Co-Production: The Future for Public Sector Services

ID: 4162849

Public Management and Governance

Module Code: L34678

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This essay concentrates on analysis of the role that co-production play in the delivery of public services. Co-production is one of the most interested and talked about topics in new public management and its popularity mainly lies in the public or client contribution it gives to service delivery of public sector products such as their direct influence on products and service and shaping service preferences according to their needs thus proving to be a customer friendly way of delivering public services (Brandsen and Pestoff, 2008, p. 2). The discussion in the essay focuses on the different modes of coproduction and how they influence customer relations in the delivery of services. The first part starts with describing the concept of co-production and how it tailored the views of the people in shaping public service delivery. The next part contributes to explaining the differences between the different actors involved in co-production and how they are motivated to do this. The next few paragraphs are used for summing up all the points formulated, in a final evaluation of its possibilities and limitations. Finally concluding on how co-production can be useful in the present society for the provision of public services. Introduction Delivery of public services is one of the important functions of the government and when public participation begins to shape the basic format by which these services are delivered, keeping in mind individual preferences. This basically means that development reaches a new level of understanding under the deliberation between the public and the officials in charge of providing the service (Barnes et al., 2003, p. 379). Another prevailing belief is that co-production helps in improving the existing services provided by the government sector but is very important to also put forth the scope and methods of this particular method (Needham, 2007, p. 221). When reading upon various literatures on co-production, it fairly encompasses a variety of sections that may contribute to the development of services such as citizens, volunteers, voluntary or community organizations, other government organizations and clients or service users (Alford, 2002, p. 32). Since so many actors are involved in this process of providing public services there must be some motivating factor behind this that makes them so committed in making the service better. This motivation is discussed further, along with explaining the process by which the resources of public influence is accessed. Origin of Co-Production As more and more people look to their government to provide basic necessities and service that would help them survive the every day challenges that face in their lives, they find out that it is not applicable to them in an intimate level. Thus this creates a gap and fosters dissatisfaction in heart of the public. They expect changes in these services

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are needed and more effectively they understand the importance of their personal input in terms of the view suggested by individuals or a group of individuals for shaping the services. The starting point of co-production can be traced back to the 1970s and 1980s when there were discussions of developing initiatives by the community and also looking at moulding the public sector on a more customer centred service provider (Barnes et al., 2003). More recently over the last decade official documents were printed involving the importance of including the peoples opinion and making sure they are involved in the decision making process of the services that are provided (Cabinet Office, 1999). Clients and citizens: The Difference When talking about the various actors involved in the process of co-production there are few differences in certain similar actors such as clients and citizens or volunteers. The understanding of these differences is very important for the proper development and implementation of the public services. Firstly, there is the relationship between the public and the formal organisations that are in the service sector, and their relationship between them. Formal organisations are those who provide the service and otherwise well known as the public sector officials. The public are of many divisions. There are the publics who are served and the public-in-contact. Starting with the public-in-contact, they are the people who or with whom the organizations members work (Blau and Scott, 1963, p. 59). The public-in-contact also varies according to different institutions it works with. For example in regard to working with a business or industry they are primarily termed as customers who are provide services without much preference given to their individual needs. The same public-in-contact when seen in cooperation with the service organisations can also be considered as the public served, since the people involved in giving their opinions on provision of public service might also be the users of those services. Thus to define the term clients with the above analysis, it can be said that clients are those people who are considered to be the public-in-contact in the business perspective and who have more of a private value in the services they receive (Alford, 2002, p. 33). These people just buy the services and use them without any personal expectations. According to Alford, if it were necessary, the only process of collecting the preferences of the customers would be through the measurement of purchases in the market and other miscellaneous methods such as customer complaints and surveys (2002, p. 34). On the other hand citizens can be defined relating to the term public-in-contact and the public served in the public services context. These people in contrary to customers or clients provide their preferences in developing and providing public services not only for themselves but collectively helping shape it for the many million citizens who use these services, thus creating a public value in the services provided. Their main form of input in these public services is through voting in political

