Introduction
The concept of co-production – also called co-creation – is gaining widespread attention as a way to improve public service provision in the UK (Kelly et al., Reference Kelly, Mulgan and Muers2002; Needham, Reference Needham2003, Reference Needham2007; Halpern et al., Reference Halpern, Bates, Beales and Heathfield2004; Leadbeater, Reference Leadbeater2004; Miller and Stirling, Reference Miller and Stirling2004; Lawson, Reference Lawson2005; Cottam and Leadbeater, Reference Cottam and Leadbeater2006; Hart, Reference Hart2006; Parker and Heapy, Reference Parker and Heapy2006). Rather than separating out the consumption and production of government services, co-production emphasises the role that service users play in both the consumption and production of public services (Whitaker, Reference Whitaker1980; Parks et al., Reference Parks, Baker, Kiser, Oakerson, Ostrom, Ostrom, Percy, Vandivort, Whitaker and Wilson1981; Brudney and England, Reference Brudney and England1983; Brudney, Reference Brudney1984; Kiser, Reference Kiser1984; Percy, Reference Percy1984; Offe, Reference Offe1985; Moore, Reference Moore1995; Ostrom, Reference Ostrom1996). It signals a shift away from defining public services solely in terms of the productive activities of the state (Ostrom, Reference Ostrom1989: 148; Stoker, Reference Stoker, Stewart and Stoker1989; Hoggett, Reference Hoggett1991). It challenges public choice approaches that position consumer–producer relationships in adversarial terms, highlighting instead their interdependence (Ostrom, Reference Ostrom1996).
Alford defines co-production as ‘the involvement of citizens, clients, consumers, volunteers and/or community organisations in producing public services as well as consuming or otherwise benefiting from them’ (Alford, Reference Alford1998: 128 – emphasis in the original). A term developed by political scientists in the late 1970s, co-production was associated with efforts to respond to urban fiscal cutbacks in the United States at a time of rising public expectations of services (Parks et al., Reference Parks, Baker, Kiser, Oakerson, Ostrom, Ostrom, Percy, Vandivort, Whitaker and Wilson1981; Brudney, Reference Brudney1984). The scope for co-production to supplement weak state capacity has led a number of authors to explore its usage in developing countries (Ostrom, Reference Ostrom1996; Joshi and Moore, 2003). In the UK, attention to co-production has been relatively recent and can be associated with the public service reforms of the Labour governments since 1997. The concept has been invoked by academics and commentators calling for new directions in service delivery (Needham, Reference Needham2003, Reference Needham2007; Miller and Stirling, Reference Miller and Stirling2004; Lawson, Reference Lawson2005; Parker and Heapy, Reference Parker and Heapy2006), but has also gained attention within government (Kelly et al., Reference Kelly, Mulgan and Muers2002; Halpern et al., Reference Halpern, Bates, Beales and Heathfield2004). Ed Miliband, then Minister for the Third Sector, told a conference in January 2007:
Rather than a ‘letterbox’ model in which we see the individual as simply having the service ‘delivered’ to them, we must think in terms of a more collaborative model. . . The task for the future must surely also be to systematically look at each public service and think about how the user can become an integral co-producer. (Miliband, Reference Miliband2007)
Interest in co-production in the UK is growing across a range of institutions. When the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) announced its inquiry ‘Public Services: Putting People First’ in November 2006, it included an examination of how users could be more involved in service design through co-production (PASC, 2006). In the same month, the National Consumer Council (NCC) and the trade union Unison published a report entitled Shared Solutions, which emphasised the need for public service users and staff to work together to shape service delivery collaboratively (NCC/Unison, 2006). Recognising this attention, a Demos pamphlet noted: ‘The notion of co-production, initially dismissed as jargon that featured only in the lexicon of aspiring ministers and seasoned thinktankers, has become part of the new consensus about future approaches to public service reform’ (Parker and Heapy, Reference Parker and Heapy2006: 13). A range of recent policy initiatives can be seen as co-productive in nature, bringing service users more fully into the production of service outcomes. These include direct payments in social care, expert patient programmes in the NHS, home–school contracts in education and a greater emphasis on community justice in policing.
