Varieties of Participation in Public Services: The Who, When, and What of Coproduction

TL;DR: In this paper, a typology of coproduction in public administration is presented, which includes three levels (individual, group, collective) and four phases (commissioning, design, delivery, assessment).

Abstract: Despite an international resurgence of interest in coproduction, confusion about the concept remains. This article attempts to make sense of the disparate literature and clarify the concept of coproduction in public administration. Based on some definitional distinctions and considerations about who is involved in coproduction, when in the service cycle it occurs, and what is generated in the process, the article offers and develops a typology of coproduction that includes three levels (individual, group, collective) and four phases (commissioning, design, delivery, assessment). The levels, phases, and typology as a whole are illustrated with several examples. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for research and practice.

Summary

Author Biographies

• Tina Nabatchi is an associate professor of public administration and international affairs and a Tenth Decade Scholar at the Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.
• Her research focuses on citizen participation, collaborative governance, and dispute resolution in public administration.
• Alessandro Sancino is a Lecturer in Management at the Department of Public Leadership & Social Enterprise, The Open University (UK).
• His research focuses on citizen participation and stakeholder engagement across the public policy cycle and on how public outcomes are co-created within a place.
• Her research covers public sector accounting and accountability and models of public service delivery.

Practitioner Points

• The typology developed in this article provides terminological clarity by offering vocabulary for describing and defining variations of coproduction.
• Reflecting on the who, when, and what of coproduction can help address the conceptual confusion and ambiguity surrounding coproduction.
• The typology of coproduction enables practitioners to identify different forms of coproduction and to select the type that is best aligned with their goals and purposes.
• Describing and explaining the variations in coproduction may facilitate the examination and comparison of cases and experiences and contribute to improvements in evaluation, transparency, and communication.

Understanding Coproduction

• Coproduction entered the lexicon of public administration in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
• The authors do not wish to repeat those arguments here.
• In rather simplistic terms, NPM and other market-oriented reforms led to the involvement of public, private, and nongovernmental actors in public services, who in turn devolved responsibilities to individual service users (cf. Levine and Fisher 1984).
• It emphasizes a pluralistic model of public service based on inter-organizational relationships, networks, collaborative partnerships, and other forms of multi-actor policymaking and public action (Agranoff and McGuire 2003; Emerson and Nabatchi 2015; Huxham and Vangen 2005; Kickert, Klijn, and Koppenjan 1997; Stoker 2006).
• Some see coproduction as necessary in an era of austerity, and others see it as a way to redefine the roles of government, civil society, citizens, and service users (Nabatchi et al. 2016).

Defining Coproduction: The Who and The What

• In its initial formulation, the “co-” side of coproduction involved two sets of actors – “regular producers” (i.e., government professionals) and “citizen producers” or “coproducers” (i.e., laypeople who participate voluntarily as individuals or in groups) (Ostrom 1996; Parks et al. 1981).
• They also identify other actors such as community organizations, volunteers, or people outside of an organization or government.
• In sum, the term coproduction is applied to a wide range of professionals and laypeople, and is used to describe activities involving traditional and untraditional service areas, as well as activities that have nothing to do with service delivery but rather attend to other elements of public services and public policies.
• In contrast, the authors believe the multiple uses and applications demonstrate that coproduction is a provocative concept with high generalizability (a criterion in evaluating the strength of concepts and theories) and proven usefulness to a broad range of scholars and situations.
• This definition is sufficiently broad to maintain the generalizability of the concept and ensure its usefulness to a range of scholars and situations, but also allows for the specificity scholars need to categorize activities, position and compare findings, and ultimately improve research validity.

Creating A Typology for Coproduction

• As suggested above, the differences among definitions and applications of coproduction are related to both sides of the term, where the “co” side captures who is involved, and the “production” side captures what occurs and when (Alford 2014; Fugini, Bracci, and Sicilia 2016).
• The authors believe that further specification of these two sides may lead to better classification of coproduction activities, and therefore, to better empirical study.
• The authors then identify four phases of the service cycle during which coproduction can be used that distinguish among the timing and nature of the “production” activities.
• Finally, the authors merge the levels and phases to create a 3x4 typology of coproduction.
• The authors illustrate the levels, phases, and typology as a whole with several examples.

Levels of Coproduction: Who is Involved?

