There is now growing worldwide interest in the potential of user and community-led co-production for improving public services and increasing publicly-desired outcomes. Nevertheless, policymakers and practitioners are finding co-production to be very challenging to put into practice. In particular, a range of major barriers are often perceived for co-production approaches failing to be adopted as quickly and widely as initially hoped, when adopted as a policy commitment.
These barriers arise from several sources, e.g. from the risks attached to greater user involvement in public services; from the pressure to generate short-term budget savings, from the potentially unfair burdens placed by co-production on vulnerable service users; from the resistance of some professional staff to changes in their practice and their power base; from lack of sustainability of co-production initiatives; and from the costs of supporting citizens and training staff in more effective co-production practices. However, there has so far not been a systematic exploration of how serious these barriers are in practice, nor how public service organisations have gone about tackling them. This paper seeks to provide a conceptual framework and some initial results to help to plug this gap in current knowledge.
The paper summarizes the literature on perceived barriers to co-production in different contexts. Building on this literature, it develops a conceptual framework which integrates barriers arising from both the organizational side and the citizen side of co-production. It then conducts an analysis of the empirical extent of barriers to co-production and how they are being overcome in practice. The methodology involves both in-depth focus groups and stakeholder surveys in four case studies, chosen to represent cities and counties which have had major successes in implementing a co-production strategy and those which have had difficulties in extending co-production approaches.
The study has conducted both focus groups and surveys of staff, managers, politicians, service users and representatives of local communities involved in these four case studies in two samples of the case studies. This paper will report responses to the following issues:
- Which barriers have been met in the case studies and how have they been overcome?
- What risks have been experienced in practice – and how have they been managed?
The analysis compares how these issues vary between different services, in particular, relational services such as social care and regulatory services such as community safety . This empirical analysis provides new evidence on the implementation and results of user and community-led co-production in key public services and across publicly-desired outcomes. Early results from this analysis highlight the key role played by the skills and motivation of staff involved in co-production initiatives and their training to enable them to find more successful ways of bringing citizen resources into the improvement of public services and outcomes.
Value co-creation, co-design and co-production in public services