Given this recent attention on co-production, and the range of initiatives which appear to be premised on co-productive insights, it is necessary to be clear about how far and in what ways co-production can improve public services. This article looks at the purported advantages of co-production, and considers how these can best be accessed. A case study workshop involving social housing users and providers, conducted as part of the National Consumer Council–Unison Shared Solutions project, is used to illustrate the need for collective dialogue and deliberation between co-producers rather than purely transactional forms of co-production.
Co-production and its benefits
One reason for the recent attention on co-production is its potential to deal with a range of factors inhibiting effective public service provision. Although some attention has been given to the potential limitations of co-production – such as the blurring of boundaries between public and private interests and the shifting of costs and risks on to users (Ostrom, Reference Ostrom1996: 1082; Needham, Reference Needham2006; Bovaird, forthcoming) – most writers have emphasised its desirability. It is seen as an approach that can make services more efficient and effective, whilst also enhancing the morale of bureaucrats and citizens. In particular, co-production offers three advantages over traditional bureau-professional models of service provision.
First, in the co-productive model, staff on the frontlines of public services are recognised to have a distinctive voice and expertise as a result of regular interaction with service users. Whilst post-war bureau-professional models of public service tended to emphasise the dominance of bureaucrats over users (Clarke et al., Reference Clarke, Cochrane and Smart1987), there was also a class of low-paid frontline workers whose perspectives were marginalised (London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group, 1979). Implementation research by Lipsky (Reference Lipsky1980), Sabatier (Reference Sabatier and Kaufmann1991) and others began to orient attention towards these ‘street-level bureaucrats’ and emphasised the importance of frontline interactions as places where ‘public policies are effectively made or produced in important ways’ (Wirth, Reference Wirth and Kaufmann1991: 78). The co-productive approach continues this process of valorising frontline experience, moving away from the misleading ‘neo-Taylorist’ accounts of public service delivery (Clarke and Newman, Reference Clarke and Newman1997: 111) to a recognition that the user's experience of the service is shaped almost entirely by their interaction with the frontline provider.
Second, co-production can transform citizen attitudes in ways that improve service quality. The emphasis on user agency and empowerment rather than dependence marks a move away from the traditional client model (Barnes et al., Reference Barnes, Harrison, Mort, Shardlow, Wistow and Stoker1999); nor are users ‘merely consumers, choosing between different packages offered to them’ (Leadbeater, Reference Leadbeater2004: 60). Co-production creates ‘more involved, responsible users’ (Leadbeater, Reference Leadbeater2004: 59), who are ‘more knowledgeable of the content, costs and limitations of municipal services and their joint responsibility with service agents for their delivery’ (Brudney and England, Reference Brudney and England1983: 62). It may be that positive experiences of co-production encourage individuals to become more civically minded in other areas of their lives. As Ostrom argues, ‘The experience of success of co-production also encourages citizens to develop other horizontal relationships and social capital’ (Reference Ostrom1996: 1083).
Third, by emphasising user input into the productive process, co-production improves allocative efficiency, making frontline providers and their managers more sensitive to user needs and preferences (Percy, Reference Percy1984: 437). Co-production connects closely with concepts such as ‘public value’ (Moore, Reference Moore1995) and ‘relationship value’ (Zuboff and Maxmin, Reference Zuboff and Maxmin2003), which have gained attention in government for their potential to replace narrow cost-efficiency analyses of public services (Kelly et al., Reference Kelly, Mulgan and Muers2002). Co-productive relationships, premised on credible commitments from both government agencies and citizens, can be the basis for more constructive interactions, ending cycles of hostility (Ostrom, Reference Ostrom1996: 1082). As users take on new responsibilities, the role of providers may change as they ‘help to create platforms and environments, peer-to-peer support networks, which allow people to devise these solutions collaboratively’ (Leadbeater, Reference Leadbeater2004: 24). Accountability may be enhanced as user involvement in the production of services ‘fosters an active, vocal constituency that puts in motion the accountability mechanisms needed for good agency performance’ (Ostrom, Reference Ostrom1996: 1075).
