opening up economies of scope, which may be more important than economies of scale. They came to realize that “collaboration between those who supply a service and those who use a service is essential if most public services are to yield the desired results. These problems arise in all service industries in both the private and public sectors” (Ostrom & Ostrom, 1977, p. 20).
The idea of coproduction aligned with but went further than Frederickson's (1982) exhortation that “effective public administration of the future should be intimately tied to citizenship, the citizenry generally, and to the effectiveness of public managers who work directly with the citizenry” (p. 502). This built on what Frederickson insisted were the early formulations of public administration one hundred years before, concerned with direct citizen participation in government. However, these “new networks of concerned citizens” were largely involved in coplanning of services, involving citizens in consultation. Although Frederickson did not mention this, examples of this new approach had already become evident in the 1960s in the field of urban planning. In the United States, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 demanded the “maximum feasible participation of residents and groups,” while in the United Kingdom, the Town and Country Planning Act of 1968 made participation a compulsory part of all land use planning.
Soon afterward, the service management literature, particularly Normann (1984), highlighted that in service systems, the client appears twice, once as a customer and again as part of the service delivery system. Sometimes service professionals use a “relieving logic,” in which they “do the service for the customer” (e.g., a surgeon performs an operation on a patient). However, in many services, the client actually performs the key task (e.g., a student finds appropriate material and writes an essay on a topic), while the service professionals involved play solely an enabling role. Here the client is clearly key to codelivery of the service (early private sector examples included the self-service supermarket and bank ATMs). Grönroos (2008, p. 299) describes this as “customer service logic”: “When using resources provided by a firm together with other resources and applying skills held by them, customers create value for themselves in their everyday practices.” This approach has recently been explored further by Osborne, Radnor, and Nasi (2013). Normann predicted that as service users become increasingly competent, providers who could offer enabling relationships would become more prominent and pose tough competition for “relievers.” However, only since fiscal austerity became widespread after the financial and economic crisis from 2008 onward has this possibility appeared attractive to governments.
Ostrom (1996) later also acknowledged an intellectual debt to the concept of “street-level bureaucrats” (Lipsky 1980), who recognize that they cannot simply deliver successful services to passive clients but rather need to mobilize citizen inputs so that clients are actively engaged in service delivery. Consequently, as Hupe and Hill (2007, p. 292) point out, street-level bureaucrats and citizens have a two-way relationship: “Having both duties and rights, citizens can hold street-level bureaucrats accountable for their behaviour and, if necessary, make a formal appeal in response to the results of that behaviour.” This highlights coassessment as another element of coproduction.
A further influence on the development of the concept of coproduction has been the disabilities rights movement, which adopted the social model of disability and insisted that people should not be treated as passive recipients of care but rather as active participants in decisions about their lives, with power to influence how support should be provided (Oliver, 1990). Through direct payments, personal budgets, and, more generally, the personalization agenda in social care, disabled people have become codesigners and coproducers of services (Leadbeater, 2004). This approach has been used as a template for the empowerment of people with other social and economic disadvantages (Cahn, 2004).
More recently, political scientists have sought to locate coproduction within a typology of roles that citizens play in relation to the state. Hood, Peters, and Wollmann (1996) categorized coproduction as one of the four archetypical forms of “consumerization”: active (rather than passive) consumers, who have direct (rather than indirect) power. Thomas (2012) distinguished citizens, customers, and partners, of which the first and third groups undertake some coproduction activities. However, Alford (2002) argued that all his categories of citizens (user-clients, volunteers, and members of a community) might undertake coproduction.
Forms of Coproduction in Practice
Coproduction may involve any of the following elements:
- Co-commissioning of services:
- Coplanning of policy—for example, deliberative participation, planning for real, open space (dealt with in detail in chapter 8, this volume)
- Coprioritization of services—for example, personalization and personal budgets, participatory budgeting, stakeholder representation in commissioning decisions
- Cofinancing services—for example, fundraising, charges, agreement to local tax increases.