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elections and other locally started committee participation in deliberating issues in the public sector which are formulated as their rights. The volunteers as a separate group lie somewhere in the middle because they are less of service users than of providing feedback and information on how to modify the public services for the benefit of others and are wilfully done on a voluntary bases. The purpose for these difference between the three actors of co-production to be explained lies in the fact that each of them play a huge role in developing the public services while remaining to be close in pretence with each other. By understanding this it is possible to root out the factors that push or motivate them towards the practice of coproduction. Motivation for Co-production Co-production is most popularly involves the citizens who use the services along with various other actors. The motivation for participation and involvement in shaping and delivering the services to the public varies with each actor and thus is important to acknowledge this information for better development of the society. For citizens in particular the motivations are more in the form of incentives divided into three forms namely Material incentives: being more interested in tangible goods or money, Solidary incentives: incentives in the form of social relationship with other people (Clark and Wilson, 1961, pp. 134-135) and Expressive incentives: wherein the main idea of incentive lies in forming a sense of satisfaction in doing something for a good cause as described by Wilson (Alford, 2002, p. 35). The motivations for volunteers on the other hand are based on more value based and moral attitudes towards their work and are divided into a total of six incentive providers. Out of these six only four rank high in popularity of motivation and they are as follows, Values: in which the volunteers help in protecting the value of people; Understanding: in more of a field work for learning and acquiring knowledge and experience; Social: to be able to socialise with people who the volunteers are interested in; and finally Enhancement: as way of developing an individuals character and personality. The motivation found in customers or clients who try to co-produce are simply explained to have more self-interest in what they do and also seek some gain from the whole process (Schneider and Bowen, 1995, p. 96). Different levels of co-production Co-production as a process involves a combination or more definitively a co-operation of different modes of functioning that constitutes to its overall implementation. They are divided into three parts according to their levels of functions involved such as (a) cogovernance in which planning and delivery is the main objective of the public; (b) co-

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management wherein the main task of the public is to produce the services in cooperation with the state, and finally (c) co-production is where the citizens have the power to create their own public services to a certain level (Brandon and Pestoff, 2006, p. 592). According to Brandon and Pestoff these three concepts are framed along two dimensions: (1) the first being the differentiation of organisational and individual level of working whereby communication between organisations are termed under comanagement and the individual aspect refers to the citizens who take up charge of shaping the public services; (2) the second dimension distinguish between the policy formulation of co-governance and the implementation of the policies by the other two concepts (2008, p. 5). Co-Governance Co-governance of public services made an impact on the vast majority of the public by bringing them together with the civic and professional actors and forming a complimentary network governing the policy development for provision of services. As explained by Kooiman co-governance is a major modernisation of the way the public service are organised (2003). This network approach has in many ways effectively replaced the concept of hierarchical system as a more efficient method of bringing in citizen and community opinions (Hudson, 2004, p. 91) and also the very recent marketisation endeavour of the New Public Management system by the use of network bargaining (Radcliffe and Dent, 2005, p. 621). To illustrate how cogovernance works to develop the policy structure for public services through the use of network communication, the social care sector is used an example. The social care system contains many folds of tradition that influence the shaping of the both the market regulations and community partnerships that provide the service through networking. Thus there has been moulding of both the social and organisational attitudes towards the provision of services to the elderly. These networks have in them a multi-tiered structure that work together to meet the different individual challenges to put forth the best service. These come in the form of welfare bureau, where the officials maintain a standard of service distribution measured on a scale towards individual needs, followed by welfare professionals who sets the rules on a the whole process of distribution on the organisations end and on the social side of delivering the social care services there exists the third sector whose sole purpose is to administer the needs and opinions of the citizens into the services provided by the public sector (Bode, 2006, p. 553). All these elements working in co-operation with one another, helps to develop a more efficient and satisfactory social care system for their users.

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Co-management According to decades of literature studied on the topic of voluntary and service community, the delivery of public services was done by the third sector even before the public sector had started to take charge and have now become a more experienced and professionalised organisation. Co-management as a level of co-operation is seen to be more directed towards the management of political ties and tensions between the third sector and the public sector and other actors present in the network involved in delivering the services. So the main function of co-management is to deal with the problems of network integration by linking interorganizational relations to the internal production process (Branden and Hout, 2006, p. 537). These processes work on a contractual basis and are sometimes fast changing with short term partnerships between the government and the third sector. These repetitive changes bring about two important effects, both of which must be balanced to control the rise of tension in the internal processes. The two effects are namely differentiation in the form of equal division of work which are sometime of the same service divided into specialised components between the organisations and the other effect is integration, concentrating on the co-ordinated functioning of the various divisions (Jaffee, 2001, p. 35). Thus to balance the tension between the two effects equal movement should be taken on both the effects. These equal movements come in the form of acquiring soft skills that are useful tight and ambiguous situations when dealing with individual citizens or in the management of the network organisations. When dealing with services which have a multi-faceted area of functioning, there arises the problem of handling and insufficient staffing which can be dealt with by outsourcing to different agencies. These solutions are seen to be effective in the case study conducted on the Dutch social care services, where the managers had be trained to deal with challenging situations regarding the elderly and have trained to be friendly and interactive with the them (Breedveld, as cited by Brandsen and Hout, 2006, p. 544). Co-production In early traditional public administration the public services were produced and delivered by the public officials and the users of the service had no option to put forth their preferences in what they needed. The concept of co-production as one of the levels functioning includes the power of citizens to create services that they need up to a certain restrictions given by the government. It gives them the opportunity to improve the services with a collective mentality for every citizen in the society. One of the most required elements for improving services is the need for feedback. Co-production allows