Thus co-production can be a therapeutic tool (building trust and communication between participants, allowing bureaucrats and citizens to explain their perspective and listen to others) as well as a diagnostic one (revealing citizens' needs, identifying the main causes of delivery problems and negotiating effective means to resolve them). Taken cumulatively, the benefits of co-production appear to be considerable:
More personalised solutions, in which the user takes responsibility for providing part of the service, should enable society to create better collective solutions with a less coercive, intrusive state, a lower tax burden, a more responsible and engaged citizenry and stronger capacity within civil society to find and devise solutions to problems without intervention. (Leadbeater, Reference Leadbeater2004: 88)
Realising the benefits of co-production
This cure-all potential of co-production is in part a result of excessive elasticity in its definition. Some authors see co-production as no more than a description of the status quo: as Garn et al. point out, all services, public and private, require some input from consumers and producers (Reference Garn, Flax, Springer and Taylor1976: 14–15). Others position it as a radical break from existing delivery models, highlighting its transformative potential (Halpern et al., Reference Halpern, Bates, Beales and Heathfield2004; Parker and Heapy, Reference Parker and Heapy2006; Miliband, Reference Miliband2007). More specificity is required if the potential of co-production to improve public service provision is to be evaluated. A number of authors have offered typologies of co-production to separate out its different manifestations, and these provide a starting point for disaggregating its effects. Brudney and England, for example, distinguish individualistic forms of co-production from group and collective types (Reference Brudney and England1983: 63–64). Individualistic co-production may mean filling in a tax return or taking medication at the right time, whereas group modes of co-production may bring users together to shape or provide services, perhaps in the form of ‘walking bus’ initiatives for school children. Collective co-production refers to programmes that benefit the whole community rather than groups of users, such as lay magistrates and jurors.
Dualities between beneficial and detrimental co-production have also been developed, in other words between citizen activity which enhances services (such as recycling) and activity which does not (such as dropping litter) (Rich, Reference Rich1981). Others have explained co-production as a continuum ranging from high levels of official input and passive users to minimal official input and high levels of citizen production (Miller and Stirling, Reference Miller and Stirling2004: 5). It is also possible to distinguish between zero-sum models of co-production, in which citizens substitute their labour for that of professionals (for example using recycling centres rather than having doorstep collections), and positive-sum forms of co-production in which public officials and citizens collaborate, such as safer neighbourhood initiatives (Parks et al., Reference Parks, Baker, Kiser, Oakerson, Ostrom, Ostrom, Percy, Vandivort, Whitaker and Wilson1981: 1003; Ostrom, Reference Ostrom1996: 1082).
Some of these types of co-production appear better suited than others to deliver the diagnostic and therapeutic benefits noted above. So-called detrimental co-production, in which users contribute to services by vandalising street furniture or fly-tipping are unlikely to bring users and providers closer together (Rich, Reference Rich1981). Positive sum approaches, in which bureaucrats and citizens play an active and complimentary role, offer more scope to expand service capacity than the zero-sum substitution approaches, which can be perceived by citizens as a way to deliver services on the cheap (Wirth, Reference Wirth and Kaufmann1991: 82). Collective forms of co-production are generally seen as more beneficial than individualistic forms. Brudney and England argue that individualistic forms of co-production should be placed at the bottom of a hierarchy of co-productive activity, and it is not until co-production is undertaken at the group or collective level that it begins to transform service: ‘Inherent in the definition of collective co-production is the notion of a redistribution of benefits from citizen activity. Regardless of which citizens participate in the service delivery process, the benefits accrue to the city as a collectivity’ (1983: 63–64).
To access the benefits of co-production, it is also important to be clear about the arenas within which effective co-productive relationships are most likely to develop. Parker and Heapy emphasise that engagement between users and producers must occur as part of the service delivery process – rather than in abstracted consultation exercises: ‘[E]ngaging people in co-production does not happen through consultations, on citizens' juries or at council meetings: it needs to happen at the point of delivery and through conversation and dialogue rather than chance alone’ (Parker and Heapy, Reference Parker and Heapy2006: 15 – emphasis in the original). This distinction between co-production and consultation is an important one: whereas consultation tends to reassert traditional roles and divisions between users and officials by involving them in separate consultative exercises and generating wish-lists, effective co-production emphasises the importance of dialogue, interaction and negotiation.
