Co-Production of public services and Co-Governance of public policies in Europe: progress report

It is worth noting that both co-production and co-management take place on the output or implementation side of the political system, once a public policy has been determined. Co-governance, on the other hand, is usually found only on the input side, and involves the third- sector and other private actors in the determination of public policy for a given sector. Co-governance refers to attempts to manage this growing diversity in a more democratic fashion, through the creation of citywide, provincial and/or national bodies where various providers are represented and given both a voice and vote in developing and deciding the future of a sector, i.e., in its governance.

* Essay: Innovations in public services: Co-production and new public governance in Europe. By Victor Pestoff (SE), Institute for Civil Society Studies, Stockholm

The above essay is a good introduction to the general thematic of the recently published book:

* Towards Peer Production in Public Services : Cases from Finland. Editors: Andrea Botero, Andrew Paterson and Joanna Saad-Sulonen. Aalto University publication series Crossover 15/2012. Helsinki, Finland

Below is just an excerpt. Full text of the introductory essay by Pestoff is available here.

Victor Pestoff:

“Peer production is a way to produce goods and services that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals who come together to produce a shared outcome, i.e., the production of content by the general public rather than by paid professionals and experts in the field. In these communities, the efforts of a large number of people are coordinated to create meaningful projects. The information age, especially the Internet, has provided the peer production process with new collaborative possibilities and has become a dominant and important mode of producing information. Free and open source software provides an example of peer production. It occurs in a socio-technical system which allows thousands of individuals to effectively cooperate to create a non-exclusive outcome. Such collective efforts are informal and without traditional hierarchical organization. However, as in the case of Wikipedia, a large amount, if not most, of this collaborative effort is maintained by a relatively small number of devoted and active individuals. Peer production is often used interchangeably with the term “social production” or even “P2P” production (Wikipedia 2012).

Collaborative efforts by various parties to produce a common outcome, either in the form of a product or service, can assume different labels. Co-production is a common term for such collaborative efforts involving at least one hierarchical organized partner from either the public or private sectors. In business relations between firms collaborating to produce a common outcome, we can speak of Business-to-business (B2B) co-production. Here two firms collaborate in achieving a common product or service, like when the BBC co-produces the daily news together with National Public Broadcasting in the USA or other public broadcasting systems. It can also mean that one firm outsources the production of certain essential ingredients to another firm. Furthermore, certain aspects of service provision can be assumed by the consumers themselves, for Business-to-consumer (B2C) co-production. The spread of self-service shopping and use of automatic teller machines, also known as ATMs, provide clear examples of this.

Sometimes governments attempt to involve their citizens in the provision of goods and services, either for reasons of improving efficiency of public services, effectiveness of public policies, or to promote other important social goals, such as citizen empowerment, participation and democracy. Here we can speak of Government-to-citizen (G2C) co-production more generally or Municipality-to-inhabitant (M2I) co-production at the local level. Alford (2010) compares the use of postal codes on letters and filing individual income tax returns as examples of citizen co-production in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Moreover, Public-private partnerships, or PPPs, can either involve private firms as the collaborators of public sector agents, third sector actors as their partners or bring both private firms and third sector actors in collaboration with the public sector. Outsourcing the provision of public goods or services is typically seen as a form of PPP. However, note that this article focuses on partnerships between the public and third sectors that take the form of G2C or M2I co-production. Moreover, it does not discuss the role of information technology in co-producing public services, although it plays an important role in promoting greater interaction between some public agencies and citizens (Bauwens, 2005, Bauwens in this volume; Meijer, 2012).

Today, many European governments are searching for new ways to involve their citizens in the provision and governance of public financed social services. There are both economic and political reasons for this development. At a general level the explanations are similar throughout Europe. First is the challenge of an aging population; second is the growing democracy deficit at all levels, local, regional, national and European; and third is the semi-permanent austerity in public finances, made more acute by the recent global economic crisis. The response to these three challenges will, of course, vary between countries and across sectors of service provision, but some general trends are nevertheless observable. First is the promotion of greater volunteering. Second is the growth of new and different ways to involve users of social services as co-producers of their own and others’ services. Third is the spread of new techniques of co-management and co-governance of social services, where the third sector plays a more prominent role in various European countries. Fourth is the development of user councils or other forms of functional representation at the local level to engage users in a dialogue about public services. Taken together they represent a major social innovation in the provision of public services and imply a different relationship for the third sector vis-á-vis the state.

