New Public Governance, the Third Sector, and Co-Production

Victor Pestoff, Taco Brandsen, Bram Verschuere

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136518843
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Gobierno y empresas

In recent years public management research in a variety of disciplines has paid increasing attention to the role of citizens and the third sector in the provision of public services. Several of these efforts have employed the concept of co-production to better understand and explain this trend. This book aims to go further by systematizing the growing body of academic papers and reports that focus on various aspects of co-production and its potential contribution to new public governance. It has an interdisciplinary focus that makes a unique contribution to the body of knowledge in this field, at the cross-roads of a number of disciplines - including business administration, policy studies, political science, public management, sociology, third sector studies, etc. The unique presentation of them together in this volume both allows for comparing and contrasting these different perspectives and for potential theoretical collaboration and development. More particularly, this volume addresses the following concerns: What is the nature of co-production and what challenges does it face? How can we conceptualize the concept of co-production? How does co-production works in practice? How does co-production unfold in reality? What can be the effects of co-production? And more specific, firstly, how can co-production contribute to service quality and service management in public services, and secondly, what is the input of co-production on growing citizen involvement and development of participative democracy?

1 Co-Production as a
Maturing Concept

Taco Brandsen, Victor Pestoff
and Bram Verschuere

INTRODUCTION

The concept of co-production has been around for decades, but in recent years it has experienced a revival. Public management research in a variety of disciplines has paid increasing attention to the role of citizens and the third sector in the provision of public services. The growth of interest in co-production during the past ten years provides important insights into, and at the same time poses important challenges for, public management.

Following previous work in this field, particularly in the tradition of Ostrom, we will define co-production as

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 by individuals and groups to enhance the quality and/or quantity of the services they use. (Parks et al., 1981)

This understanding has been referred to as a possible bridge over the great academic divide between the consumption and provision of public services (Ostrom, 1999). More recently, exploring co-production has become increasingly topical for a broad range of academics with a focus on, and/or practitioners working with, public services and management. These include the issues of the nature of co-production (Alford, 2002); how co-production has developed in recent decades (Pestoff and Brandsen, 2006); the relationship between individual and group participation in the provision of public services (Bovaird and Löffler, 2003); how co-production can contribute to the development of service quality in public services (Bouchard et al., 2006); how it can promote participative democracy (Ostrom, 2000; Fung, 2004); and how ownership and institutional set-ups are related to co-production (Vamstad, 2007; Pestoff, 2009).

However, although there is a growing body of work describing, or claiming to describe, co-production, we still lack a comprehensive theoretical and systematic empirically orientated understanding of what happens when citizens and/or the third sector are drawn into public service provision and of the various aspects of co-production. This book takes a step forward in developing a better understanding of this phenomenon.

BACKGROUND

Co-production can potentially be traced to various traditions, which will be addressed in the various chapters of this volume. Here we will specifically refer to the 2009 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Elinor Ostrom (Ostrom 1999). In the early 1970s, she and her colleagues studied urban reform in major cities in the United States (Ostrom, 1975). After completing their research on urban services and summarizing their results, they concluded that most public services are not delivered by a single public authority, but rather by several different actors, both public and private. Moreover, many public services depend heavily on the contribution of time and effort by the same people who consume these services, that is, the clients and citizens.

They coined the term co-production to describe the potential relationship that could exist between “regular producers,” such as street-level police, schoolteachers or health workers, and their “clients,” who want to be transformed by the services into safer, better educated and/or healthier people. It later spread to Europe, Asia, Australia and elsewhere and is now used by researchers in many parts of the world to analyze citizen participation in the provision of publicly financed services, regardless of the provider. This is of course not to say that there was no empirical or theoretical work on the issue prior to the concept of co-production. Indeed, many studies focusing on citizen participation have addressed it, albeit with different terms and with a different focus. What is new is that it is addressed as a cross-cutting phenomenon in the context of public management research.

In this sense, research on the topic came together at the beginning of the new century, in networks that were assembled around the study of nonprofit or third sector organization in the public sector. In particular, much of the work focusing on co-production as a cross-cutting phenomenon came together under the auspices of the European Group for Public Administration (EGPA) and the International Research Society for Public Management (IRSPM). Several conference papers presented at the annual sessions of the EGPA's third sector study group and at third sector panels of the IRSPM focused on various aspects of co-production. This has led to the further refinement of the concept. In particular, it led to the distinction between the original concept of co-production, which focuses on the relationship between individual citizens and producers, and “co-management,” which centers on relationships at the organizational level (see Brandsen and Pestoff, 2006). Both are addressed in this volume.