Thus, the forms of co-production most likely to access its therapeutic and diagnostic benefits are those that are collective, dialogical, positive-sum and focused at the point of delivery, rather than individualised, zero-sum and abstracted from service experiences. However, it is not clear that all of these features of co-production can be accessed simultaneously. In particular, the call to focus co-production on the point of delivery may run counter to efforts to ensure that it is collective and dialogical in nature. Whilst most public services have collective externalities, the interaction between bureaucrat and citizen at the point of delivery is in most cases on a one-to-one basis – at the doctor's surgery, the housing office, the job centre, the police station. There is a danger that any co-production that occurs will be individualised, transactional and substitutive, particularly where users lack individual and social capital (Miller and Stirling, Reference Miller and Stirling2004: 5), and where staff are low-paid and under pressure to dispatch clients as quickly as possible. For example, co-production in a job centre context may mean only that users demonstrate that they have been proactive in looking for work, rather than staff and users exploring ways in which the service can be remodelled to more effectively mobilise their combined resources. Daily service interactions on the frontlines can provide little opportunity for users and staff to share their expectations and experiences, explain their behaviour and agree mutually beneficial service norms, particularly where citizens must petition officials for access to scarce resources.
To facilitate collective, dialogical and positive-sum co-production in such an environment, mechanisms are needed in which users and providers can discuss service provision away from the point of delivery. A forum such as a staff–user workshop may be an effective environment for officers and citizens to engage in dialogue as co-producers. In such a setting participants are invited to give their individual perspectives on the service, but may adopt some of the norms of collective participation. For example, it can be hypothesised that they are more likely than in individual or user-only consultation exercises to give accurate (rather than exaggerated) accounts of service limitations and to suggest service improvements that will benefit users generally rather than only themselves. They are placed in a speech situation that prevents the expression of purely self-regarding justifications, akin to forms of deliberative democracy (Miller, Reference Miller2000: 16). Through creating dialogue between bureaucrats and citizens, their interdependence as co-producers of the service is likely to be exposed in a way that may not be happen in their day-to-day interactions. The following case study, drawn from research conducted as part of the Shared Solutions project undertaken by the National Consumer Council and Unison, presents an example of the potential advantages of allowing co-producers to engage in collective dialogue outside of their daily and individualised service interactions.
Dialogue between co-producers: a case study
In February 2006, a small group of social housing tenants and officers were brought together in a workshop to discuss service delivery. The research was conducted in a city in the north of England, which had several features relevant to the broader debate surrounding social housing in England: choice-based letting arrangements, stock management by an Arms Length Management Organisation (ALMO) and an ongoing regeneration programme to improve housing stock. The workshop was designed, facilitated and transcribed by an independent research agency (Opinion Leader Research). Fifteen social housing residents were recruited, selected to be representative of social housing users nationally, by gender, social class and ethnicity. They were paid a small incentive to cover their expenses for the day. Ten frontline housing officers from the ALMO volunteered to take part in the workshop, and were given permission by their managers to attend the workshop during working hours. By asking for staff volunteers, it was not possible to achieve a representative sample of officers. However, as Parker and Heapy point out: ‘A participatory design project . . . is not something that staff can be coerced or targeted to get involved in. Vital to its success is that those who take part are willing and energised participants’ (Reference Parker and Heapy2006: 40).
The day involved an initial plenary session for all participants, morning break-out sessions in which tenants and officers talked separately about issues, followed by mixed and plenary sessions in the afternoon. The sessions were designed to be inclusive and appropriate for the range of stakeholders participating. Most evident at the start of the day was the level of hostility felt by some of the tenants to the officers. For example when asked in a warm-up exercise ‘If you were an animal what animal would you be’, one tenant chose a lion: ‘And the reason I want to be a lion, I can maul all these council workers to death’. Complaints about council properties were raised in the warm-up session even though tenants were only being asked to introduce themselves. One officer left the event in tears, feeling that tenants were victimising her. Such experiences highlight the barriers to effective frontline co-production in a situation where access to a key service such as housing is rationed and officers act as gatekeepers defending council policy in a low-trust environment.