- Codesign of services—for example, user forums, service design labs, customer journey mapping
- Codelivery of services, which embraces:
- Comanaging services—for example, community trusts, community management of public assets, members of school boards,
- Coperforming of services—for example, peer support groups (such as expert patients), nurse-family partnerships, meals-on-wheels, Neighborhood Watch
- Coassessment
- Comonitoring and coevaluation of services—for example, citizen inspectors, user online ratings, participatory service reviews
Different definitions of coproduction vary in their emphasis on these elements. While many early scholars referred explicitly to coproduction in the delivery of public services, their interpretation of “delivery” was often broad, including, for example, membership on advisory and review boards, cooperation in surveys of governmental performance, and the transmittal of preferences to city officials (Brudney & England, 1983). Many public agencies tend to emphasize cocommissioning and codesign as part of their public consultation activities. More recently attention has swung to codelivery of services, since many public sector organizations are hoping to use coproduction to reduce the impact of service cuts in the current climate of fiscal austerity.
Research Evidence on Coproduction
Here we summarize research evidence on the level of coproduction, the characteristics and motivations of those who coproduce, the impact of coproduction on service outcomes and costs, and how citizens can be mobilized to coproduce more often.
Level of Coproduction
As examples of how important coproduction may be to the creation of public value, in the United Kingdom, there are about 1.8 million regular blood donors to the National Health Service (NHS) (about 5 percent of the adult population), 8 million people have signed up as potential organ donors, and 10 million people live within Neighborhood Watch areas, all of which involve citizens in coproducing public outcomes with public services. Even more intense coproduction contributions are made by about 350,000 members of school boards, who help run schools and may have a legal liability for the affairs of the school, the 750,000 people who volunteer to assist teachers in schools, and the 170,000 volunteers in the NHS.
We can identify a range of activities in which very large numbers of citizens get involved in the gray area between coproduction and “self-organization,” depending on whether public services are making a contribution. For example, in the United Kingdom, over 5 million people help to run sports clubs, often but not always in local authority leisure facilities; there are well over 14,500 community buildings in community ownership and management and development trusts own and manage at least £300 million worth of social assets (Quirk Review, 2007), many of which are partly supported with public funding; in addition, it has been estimated that the value of unpaid social care (from, family, friends, neighbors, and organized volunteers) is around £89 billion annually, compared to the £19 billion annually of social care public expenditure (Buckner & Yeandle, 2007). A similar study in Massachusetts has estimated that if unpaid care were counted in gross domestic product, it would amount to nearly 30 percent of goods and services produced in the state (Duffy, Albelda, & Hammonds, 2013). However, in both these studies, it is unknown how much of this citizen input was matched by some input from public services, so that it could be classified as coproduction rather than simply self-organizing by caregivers and communities.
Most of the detailed research evidence on the level and impact of production comes from case studies from around the world (Pestoff, Brandsen, & Verschuere, 2012; Loeffler, Taylor-Gooby, Bovaird, Hine-Hughes, Wilkes, 2012; Durose, Mangan, Needham, & Rees, with Hilton, 2013; Loeffler, Power, Bovaird, & Hine-Hughes, 2013; Osborne & Strokosch, 2013; and the more than forty coproduction case studies at http://www.govint.org/good-practice/co-production). However, some systematic quantitative evidence is now becoming available from surveys. In particular, we were involved in a five-country European project in 2008 that undertook a telephone survey of about one thousand citizens in each of the United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, and Germany (Loeffler, Parrado, Bovaird, & van Ryzin, 2008). Questions were asked about coproduction activities (concentrating mainly on initiatives which were likely to prevent future problems arising) in the fields of community safety, local environment, and public health. A coproduction index (scaled from 0 to 100) was created for each of these fields, aggregating the responses to five specific questions in each field about coproduction behavior. The results showed that citizens were particularly active in taking steps to look after the local environment (index score 61), rather less active in health improvement initiatives (index score 52), and considerably less active in prevention of crime (index score 45). The coproduction index for reporting crime to the police and making personal interventions to stop someone behaving in an antisocial way was much lower (index score 33).