In 2006, the Public Management Review published a special issue (volume 8 number 4) on co-production, called Co-Production. The Third Sector and the Delivery of Public Services. It was later reprinted by Routledge and made available in paperback (Pestoff and Brandsen, 2006). This book is a second collection that aims to go further by systematizing the growing body of academic papers and reports that focus on various aspects of co-production and its potential contribution to new public governance (Osborne, 2010).

FOCUS OF THIS BOOK

This book addresses the nexus of issues and disciplines interested in co-production, and through them it makes a contribution to public management research. The concept of co-production sits at the crossroads of a number of disciplines—including business administration, policy studies, political science, public management, sociology and third sector studies. They all have important perspectives on this topic, and all of them are important for the development of public management and public services. Bringing them together in this volume both allows for comparing and contrasting these different perspectives and for potential theoretical collaboration and development.

More particularly, this volume addresses the following concerns:

• Conceptual issues: What is the nature of co-production, and what different conceptualizations exist, especially in the context of public management?
• Empirical issues: How does co-production in public service delivery work in practice? Is it as successful as some of its proponents have claimed? Given that we know how it works in practice, can co-production contribute to improved quality in public services?
• Comparative issues: How does the practice of co-production differ between countries and sectors?
• Methodological issues: What methods and theoretical approaches are most suitable for the examination of the topic?

CONTENTS

In this collection, we bring together a wide range of authors. Inevitably, we have had to strike a balance between capturing the diversity of approaches that exist in the field and achieving a systematic framework for the study of the concept.

The first part of the book addresses the question “what is co-production” and discusses the concept of co-production theoretically. In Chapter 2, Pestoff argues that co-production is the mix of public service agents and citizens who contribute to the provision of a public service. This chapter addresses some crucial conceptual issues for co-production, including definitions and level of analysis; relations between the professional staff and their clients; motives for citizens to engage in co-production and collective action; and co-production as individual acts, collective action or both, and so on.

In Chapter 3, Bovaird and Loffler argue that user and community co-production can be conceptualized as a movement from “public services FOR the public” toward “public services BY the public” within the framework of a public sector that represents the public interest and publicly valued outcomes, not simply the interests of public service “consumers.” However, it is not a panacea for all public sector issues, as the case studies clearly demonstrate. They show that, while co-production can achieve major improvements in outcomes and service quality and also cost savings, it is not resource-free. Co-production may be “value for money,” but it usually cannot produce value without money.

In Chapter 4, Ewert and Evers argue that co-production lacks a fixed meaning, both on the level of interactions between organizations and the level of providing services to users. Different meanings unfold once one looks at the impact of narratives, such as consumerism, managerialism or participatory governance. Together with the traditions of state welfare, they simultaneously influence the modes and meanings of co-production in personal services. The example of modern health care systems in Germany shows that uncertainty and ambiguity is normal rather than an exception when it comes to defining co-production. Role expectations, such as the “expert-patient” or the “citizen-consumer,” may have a liberating potential, but likewise they can marginalize crucial issues, such as trust and the need for protection. Moreover, user organizations face challenges in their roles beyond helping users to cope with making as good a choice as possible with some models of co-production.

In Chapter 5 by Vaillancourt, the participation of the third sector in the development of public policy in Canada is examined on two levels: the Canadian federal state level, and the provincial state level (Quebec). He concludes that third sector participation in public policy can take two forms: co-production, or the participation in the application of policy, and co-construction, or the participation in the design of policy. From this conceptual angle, two federal and six provincial policy initiatives are analysed and compared.

Ackerman discusses co-production and co-governance in terms of accountability in Chapter 6. Through an exploration of case studies from a wide variety of contexts (Brazil, Mexico, United States and India) and policy areas (poverty reduction, infrastructure provision, school reform, electoral administration and police reform), his chapter shows that state reformers should move beyond strategies based on “exit” and even “voice” to establish spaces of full “co-governance” with society. Instead of sending sections of the state off to society, Ackerman argues that it is often more fruitful to invite society into the inner chambers of the state, in order to strengthen government accountability.

The second and third parts of the book contain chapters on the practice of two related concepts: co-production and co-management. In both parts, chapters deal with the question “how do co-production and/or co-management work?”