Separated from officers in the morning sessions, tenants recognised that some aspects of the service were positive, such as the introduction of concierges and the modernisation of some properties. However, most of the session focused on a range of grievances against the housing provider (often referred to as the council, despite the creation of the ALMO). When asked what the negatives were of living in the area, one said, ‘It's just the council really. Ask the council about anything and it goes over their heads.’ Attitudes to the frontline housing staff were particularly hostile:
First respondent: ‘The people in the rent office . . . there's no help whatsoever.’
Second respondent: ‘Because when you go down they think you should be paying them to speak to you.’ [Tenant group 1]
First respondent: ‘I think it goes down to the staff are not trained to deal with the public, top and bottom of it.’
Second respondent: ‘They look down at you, they think that they're better than you.’ [Tenant group 2]
Officers were well aware of this hostility and reflected on it in their own groups. As one put it, ‘I think something we suffer is the abuse, that has to be really recognised, is the abuse.’
In accounting for the perceived levels of mutual hostility, tenants and officers working in separate groups articulated common explanations, particularly around the fragmentation of the service. The language of an arms-length management organisation was rejected. As one tenant put it, ‘I don't like the title arms-length. I think it should say hands on.’ Several officers similarly felt that fragmentation between housing benefit services and local estate offices exacerbated hostility. As one put it, ‘Because we're putting services away from them, we're getting distanced from the tenants . . . and it's becoming adversarial, it's becoming them and us.’ Both tenants and officers wanted a more personal service. According to one tenant, ‘We think it's great when there's someone who knows you when you go into a council office . . . If you've got more personal service it's just better for everyone involved really isn't it?’ Officers expressed frustration at how service reorganisation prevented them from providing a personal service: ‘There was a little old man who came in every week and if he wasn't there that week the cashier would alert the staff, the good neighbour role really, and we don't do that now.’
Whilst the separate sessions revealed a good deal of common ground, they also highlighted the gulf in perceptions between tenants and officers. Officers felt that rising expectations lay behind tenant frustrations with the service: [P]eople's aspirations are different now. People won't just accept a council house now. They want a house in a nice area with a nice garden with nice neighbours.' However, in the tenants' sessions, when people were asked about what they wanted from social housing, in general expectations were low rather than high. As one said, ‘there's no way I would get a house with a garden and all that. It's just that I'll be happy if they modernise the flats and do what they say they're going to do.’ Another said, ‘I'm not bothered, as long as the street was tidy and I didn't have bins, loads of bin bags outside me front door that don't even belong to us, just rubbish.’
Tenants put their frustration down to a sense that officers were indifferent to their problems. As one put it:
At the end of the day the officers are not really bothered. You could talk to them for two and three hours and it just goes in one ear and out the other, they are not bothered because they don't live in the area, they can go home and close the door, they live in a nice area.
However, officers felt that they were unable to respond effectively to tenants because of their own disempowerment in the organisation. According to one, ‘We don't know what's going on, we can't tell tenants what's going on.’ Another said, ‘Lack of communication from the higher management to the frontline staff I think is a huge issue.’ According to a third, ‘Nobody seems to be actually taking into consideration . . . staff who are face to face with the tenant, who are listening to what the tenants are wanting.’
Thus, the separate sessions diagnosed common problems with the service, but revealed gulfs in perception about the motivations of tenants and officers. Officers felt that tenants had excessively high expectations; tenants did not recognise how marginalised officers felt within their own organisation. The joint afternoon sessions were an opportunity to report back on these separate discussions, allowing recognition of the amount of common ground and discussion of misconceptions over expectations and attitudes. During these sessions, tenants were surprised to see the concerns of the officers overlapping so closely with their own. One said, ‘They do seem to be the same problems, just crossing over.’ There were shared frustrations about recent changes to the housing benefit system:
Tenant: ‘Whoever you speak to they always seem to send you to someone else, do you know what I mean? It's like round the houses. They all have a good laugh about it.’
Officer: ‘That happens internally as well.’
By the final plenary session of the day, tenants and officers were able to identify shared priorities around improving the promptness of repairs, stronger action against anti-social behaviour, more information around choice-based lettings and revision of the priority allocation system. One officer said:
I think there's a lot of common concerns between the customers and our organisation, that's been apparent from this morning, because it's, the common vein has run through the whole day that our frustrations and concerns are also the tenants'. It's about how we deal and tackle them of course is the key.