In general, citizens showed particularly high levels of engagement in activities that do not need much effort by themselves and do not require getting in touch with third parties (e.g., locking doors and windows in their home before going out, recycling household rubbish and saving water and electricity, which about 80 percent of citizens indicated as doing often). When it came to making changes to personal lifestyle in order to improve publicly desired outcomes, there was a sharp drop: only about 50 percent of citizens reported doing these often. At the very bottom of the responses on prevention activities were participation regularly in groups, whether the topic was community safety, local environment, or health.
Comparing across the five countries, the United Kingdom had the highest level of coproduction (index score 56) and Denmark the lowest level (index score 48). While these differences were statistically significant, they suggest that levels of coproduction fall in a similar range across a wide range of European countries. As yet, there are no non-European surveys with which to make comparisons, although a survey using the same methodology and questionnaire is underway in Australia.
Characteristics of People Who Coproduce
Using data from the same five-country citizen survey in 2008, combined with qualitative evidence from focus groups with service providers and stakeholders, Parrado, van Ryzin, Bovaird, and Loeffler (2013) analyzed correlates of citizen coproduction of public services in three key policy areas: public safety, the environment, and health. In line with previous research on other aspects of public engagement and volunteering, they found that women and older citizens generally engage more often in coproduction, although these characteristics explained only a small proportion of the variation in coproduction among survey respondents. Their research showed no significant tendency for higher coproduction to be associated with levels of education or urban or rural location.
Motivations for Coproduction
The most extensive empirical investigation of what motivates citizens' willingness to coproduce has been reported by Alford (2009) in three Australian case studies. He finds no systematic variation of motivations among different types of citizens and service clients but that sanctions appear to be counterproductive with both beneficiaries of services and most “obligatees” (those legally obliged to make use of the service), although they may be effective with a small minority of those citizens who are “opportunistically noncompliant” with service requirements. He concludes that inducing coproduction in a service will most often succeed through increasing the nonmaterial aspects of the value that citizens get from a service—the intrinsic rewards, incentives based on enabling greater social interaction and esteem, and normative appeals to shared values.
Impact of Coproduction on Service User and Community Outcomes
The actual and potential impact of coproduction on well-being outcomes that citizens experience is as yet only sketchily researched. A number of case studies have, however, been widely cited.
Perhaps the best-known example is the Nurse Family Partnership, which started in the United States and has become an international template. This is an evidence-based model partnering first-time parents with a public health nurse aimed to break a cycle of “poverty, conflict and despair.” Randomized controlled trials show that the approach reduces child abuse and neglect by 48 percent, teenage arrests by 61 percent, and “incorrigible behavior” by 90 percent, leading to an estimated cost saving of 5:1 (Eckenrode et al., 2010). Current estimates from a similar Scottish program are between 3:1 and 5:1 (Loeffler, 2013).
An illustration of the health benefits of coproduction comes from the gastroenterology unit in Highland Hospital, Eksjoe, Sweden (Bovaird & Tholstrup, 2010). By 2001 the unit had long waiting lists and was at capacity. It therefore introduced an innovative approach through which patients were involved more intensively in and took more responsibility for their own care. In particular, patients were helped to self-monitor their condition more effectively and encouraged to make much earlier contact when they suspected a flare-up in their condition. Consequently, the number of unscheduled visits of patients with flare-ups in their condition decreased from two a day in 2001 to two a week in 2005. The effect on the patients' health was dramatic: the number of patients with inflammatory bowel disease who needed in-patient care decreased 48 percent from 1998 to 2005, compared to the nationwide decrease of 4 percent. The clinic moved from above the national average of in-patients per 100,000 residents to being almost half the national average during this period. This not only improved the health of patients but also lowered demand on beds in the unit.