Cahn and Gray note in Chapter 7 that citizen co-production in the advancement of public goods and services has a rich history in the United States. The concept embraces a wide range of volunteering, but it also can lay claim to distinctive progeny stemming from the civil rights movement and the Johnson administration's war on poverty. The statutory mandate “maximum feasible participation” in the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 sought to enfranchise the poor with both a voice and a role in the implementation of the programs initiated as part of that effort. The chapter provides numerous examples of co-production generated by TimeBanking. The TimeBank movement developed its own version of co-production as a catalytic vehicle that takes “maximum feasible participation” as a source of citizen empowerment to a new level.

Porter's work in Chapter 8 demonstrates advantages of applying the concept of co-production to a specific government service, basic education. The co-production function for education services combines input from students, teachers, parents and community institutions. Input from these regular and consumer producers are required in some cases and are discretionary or contingent in others. At the student-teacher nexus, co-production is required. No learning can take place without voluntary, active involvement by a student. In addition, a large body of research has found that parents, student peers and community institutions contribute vital, but contingent, input. His chapter explores how the presence of these network structures constrains organizational arrangements used to coordinate and administer the co-production of education services.

Brandsen and Helderman note in Chapter 9 that co-production in housing could be of crucial importance, since housing is an area in which the involvement of citizens in the provision of services has the potential to enrich individual lifestyles, local communities and the organizations providing housing, regardless of whether they are public or private for-profit or nonprofit. However, in current housing markets, housing tends to be purely individual, either self-organized (through home ownership) or collectively managed (through social housing). The chapter explores the conditions under which co-production in this area could be successful as an alternative model. The analysis is based on empirical fieldwork carried out among German housing cooperatives. As it turns out, successful co-production depends primarily on the long-term maintenance of group boundaries and specific trajectories of organizational development. Established public and nonprofit housing providers could play a crucial role in fostering co-production by providing essential support to groups of citizens.

In Chapter 10, Meijer discusses the meaning of co-production in an information age. The core of his message is that technology is able to facilitate new practices of co-production: costs of large scale and dispersed action can be lowered, and new media can make co-production more “social” and “playful.” The essential question, however, is what these changes mean for government. Meijer argues that in the information age, government needs to reassess the need, opportunities and forms of co-production. New connections between government and citizens can be developed, but the challenge remains to develop forms of co-production that appeal to citizens’ motives to co-produce.

Brown and her colleagues in Chapter 11 maintain that while governments are engaged in developing social policy responses to address wicked issues, such as poverty, homelessness, drug addiction and crime, long-term resolution of these issues has remained elusive. Joint action and partnership between government and the community sector, such as co-management, is seen as a way of harnessing productive capability and innovative capacity of both these sectors to resolve these complex problems. However, models for actually undertaking this joint action are not well understood and have not been fully developed or evaluated. Their chapter examines new approaches to resolving the wicked issue of homelessness. It analyses a new horizontal “hub-based” model of service delivery that seeks to integrate actors across many different service areas and organizations. The role of the third sector in co-managing public services is examined through the in-depth case studies, and the results are presented together with an assessment of how co-management can contribute to service quality and service management in public services.

In Chapter 12, Schlappa discusses three cases of urban regeneration in which third sector organizations (TSOs) are engaged. Two cases are examples of co-management, where staff members of local development partnerships (LDPs) produce new services in collaboration with third sector organizations. In the third case, the local development partnership contracts and commissions services with third sector organizations, a practice that does not leave much scope for real collaboration. The analysis shows that co-management can occur in very different institutional contexts, and that TSOs and LDPs can both derive significant benefits from co-managing the development and delivery of new services. A number of variables can be identified that support the co-management process, specifically in urban regeneration contexts. These include a high degree of organizational flexibility in participating organizations; workers who share responsibility together for the provision of a new service; and senior managers who are able to navigate regulatory, institutional and political barriers that stand in the way of collaborative cross-organizational working.

Dezeure and De Rynck examine citizen participation in the realm of local service delivery in Chapter 13, addressing two fundamental questions: How does local government cope with the private initiatives set up by groups of citizens in several policy domains over time? And do these arrangements evolve to governance in terms of co-management or partnerships? They address these questions by merging two distinct strands of research—the theory of local participation and studies of local governance—and conduct an empirical analysis based on in-depth cases in several policy domains in the city of Ghent (Belgium). The main conclusion is that each nonprofit organization has its own story and line of development over time, embedded in its own institutional setting and mixed with the different balance between rules-in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• 1 Co-Production as a Maturing Concept
• Part I What Is Co-Production? Conceptual and Theoretical Perspectives
• Part II How Does Co-Production Work?
• Part III How Does Co-Management Work?
• Part IV Effects of Co-Production Service Quality, Accountability and Democracy
• List of Contributors
• Index