Co-production has attracted attention from practitioners and academics, in many countries as a response to recent financial crises (Bovaird, Ryzin, Loeffler & Parrado, 2015). It is a silent phenomenon, which embraces public employees not aware about implications and potentials (Bovaird and Loeffler, 2012; Bovaird, Flemig, Loeffler & Osborne, 2017). Some barriers impede co-production to be effective, as politicians’ and service professionals’ unwillingness to share power with citizens (Bovaird et al, 2017). The well documented type of co-production (co-comissioning, co-design, co-assessement, co-delivery) is co-delivery, mostly on health (see Palumbo, 2016) and education. But the research on individual level determinants as persistence and engagement is scarce (van Eijk & Steen, 2014).
The paper explores group coproduction (Nabatchi, Sancino & Sicilia, 2017) in state secondary schools, where students (15 to 17 years old) were motivated to monitor their own meals delivery. Our analysis at the individual level looks for individual and contextual characteristics which can strongly contribute to engagement and outcomes of co-production processes. Additionally, despite some examples of co-production in schools (e.g. Sicilia et al. 2016, Pestoff, 2006), and the extensive literature on students as individual “co-producers” of education, we scarcely identified studies in which young citizens are the main lay actor (e.g. Cockburn, 2007).
Our approach is interventionist (Westin & Roberts, 2010) and interpretivist. We run an experimental learning in 15 state secondary schools located in one Brazilian capital city (Belem, 1,45 million inhabitants). The initiative was a response to a real failure of the distribution of payed food and other items from local suppliers to those schools. It was formally supported by Ministry of Transparency, the department of education at the State Government and one local social organization.
Secondary students were invited to freely and voluntarily attend the co-assessement task using smartphone apps to point out the frequency and quality of their everyday meals. The authors coordinated a team of about 90 facilitators (undergraduate students) to explain the initiative to secondary students. During 4 months in 2017, the experiment covered: (i) two stages with theorization (students were exposed to engagement lectures) and, (ii) the last one without theorization (students previously involved with the project were just reminded about the coproduction initiative). We collected more than 900 records from 110 students.
We analyzed whether the students’ institutional biography (Lawrence et al, 2011) and the contextual factors in each school, both aligned to co-production institutional logic (Thornton & Ocasio, 1999, Reay & Jones, 2016) contributed to the persistence of engagement for the co-production outcome. Our results suggest that when the theorization is reduced, both the engagement and the outcome (quality of the meals) felt down. The students that persisted co-producing has higher identification with public good. We discuss also why the co-production movement did not spill over to other services and groups. The experiment can contribute to clarify motivation to co-production among young citizens and the role of ICT (Linders, 2014) in schools’ facilities and services assessment.
Value co-creation, co-design and co-production in public services
Aquino_et_al_2017_Coproduction_secondary_schools_FINAL_28Mar.pdf 