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the internal passage of feedback in the form of consumer producers. As Ostrom explains Co-production of many goods and services, normally considered to be public goods by government agencies and citizens organized into polycentric systems, is crucial for achieving higher levels of welfare in developing countries, particularly those that are poor (1999, p. 347). There are also some hurdles that the citizens face which interfere with their functions of co-production. This problem is related to the way organisations are arranged which is facilitated by experienced public officials and service providers. Thus when the citizens do not have much experience in running a public sector office, they may find themselves disliked by the public officials when they interfere with the provision of services, which might prove to be more of a problem than a solution (Rosentraub and Warren, as cited by Pestoff, 2006, p. 508). In terms of developing the democracy and welfare of the state, co-production acts in two ways, firstly, by form of substitution whereby the citizens or as mentioned in the case study involving childcare service in Sweden (Strandbrink and Pestoff, 2006), the parents take up pretty much all the functions a pre-school requires inclusive of teaching which allows growth in a mutual level supported financially by the government. Secondly, the parents can take part in the administrative and maintenance of the childcare facilities which allows cooperative functioning between the parents and the professionals who take up the main job of teaching the children (Pestoff, 2006, pp. 514-515), thus promoting a democratic structure with political support for the development of the welfare state. Limitations Co-production has many limitations equal to amount of positive attributes it gives. The limitation found from the analysis is the contradiction of interests between the citizens and public officials in regard to experience in the matter of provision of public services. This creates a problem of discrimination inside the network and reduces the potential for co-operation between the two actors to perform well. As Boviard explains coproduction is not a panacea (2007, p. 856) and many components plays an active role in limiting the functioning of coproduction such as different value framework present in different co-producers who take part in this system, the complex and ambiguous distinction between work divided to the agencies, and many other incapacities which proposes a new challenge for them every day. There is also the simple reason that sometime citizens and communities do not want to take part in the co-production process owing to low self interest in the services they receive (Goetz and Gaventa, 2001). According to Alford there are many complaints and feedback from existing co-producers that they are much less appreciated and put down by the work they do rather than getting any support from the users and officials, even though the need for services still remains at large (1998). This portrays a picture that the people might want to help in co-production

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of public service so as to improve its quality and in return does not ruin the quality of their own lives. So from deliberation of these findings it is important that there should be a look out for the proper balance between the amount of effort taken to deliver a service and the level of benefits the co-producer gets back for his service and sometimes this may not be that much of a positive factor. Nevertheless, there is great power in the analysis of Joshi and Moore (2003), which indicates how coproduction may offer the only realistic hope for improved quality of life in many poor communities around the world (Boviard, 2007, pp. 856-857). Conclusion Co-production is one concept through which many people of different statures, communities and organisations can work together for the betterment of the society and its services. It does not only help develop the services from a better perspective, it also acts as a national stage where people can voice their votes about their preferences and also their grievances. This hearing agent will help mould the society into an integrated entity which provides stable services and helps develop a strong welfare state. Even though there might be some discrepancies in the micro level of processing and working, the bigger picture needs to be considered for the overall growth of the society. Along with the developing nature of the citizens the support and commitment of the public administrators and politicians are required to keep the unity of the public sector strong.

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Pestoff, V. (2006). Citizens and Co-production of Welfare Services: Childcare in Eight European Countries. Public Management Review, 8(4), 503-519. Pestoff, V., Osborne, S.P., Brandesn, T. (2006). Patterns of Co-production in Public Services: Some concluding thoughts. Public Management Review, 8(4), 591-595. Strandbrink, P., Pestoff, V. (2006). Small-scale Welfare on a Large Scale: Social cohesion and the politics of Swedish childcare. Huddinge: Sdertrns hgskola. [3,025 words]

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