Governmental framing of citizens in welfare services: partners or clients?

In many Western countries public service provision is said to be changing. Co-producing public services is becoming an increasingly important theme in European social policy. However, systematic insight in the way governments... [ view full abstract ]

In many Western countries public service provision is said to be changing. Co-producing public services is becoming an increasingly important theme in European social policy. However, systematic insight in the way governments actually frame citizens’ roles and possible new relationships between government and citizens, and how they try to steer this shifting balance between state and society, is lacking. Our research question is therefore formulated as follows: How do national governments frame the role of citizens in the (co-)production of welfare services in the period 2012-2015 and which meta-governance strategies are proposed in this respect? Based on a qualitative content analysis of 37 Dutch policy documents on the provision of welfare and care services in the period 2012-2015 we indeed found the Dutch national government to prominently frame citizens as a service providing ‘partner’. In this frame, citizens are depicted as (co-) producing the delivery of care and welfare services. This is in line with the New Public Governance paradigm, which emphasizes more horizontal and co-producing roles of governments and non-governmental actors. At the same time though, the citizen-as-client frame was (still) also strongly present. In this respect, we can conclude that the emergence of the citizen-as-partner frame does not come at the cost of the citizen-as-client frame, but is rather a new layer on top of the previous one, although what this means for the extent and quality of care provision has to be found out. We further distinguished three sub-frames that governments used within the partner frame (disciplining, supporting and cooperating) and found that while government is partly retreating, giving her agenda on reforming the welfare system and cutting back expenditures, this does not mean government is ‘less steering’. Next to the more subtle and indirect ways of steering, we observed a strong presence of direct regulatory governmental steering efforts. These efforts were, when it comes to informal care, aimed at altering formal positions of local governments and professionals in order to achieve a stronger positioning of informal carers in the system. These findings partly support claims of authors suggesting that governments are co-opting citizen action in their policy agenda’s and thereby trying to reshape those they collaborate with.

Keywords: public service provision; New Public Governance; co-production; framing; meta-governance; content analysis

About the authors

Jose Nederhand, MSc (nederhand@fsw.eur.nl) is a PhD student at the Department of Public Administration and Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Her focal areas for research are: social innovation, PPS partnerships and citizen self-organization.

Dr. Ingmar van Meerkerk (vanmeerkerk@fsw.eur.nl) is postdoc at the Department of Public Administration and Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. His focal areas for research and education are: boundary spanning within governance networks, democratic legitimacy, interactive governance and citizen self-organization.