• On the “co” side of the term, the authors find the labelling of professionals as “regular producers” and citizens as “coproducers” to be confusing.
• To address this issue, the authors assert that coproduction involves two types of participants: (1) state actors who are (direct or indirect) agents of government serving in a professional capacity (i.e., the “regular producers”), and (2) lay actors who are members of the public serving voluntarily as citizens, clients, and/or customers (i.e., the “citizen producers”).
• For the purposes of this article, the authors identify two categories: (1) personal benefits that are enjoyed individually, and (2) social benefits that are enjoyed more broadly and communally (cf. Alford 2002, 2014).
• Fifth, this interpretation excludes activities that are not voluntary for the lay person.

Coproduction in Phases of the Service Cycle: What Occurs and When?

• Specifying the “production” side of coproduction is perhaps more challenging given the breadth of activities to which the term has been applied.
• Co-commissioning refers to activities aimed at strategically identifying and prioritizing needed public services, outcomes, and users.
• In coproduction, the commissioning of services is done by state and lay actors working together, an approach also recognized in the public participation literature (e.g., Nabatchi and Leighninger 2015).
• First, the types vary by who is involved, including the number of participants and who they represent.
• On the other, this relates to what is created through coproduction.

Implications for Research and Practice

• The lack of conceptual and definitional clarity is impeding scholarly research and limiting its development in practice.
• Specifically, the authors defined coproduction as an umbrella term that captures a wide variety of activities that can occur in any phase of the public service cycle and in which state and lay actors work together to produce benefits.
• Second, the typology sets the stage for stronger empirical research on coproduction.
• They could also examine the ways in which participation in one form of coproduction influences the willingness of state and lay actors to engage in other forms of coproduction (see for example, Bovaird et al. 2015).
• The typology offers several other potential avenues for research and practice, but one final implication should be noted.

NOTES

• 1 The marketing and business literatures are rife with articles examining the role of customers in the value chain, defined as the processes or activities by which a company adds value to an article, including production, marketing, and the provision of after-sales service (for a review of this history, see Ramirez 2009).
• Coproduction is now used in the business sector in the purchasing process, in the innovation, design, and (beta) testing of goods, and in the marketing of products (e.g., Lusch and Vargo 2015).
• In these and other business contexts, the definition and boundaries of coproduction are clearer and better established than in the public sector (Agrawal 2013).

Figures

Table 1: A Sampling of Coproduction Definitions

Table 4: A Typology of Coproduction with Examples

Table 3: Coproduction in Phases of the Service Cycle

Table 2: Levels of Coproduction

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Varieties of Participation in Public Services: The Who,
When, and What of Coproduction
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How to cite:
Nabatchi, Tina; Sancino, Alessandro and Sicilia, Mariafrancesca (2017). Varieties of Participation in Public
Services: The Who, When, and What of Coproduction. Public Administration Review, 77(5) pp. 766–776.
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1
Varieties of Participation in Public Services:
The Who, When, and What of Coproduction
Tina Nabatchi
400 Eggers Hall
Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs
Syracuse University
Syracuse, NY 13244
tnabatch@syr.edu
Alessandro Sancino
Department of Public Leadership & Social Enterprise
The Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes (UK)
MK76AA
alessandro.sancino@open.ac.uk
Mariafrancesca Sicilia
Department of Management, Economics and Quantitative Methods
University of Bergamo
via Dei Caniana, 2
24127 Bergamo (Italy)
mariafrancesca.sicilia@unibg.it

2
Author Biographies
Tina Nabatchi is an associate professor of public administration and international affairs and
a Tenth Decade Scholar at the Syracuse University Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public
Affairs. Her research focuses on citizen participation, collaborative governance, and dispute
resolution in public administration.
Alessandro Sancino is a Lecturer in Management at the Department of Public Leadership &
Social Enterprise, The Open University (UK). His research focuses on citizen participation
and stakeholder engagement across the public policy cycle and on how public outcomes are
co-created within a place.
Mariafrancesca Sicilia is an associate professor at the University of Bergamo and Visiting
Fellow in the Department of Public Leadership and Social Enterprise (PuLSE) at The Open
University. Her research covers public sector accounting and accountability and models of
public service delivery.
Practitioner Points
1. The typology developed in this article provides terminological clarity by offering
vocabulary for describing and defining variations of coproduction.
2. Reflecting on the who, when, and what of coproduction can help address the conceptual
confusion and ambiguity surrounding coproduction.
3. The typology of coproduction enables practitioners to identify different forms of
coproduction and to select the type that is best aligned with their goals and purposes.
4. Describing and explaining the variations in coproduction may facilitate the examination
and comparison of cases and experiences and contribute to improvements in evaluation,
transparency, and communication.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank Jeff Brudney and John Alford for their excellent advice on
early versions of this paper. We also appreciate the encouragement and feedback we received
from the participants at the IIAS Study Group on Coproduction meeting held in Tampere,
Finland, and at the Public Management Research Conference held in Aarhus, Denmark.
Finally, we are grateful for the comments provided by the anonymous reviewers.