Alford (2009) concludes from analysis of the impacts arising from his three Australian case studies that coproduction is most likely to add value to a public agency's activities if the client's contribution and the organization's production process are interdependent and complementary (when the imperative to coproduce will be greater but the complexity of achieving it will also be correspondingly greater) or where client and organizational inputs are substitutable, if the clients are more competent at performing the requisite work (whether that be inputs, processes, outputs, or outcomes). While this is conceptually well founded and illustrated from his case studies, further empirical verification is needed to demonstrate how important such impacts might be.
Impact of Coproduction on Service Costs
During the period of fiscal austerity from 2008 onward, governments have often tended to give more weight to savings in public service costs than to improvements in outcomes. The impacts of coproduction on service costs have been explored in a number of studies.
Knapp, Bauer, Perkins, and Snell (2010) were commissioned by the Department of Health in the United Kingdom to estimate cost savings from a number of coproduction initiatives in which communities complemented public agency inputs in the fields of social care and health. They found evidence that time banks could result in savings and other economic payoffs of more than £1,300 per member, while costing less than £450 per year to administer. (Time banks are organizations whose members carry out tasks for one another, receiving time credits for each task, which they can then use to reward the people who in turn help them; Cahn, 2004.) Befriending schemes typically cost about £80 per older person to administer, but savings could be around £35 per older person in the first year alone because of reduced need for treatment and support for mental health needs. Local community organizers had more significant costs: typically up to £300 per person, when working with hard-to-reach individuals to provide advice on welfare benefits and debt management, but the economic benefits (e.g., less time lost at work, savings in benefits payments) could be £900 per person in the first year alone.
Evidence on How to Mobilize Citizens to Coproduce Public Services
Scholars have conducted relatively little research into how coproduction can be encouraged among service users and the communities in which they are located. The 2008 five-country citizen survey of coproduction in Europe (Parrado et al., 2013) showed that a key driver of coproduction in any policy area was the perceived conditions of that area: the worse the perceived conditions in the area, the more coproduction behavior was evident. This suggests, paradoxically, that governments might encourage more coproduction by allowing conditions to deteriorate—and, indeed, the link between coproduction activity and satisfaction with government performance was largely negative (although statistically significant in a only relatively small number of contexts), suggesting that coproduction may depend in part on awareness of a shortfall in public performance.
However, some government interventions may be important. In the 2008 five-country survey in Europe, satisfaction with government information was largely positively correlated with coproduction, although only statistically significant in a few contexts. Satisfaction with government consultation had a rather inconsistent relationship with coproduction across countries. Although it was statistically significant in quite a few contexts, this was sometimes positive and sometimes negative. Parrado et al. (2013) therefore concluded that in general, the pattern of correlation between citizens who coproduce and those who are satisfied with government performance, information, and consultation is weak and inconsistent.
One strong conclusion from the 2008 survey was that political self-efficacy—the belief that citizens can make a difference—is strongly associated with service coproduction. This result was strikingly evident in all policy areas tested and in all five countries surveyed. The lesson for government policy would appear obvious: to encourage greater coproduction by citizens, they have to be convinced that their actions will make a difference. This therefore allows policy on coproduction to learn from the wider literature on political self-efficacy (Gist & Mitchell, 1992; Bandura, 1997). However, self-efficacy could be partly endogenous; existing coproduction levels in society could influence citizens' sense of self-efficacy, or an unmeasured variable (such as community or personal values) might be influencing both the sense of self-efficacy and willingness to engage in coproduction behavior.