Innovations in public services are not just new ideas, techniques or methods, but also new practices, and they not only involve physical artifacts, but also changes in the relationships between the service providers. Hartley (2005) distinguishes between several different types of innovations in the public sector, including a) products, b) services, c) processes, d) positions, e) strategy, f) governance and g) rhetoric. According to her, governance innovation is important since it involves new forms of citizen engagement and democratic institutions.

Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues analysed the role of citizens in the provision of public services in terms of co-production (Parks et al., 1981 & 1999). However, citizens in today’s advanced welfare states have several different roles that represent diverse aspects of post-modern life. To name just a few, they are voters, taxpayers, employees, members of a family and usually two or more voluntary associations, consumers, etc. Sometimes these roles complement each other, but sometimes they can come into conflict with each other. Moreover, sometimes citizens play these roles as individuals, but other times they do so in close collaboration with others, i.e., in informal groups or in voluntary organizations.

More important, given major social changes in Europe and Scandinavia, particularly with the growth of the welfare state at the end of WW II, the very state they interact with has also changed significantly. In the immediate post- WW II period they faced a rapidly expanding, yet basically traditional public administration, with its hierarchical chain of command, where citizens were primarily viewed as passive clients of mostly public services. Later, with the spread of neo-liberalism and introduction of New Public Management, they were expected to become active consumers and exercise more choice between various providers of public financed services, be they public, private for-profit or nonprofit. Here the market replaced the state as the main governing mechanism for the expression of citizens’ preferences. More recently, the spread of network society (Hartley, 2005) and New Public Governance (Osborne, 2006; Osborne, 2009) implies a more plural and pluralist model of governance and provision of welfare services, based on public-private networks. In these cases, where citizens are encouraged to take even more active roles as co-producers of some or many of the services they expect, demand or even depend upon, in order to fulfill a variety of their most important roles.

Thus, both the shifting roles that citizens play in their daily life, and the changing context within which they play them, place complex demands on the concepts and methods needed to study and understand such far reaching changes. However, it is necessary to explore both individual and collective aspects of such changing roles for citizens. First, as individual clients, consumers and co-producers of public financed services, how do they interact with the public sector, market and third sector to express and satisfy their needs, as well as promote their interests? Secondly, as members of third sector organizations, particularly of service organizations, how do they best promote their needs and interests to obtain the services they and others like them not only need, but may depend entirely upon? How can they become active in, and contribute to, the provision of crucial services they are dependent upon?

A. Co-Production: Some crucial conceptual issues

This section focuses on co-production, particularly of enduring social services. What is co-production and what are the crucial conceptual issues for better understanding its contribution to the renewal of public services? Five such issues are explored in the first part of this section. They include questions about: Definitions of co-production and levels of analysis; relations between the professional staff and their clients; why citizens become involved in the co-production of social services; why they engage in collective action and whether co-production involves individual acts, collective action or both.

1. Definitions of co-production and levels of analysis

Definitions of co-production range from “the mix of public service agents and citizens who contribute to the provision of public services” to “a partnership between citizens and public service providers”. Differences between them can express cultural differences, various levels of focus, or both. They can also express different levels of analysis. We will contrast a few of them below, as there seems to be some notable discrepancy between the American, British, Canadian and European usage of the term co-production. The concept of co-production was originally developed by Elinor Ostrom and the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University during the 1970s, to describe and delimit the involvement of ordinary citizens in the production of public services. Thus, they developed the term co-production to describe the potential relationship that could exist between the ‘regular producer’ (street-level police officers, schoolteachers, or health workers) and their clients who want to be transformed by the service into safer, better-educated or healthier persons (see Parks, et al., 1981 & 1999). Initially co-production had a clear focus on the role of individuals or groups of citizens in the production of public services, although their involvement also had some ramifications at both the meso- and macro levels of society. Co-production is, therefore, noted by the mix of activities that both public service agents and citizens contribute to the provision of public services. The former are involved as professionals or ‘regular producers’, while ‘citizen production’ is based on voluntary efforts of individuals or groups to enhance the quality and/or quantity of services they receive (Parks, et al., 1981 & 1999).

