Bringing the resources of citizens into public governance: Innovation through co-production to improve public services and outcomes

This chapter focuses on the roles of citizens in collaborative innovation, through the lens of user and community co-production with public service providers (from public, private and non-profit sectors). It explores how citizens’ experiences, ideas, energies and resources can be brought into the social innovation process. Its core argument is that the contribution of citizens to public service innovation is already high, but it could be much greater.

Although co-production is sometimes seen by public sector organisations as simply a low-cost way of delivering public services, using unpaid service users and volunteers instead of paid staff, this is misguided. Such an approach does not fall within our definition of co-production and it also ignores that co-production often delivers to citizens a range of outcomes not available from traditional service approaches, together with a set of extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. Co-production is not ‘free’ - it requires both sides to make inputs in order to release the potential synergies in collaboration with each other. Co-production, by definition, requires joint commitment from citizens and governments. Without citizen-powered innovation, public services are likely to repeat the deficiencies of the past; however, without investment from the public sector, even imaginative innovation is likely to be ineffective and wasteful.

Cite as: Bovaird, Tony and Loeffler Elke (2016), “Bringing the resources of citizens into public governance: Innovation through co-production to improve public services and outcomes”, in: Torfing, Jacob and Triantafillou, Peter (eds.), Enhancing Innovation by Transforming Public Governance: New ideas for increasing the innovative capacity of the public sector. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 160–177. 

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