A recent study uses an experimental approach to provide strong empirical evidence that governments, through initiatives specifically designed to provide basic resources to citizens, can increase citizen coproduction, especially among those with the greatest need for the service (Jakobsen, 2012). The focus was on government initiatives aimed at providing immigrant families with basic tools and knowledge relevant for their coproduction of their children's language skills. The public sector initiatives concentrated on supplementing citizen resources, specifically skills and knowledge relevant to the production process, tools and facilities relevant to the production process, and time available for coproduction.
Effective Practice in Coproduction
Much of the research on coproduction has thrown up a major challenge to the public sector: citizens report a level of engagement in activities relevant to improving the outcomes of public services that is considerably in excess of that expected by local public officials and members of stakeholder groups (Loeffler et al., 2008), revealing that public sector officials have a limited understanding of the coproduction activities going on in their field and their geographical area (Boyle, Clark, & Burns, 2006). This suggests that user and community coproduction of public services is not properly understood, never mind systematically managed, so that its potential benefits are not currently being maximized.
The large number of published case studies on coproduction embody a wide range of practices, often strongly influenced by the personality of one or more key players who are committed to coproduction principles. Some of these cases demonstrate the art of coproduction—a creative performance of coproductive activities between service professionals and service users and other citizens, in ways that defy (and may indeed deliberately avoid) any patterns of behavior. In other cases, however, interesting attempts are being made to classify what we might call the craft of coproduction—the knowledge base about the patterns of coproduction behaviors that appear likely to be successful in specific circumstances, without being backed by such levels of evidence as to justify claims to be scientific.
Interestingly, a degree of commonality is already emerging in these attempts at classifying the steps involved in the practice of coproduction. For example, Kannan and Chang (2013) set out nine key implementation steps in codelivering government services. In table 13.1, we show that these can be quite easily mapped onto the five key steps for making the transformation to coproduction outlined in Loeffler and Hine-Hughes (2012).
Table 13.1 Steps in Implementing Coproduction
| Five Steps for Making a Transformation to Coproduction | Key Implementation Steps |
| Map it: Set out existing coproduction initiatives. | Share your results transparently with information about your initiatives. |
| Focus it: Decide your priorities for areas in which you wish to coproduce. | Nothing succeeds like success, and thus a small successful pilot should always be the first step. |
| People it: Find the right staff and citizens who have the appetite for coproduction. | Engage participants in the development process. Targeting participants who have the appropriate skills, motivation levels, and time is critical at the design stage. |
| Market it: Develop incentives for ensuring that stakeholders continue to coproduce. | Codelivery and coproduction initiatives need to be marketed to citizens in the right way to set the intended expectations and rules of engagement. Foster citizens' civic engagement and trust. Getting the incentives right for citizens to participate in a codelivery initiative is important. |
| Grow it: Find mechanisms for scaling up the coproduction approaches that work. | Invest in education and training of both government and citizen participants. Appropriate levels of transparency should be designed into service operations. |
Sources: Loeffler and Hine-Hughes (2012); Kannan and Chang (2013).
Implications
Coproduction is not simply a new take on citizen engagement. It potentially constitutes a new compact among politicians, administrators, and citizens, recognizing the differing expertise of each and stepping up joint commitment to the achievement of each other's desired outcomes. What is key is the agreement to work with each other to ensure that these outcomes are achieved, whether shared or not. Coproduction therefore entails a redefinition of participative democracy as the interaction of experts in everyday life with experts in specialist knowledge and in collective decision making. Consequently, politicians have to forswear the primacy of politics, professionals have to accept that they are not the sole custodians of expertise, and citizens have to become active in shaping and performing public services.
For this to happen, there is a need to take a whole systems approach, recognizing the dense interconnectivity between stakeholder attitudes and behaviors. This opens up the possibility that some public services will behave as complex adaptive systems, with the uncomfortable consequences that they will be inherently unpredictable and can be improved only by innovation and experimentation in a process of organic change rather than meticulous planning (Bovaird, 2007 2008). This also opens up the prospect for reframing of professional expertise: professionals in the future may need to see themselves more as facilitators of behavior change within complex systems rather than as social engineers of predictable outcomes based on professional knowledge bases.