A tenant responded: ‘It looked as if we've all been looking at each other's sheets cos we're all saying the same thing.’ Another tenant reflected on the frustrations of the officers: ‘maybe they feel like they're being held back from people above them.’ The officers made a plea for better tenant understanding of the pressures they faced: ‘Treat people with respect. That goes both ways. So you have to realise we're not an organisation, we are people.’ A tenant said: ‘As you say we've been at the same thing all day, it just keeps coming back down to the same problem. So if we can do something about it, that would be great and you'd have happy tenants.’
The case study highlights how user and producer perspectives shift when they have to talk about services in environments that make explicit the co-produced nature of service delivery. The workshop showed the therapeutic and diagnostic benefits of dialogue between co-producers. It was useful in the identification of problems and priorities, but it also allowed frontline staff and service users to share expertise and recognise a common agenda. From the high levels of mistrust and hostility that characterised the relationship between tenants and housing officers at the start of the day, and the combination of common ground and misperceptions that emerged in the separate sessions, it was possible to see the interrogative and ultimately consensual nature of joint sessions. Some of the issues raised in the workshop – around a shortage of housing stock, delays in regeneration projects and the allocation of housing to priority groups – stem from national policies or legal requirements, which cannot be addressed at the frontline. However, at the end of the workshop it was possible to communicate a set of shared priorities, around repairs, anti-social behaviour, service fragmentation and the design of the choice-based letting system, which could be dealt with locally.
Such a workshop, therefore, has the potential to be the beginning of a collaborative process of co-production, which could lead to more effective engagement at the point of delivery. Issues of representativeness (only a small proportion of staff and users can participate) and constraints on resources (recruitment and facilitation are expensive) ensure that such workshops alone cannot transform service delivery. However they can be an important tool in diagnosing problems in public services, exposing blocks to effective staff–user relationships and identifying routes to more effective delivery.
Conclusion
The growing interest in co-productive approaches to service reform stems from their apparent bridging of the polarities in public service debate. Co-production avoids overly passive accounts of the service user, although it also steers clear of potentially unsustainable demands for a neo-republican citizenry. It can reduce the costs of service provision whilst giving more autonomy to frontline users and bureaucrats. As co-production moves to the mainstream of policy-making – offering scope for services to be delivered more effectively and at a lower cost to the state – it is important to understand better its implications. The insight of co-production – that services rely on input from those styled as their consumers as well as those positioned as producers – has a descriptive accuracy across public and private services. Its potential to improve service provision depends on how this insight is utilised.
By emphasising collective, collaborative and deliberative mechanisms of co-production, it is possible to go beyond individualised co-productive approaches which may only entrench patterns of hostility or pass the costs and responsibilities of production on to service users. To build effective co-productive relationships it may be necessary, at least initially, to move away from the point of delivery and create forums in which officials and citizens can articulate service experiences, recognise common ground and negotiate service improvements. Although a very small-scale example, the Shared Solutions workshop suggests that a forum of collective deliberation can make explicit co-productive relationships, which at the frontline may be implicit or dysfunctional.
Such deliberative workshops will not necessarily create consensus or solve the problems of service provision. Where poor relationships between officials and citizens are a product of national policy priorities – such as a shortage of social housing provision – small-scale meetings will not be able to solve core problems. Indeed, it is important to be explicit about the limitations of such exercises, to avoid raising expectations that cannot be fulfilled. Nor should such exercises be perceived as a way to co-opt awkward tenants and marginalise their complaints (Ilcan and Basok, Reference Ilcan and Basok2004). However if managed appropriately, such workshops can begin the process of accessing the collective and transformative potential of co-produced public services.
Note
Many thanks to the National Consumer Council and Unison for the use of transcript data from their Shared Solutions project. For more details about the project see http://www.ncc.org.uk/publicservices/index.htm. Advice on how to set up a project using the Shared Solutions methodology is available from WA Partnerships (enquiries@wapartnership.com). For information about the policy applications of the project contact Abena Dadze-Arthur at the National Consumer Council (a.dadze-arthur@ncc.org.uk, 0207 881 3007).