3
Varieties of Participation in Public Services:
The Who, When, and What of Coproduction
Abstract
Despite an international resurgence of interest in coproduction, confusion about the
concept remains. This article attempts to make sense of the disparate literature and to clarify
the concept of coproduction in public administration. Based on some definitional distinctions
and considerations about who is involved in coproduction, when in the service cycle it occurs,
and what is generated in the process, we offer and develop a typology of coproduction that
includes three levels (individual, group, collective) and four phases (commissioning, design,
delivery, assessment). We describe and illustrate the levels, phases, and typology as a whole
with several examples. We conclude with a discussion of implications for research and
practice.

4
Interest in coproduction has waxed and waned since the concept was first introduced
in the 1970s and early 1980s to explain and give theoretical foundation to practices that
involved members of the public in the delivery of public services. In recent years, the concept
has seen a global resurgence of interest among scholars and practitioners, evidenced by the
growing number of international study groups, special journal issues, and scholarly and
practitioner publications, as well as by the growing number of coproduction programs and
activities in public organizations. Despite the volume of scholarly and practitioner work in
public administration, confusion about coproduction remains (Brandsen and Honingh 2016;
Jo and Nabatchi 2016). This confusion stems from several definitional and conceptual
problems, as well as from empirical issues, with the latter arguably being a function, at least
in part, of the former.
First, though perhaps better defined and understood in the business sector (Agarwal
2013), no clear and consistently used definition of coproduction appears in the public
administration literature. In public administration, coproduction is generally understood to
mean ‘the involvement of both users and public sector professionals in the delivery of public
services’ (Nabatchi, Steen, Sicilia, and Brand 2016); however, “this definition is neither used
consistently nor applied in ways that make clear what does (and does not) constitute
coproduction” (Jo and Nabatchi 2016, 1104; cf. Brandsen and Honingh 2016; van Kleef and
van Eijk 2016). This definitional ambiguity, along with the growing bandwagon effect, has
led scholars and practitioners to apply the term coproduction to wide range of areas and
activities that involve a wide range of actors.
Second, given definitional and conceptual confusion and the breadth of applications,
the evidence base for coproduction is relatively weak (Bovaird and Loeffler 2016; Brandsen
and Honingh 2016). Coproduction is often the subject of exploratory, single case study

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What contributions have the authors mentioned in the paper "Varieties of participation in public services: the who, when, and what of coproduction" ?

This article attempts to make sense of the disparate literature and to clarify the concept of coproduction in public administration. The authors describe and illustrate the levels, phases, and typology as a whole with several examples. The authors conclude with a discussion of implications for research and practice. 

Q2. What is the significance of the typology?

because the typology provides language for describing and explaining thevariations in coproduction, it facilitates the examination and comparison of cases and experiences and may improve evaluation and transparency. 

Q3. What are the main arguments against NPM and similar reforms?

Many have criticized NPM and similar reforms for their heavy focus on market-oriented tools and mechanisms, arguing that the reforms failed to improve accountability, transparency, and responsiveness and instead contributed to various public sector crises (for discussions, see Pollitt 1990; Terry 1998). 

Q4. What are some other terms used to describe co-commissioning?

Other terms, such as co-prioritization and co-financing, are sometimes used either as synonyms for co-commissioning or to demarcate specific activities within co-commissioning. 

Q5. What are the two types of benefits that are enjoyed by the lay actor?

For the purposes of this article, the authors identify two categories: (1) personal benefits that are enjoyed individually, and (2) social benefits that are enjoyed more broadly and communally (cf. Alford 2002, 2014).