Meanwhile, Bovaird (2007) proposed another definition. According to him “[u]ser and community co-production is the provision of services through regular, long-term relationships between professionalized service providers (in any sector) and service users and or other members of the community, where all parties make substantial resource contributions.” (ibid., 847). This definition focuses not only on users, but also includes volunteers and community groups as co-producers, recognizing that each of these groups can have a quite different relationship to public sector organizations. However, Alford (2009) clearly distinguishes between volunteering and co-production. Citizens contribute resources when they volunteer, but do not personally consume the services provided, while co-producers both contribute resources and consume the services provided (ibid.). Nevertheless, by including a temporal aspect in his definition, Bovaird appears to exclude more mundane acts of co-production, like using postal codes, filing tax returns, etc. Furthermore, the British Cabinet Office views co-production as a partnership between citizens and public service providers to achieve a valued outcome (Horne & Shirley, 2009). Co-production is essential for meeting a number of growing social challenges that neither the government, nor citizens, have the necessary resources to solve on their own. But, it seems legitimate to ask whether co-production is just another example of ‘old wine in new bottles’, or perhaps just more neo-liberal hype designed to roll back the state and promote more volunteering? However, the British Cabinet Office argued that this clearly was not the case, since co-production comprises an approach that was distinct from other traditional responses like volunteerism, managerialism or paternalism (ibid.). Whether this still holds true after the 2010 Parliamentary Election in the UK, the huge budget cuts announced by the new governmental coalition in the Fall of 2010, and its subsequent promotion of ‘Big Society’ and ‘Localism’ remains to be seen.

In the UK, the term co-production has also been used to analyse the role of voluntary and community organizations (VCOs) in the provision of public services (Osborne & McLaughlin, 2004). Therefore, it is sometimes contrasted with co-management or co-ordination between the public and third sectors in providing some public services, and with co-governance (ibid.) or co-construction as it is often called in Canada and Latin America. Such a multi-level perspective provides a more nuanced understanding than a singular focus on co-production at the individual level or using the same term for different levels. However, co-production in the UK context also appears to imply a direct, but limited service delivery role for VCOs, i.e., they are simply service agents or providers. By contrast, co-management refers to a broader role for VCOs in local service management, while co-governance refers to the role of VCOs in policy formulation and community governance. The latter is best illustrated by the Voluntary Sector Compact(s), at both the national and local levels, and Local Strategic Partnerships designed to promote local regeneration in the UK (ibid.).

Co-production has also recently been introduced to the continental European discussion, where it refers to the growing direct and organized involvement of citizens in the production of their own social services (Pestoff, 1998 & 2005; Pestoff, 2006, 2008 & 2009; Vamstad, 2007). The continental perspective seems to adhere more to the US than to UK usage of the term co-production. For example, parents can participate in the co-production of childcare, both individually and collectively through parent associations, or co-operative preschool services in France, Germany and Sweden. We also find ample evidence of co-management and co-governance of public services in some European countries.

So, the term co-production has been used in different contexts and for different phenomena, however, these differences are not always made clear (Brandsen & Pestoff, 2006, 2008 & 2009). Sometimes co-production is used as a general term to cover many different types of citizen participation in public service provision, and it also includes various ways citizens and/or the third sector participate both in policy making and policy implementation. Other times, it seems to focus on a different level or phenomena that involves citizen and/or third sector participation in policy making and/or public service delivery. It is necessary to keep these differences in mind for the sake of clarity. Co-production can refer both to direct citizen participation in the delivery of a public financed service, at the site of service delivery, as well as to group provision of such services. Citizen participation at the site of service provision is nevertheless different from the meso-level phenomenon of co-management, where the third sector participates, alongside other public and private actors, in managing the growing complexity of delivery of diverse public financed services, without any direct citizen or user participation in such arrangements. The growing mix and diversity of service providers not only implies greater opportunities for citizen involvement in the provision of public financed services, but it also becomes necessary to manage and govern this growing diversity. Co-management, therefore, refers to the growing diversity or hybridisation of providers of welfare services, typically found in situations where different Non-profit organisations (NPOs) and/or For-profit organisations (FPOs) participate in the provision of public financed services (Brandsen, 2004). Elsewhere, this has been referred to as the “growing welfare mix” (Evers & Laville, 2005).

It is worth noting that both co-production and co-management take place on the output or implementation side of the political system, once a public policy has been determined. Co-governance, on the other hand, is usually found only on the input side, and involves the third- sector and other private actors in the determination of public policy for a given sector. Co-governance refers to attempts to manage this growing diversity in a more democratic fashion, through the creation of citywide, provincial and/or national bodies where various providers are represented and given both a voice and vote in developing and deciding the future of a sector, i.e., in its governance. The appropriate site for co-governance structures will depend, of course, on constitutional differences between various welfare states. So, in addition to serving as a general term for citizen and/or third sector participation in many kinds of public service, co-production can also be distinguished from co-management and co-governance. Thus, I will employ the above terminology to distinguish between various phenomena. However, it should be noted that these three concepts are not mutually exclusive.”

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