Changing public service delivery: learning in co-creation

William Voorberg,Victor Bekkers,Krista Timeus,Piret Tonurist,Lars Tummers

doi:10.1080/14494035.2017.1323711

William Voorberg, Victor Bekkers + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/14494035.2017.1323711

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Abstract

Co-creation – where citizens and public organizations work together to deal with societal issues – is increasingly considered as a fertile solution for various public service delivery problems. During co-creation, citizens are not mere consumers, but are actively engaged in building resilient societies. In this study, we analyze if and how state and governance traditions influence learning and policy change within a context of co-creation. We combine insights from the co-creation and learning literature. The empirical strategy is a comparative case study of co-creation examples within the welfare domain in childcare (Estonia), education (Germany) and community work (the Netherlands). We show that state and governance traditions may form an explanation for whether co-creation, learning and policy change occurs. Our paper suggests that this seems to be related to whether there is a tradition of working together with citizens and a focus on rule following or not.

Highlights

Co-creation can be described as the involvement of citizens in the initiation and/or the design of public services to develop beneficial outcomes (Voorberg, Bekkers, & Tummers, 2015, p. 1347)
The literature on co-creation and co-production has left the influence of macro-level elements relatively unexplored, partly due to a lack of international comparative research (Brandsen & Honingh, 2015; Voorberg et al 2015; see for an exception Pestoff, 2006). We address this gap in the literature by exploring two interrelated questions regarding co-creation: Does co-creation lead to frame adaptation and policy change? And how can this be explained by the state and governance traditions in which co-creation is embedded? The empirical analysis contributes to the literature by focusing on specific macro-level institutional elements, i.e. state and governance traditions, in three different countries characterized by different state and governance traditions (Estonia, Germany and the Netherlands)
We include (a) a short introduction to the case, (b) whether and which kind of policy change occurred, (c) whether new prognostic frames can be detected with the key stakeholders, and (d) whether these observations can be explained by the surrounding state and governance traditions

Summary

Introduction

Co-creation can be described as the involvement of citizens in the initiation and/or the design of public services to develop beneficial outcomes (Voorberg, Bekkers, & Tummers, 2015, p. 1347). Co-creation can be described as the involvement of citizens in the initiation and/or the design of public services to develop beneficial outcomes In co-creation initiatives, citizens are regarded as relevant partners, who have specific resources and competences which are valuable for (re)designing public service delivery Public officials and politicians are increasingly taking up co-creation with citizens as a way to address many of the public sector’s problems. This seems to mark a paradigm shift, in which the dominant consideration of citizens as passive consumers of public services has changed toward a consideration of citizens as co-creators. The rise of co-creation can be considered a learning process, in which actors learn how to use each other’s competences to develop new ways to confront public sector challenges

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