The most exciting potential from the perspective of public services is the opportunity to tap into major new resources through incorporating citizens' assets and contributions in public services. Given the research evidence on the possible level of these contributions, this may lead to a very different perception of the overall level of resources available to public services. However, these resources will become available only if citizens find this approach attractive, which will require incentives and may therefore some public spending. At the very least, it will usually require staff training and support for this new way of working (Needham & Carr, 2009). Coproduction is not free to the public sector.
Coproduction involves recognizing and giving more power to a wider range of stakeholders, specifically service users and their communities. This comes at the price of opening up the scope for disagreement and even conflict between the wider range of citizen groups involved, as they will often have strongly contrasting values and may become more intensely engaged in issues about which they have strong feelings. However, this could be seen as a step forward in public policy, exposing rather than hiding the trade-offs between the outcomes desired by key interest groups in society.
In these circumstances, there is likely to be a need for politicians to play a more active and visible role in conflict resolution. At one level, therefore, coproduction may reduce the role of politicians, since more citizens will be able to act directly on their own behalf. On another level, the role of politicians in deciding the collective public interest, over and above the views of individual citizens, may well grow significantly in a world of active coproducing citizens. The net effect on the importance of the role of politicians is not possible to determine yet, but paradoxically, the move to participative democracy may reinforce the importance of representative democracy.
The public sector will have to accept that it is just one player in the world of coproduction. Indeed, Pestoff (2012) concludes from a range of comparative case studies of preschool services in several European countries covering public, private for-profit, and cooperative service delivery models that there is a glass ceiling for citizen participation in both public and private service providers of welfare services. He suggests that only social enterprises such as small consumer and worker co-ops appear to develop the necessary mechanisms to breach these limits by empowering the clients or staff, or both, with democratic rights and influence. This signals the organizational diversity that is likely to characterize public governance when the full implications of coproduction have begun to be understood.
Summary
In public governance, we have come to recognize the interdependence of many organizations and networks in pursuing public purposes. While the state plays a major role in coordinating the roles of these different stakeholders and sometimes even in delivering key services, we have come to see the importance of private and third-sector organizations as partners in achieving public outcomes. User and community coproduction adds an extra dimension to this collaborative action, focusing on the contributions made by citizens, in their different roles, to public services and publicly desired outcomes.
This contribution from citizens can come in the form of cocommissioning, codesign, codelivery, or coassessment. Indeed, because coproduction is usually not highlighted as a key element of the strategy of an organization or partnership, it is often practiced almost surreptitiously by street-level bureaucrats, which protects it from interference but also hinders its dissemination.
Consequently, the empirical extent and potential impact of coproduction is still relatively poorly understood. Research suggests that the most powerful correlate of coproduction is political self-efficacy. Promoting self-efficacy is wholly consistent with the essential message of coproduction: that public services must focus on the assets, strengths, and contributions of citizens rather than their deficits. Nevertheless, it poses a major challenge, since the public sector has not seen its role in the past as boosting the belief of citizens in their own ability to bring about positive changes in outcomes. We should not underestimate the potential difficulties in reversing this mind-set and the power relations that underlie it.
Recent research also indicates that there are no strong socioeconomic differences between those who are very active in coproduction and those who are not, so that stereotypes (e.g., “more likely to be older, female”) are generally mistaken. This makes it harder for public services to identify those most likely to contribute to coproduction, but it suggests that the potential for coproduction may be significantly wider than is currently assumed by staff and managers in public services.
The future research agenda for coproduction is emerging. While no one expects it to be a panacea for all the troubles of public services that are short of funding, the concept that citizens have assets and resources to contribute, and now want access to the full resources of the public sector, is now widely understood. Whether it will lead to transformation of the public sector or simply another brush-off of citizens who wish to participate in government remains to be seen.