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Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes 1st ed. Edition Elke Loeffler full chapter instant download
Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes 1st ed. Edition Elke Loeffler full chapter instant download
Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes 1st ed. Edition Elke Loeffler full chapter instant download
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Co-Production
of Public Services
and Outcomes
Elke Loeffler
Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes
“This wide-ranging book is based on a unique set of case studies, collected over
a long period of time. It will be an invaluable resource to anyone who is keen to
learn about the practice of co-production.”
—Taco Brandsen, Professor, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands
“The co-production literature has, until now, been messy, featuring scholarship
from different fields across many outlets. In Co-Production of Public Services and
Outcomes, Elke Loeffler has ably synthesized this research and moved knowl-
edge of co-production forward. Integrating voluminous academic literature and
numerous case studies, Loeffler distils this knowledge seamlessly and effectively.
Whether you are new to co-production, a seasoned researcher, or a practitioner
seeking guidance, this book has much to offer you—and the field.”
—Jeffrey L. Brudney, Professor, University of North Carolina, Wilmington, USA
Co-Production
of Public Services
and Outcomes
Elke Loeffler
Strathclyde Business School
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow, UK
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For my dad, Kurt Löffler.
Preface
I started to write this book at a time when user and community co-
production was often considered as a ‘nice-to-have’ to improve public
services and outcomes. However, with the emergence of the COVID-19
crisis in January 2020, there has come increasing awareness that this crisis
cannot be solved by governments alone and that more effective citizen co-
production is a ‘must-have’ to achieve better quality of life outcomes and
public governance. It is to be hoped that this crisis, for all of the sadnesses
which come with it, will therefore bring a widespread recognition of how
citizen co-production can make this world a safer and better place.
A great deal of the material in this book was developed during my
time as Chief Executive of Governance International, of which I remain
a Director. I would therefore like to thank a number of people for their
contributions to this monograph. First, I’m grateful to Tony Bovaird for
his advice, comments and patience. I am really grateful for the imaginative
graphic support provided by Rüdiger Kern and for the unflagging admin-
istrative support from Yvonne Harley. Furthermore, I’d like to thank my
colleagues at the Department of Work, Employment and Organisation at
the University of Strathclyde for the great collegial spirit with which they
have welcomed me and for buying into the concept of co-production in
teaching and learning.
There is, of course, a long list of people—from academia, public
services and local communities–who have inspired my own co-production
journey, making it not only a key aspect of my work life but also a
vii
viii PREFACE
very important and fun part of my personal life. They include John
Alford, Dick Atkinson, Taco Brandsen, Jeffrey L. Brudney, Paula Brown,
Karen Cheney, Julie Christie, Davinia Edafioka, Penny Halliday, Dieter
Lehmann, Vivien Lowndes, Jon Mansell, Mike Owen, Salvador Parrado,
Gerry Power, Paul Slatter, Gregg Van Ryzin, Matthias Schulze-Böing and
his devoted co-production teams in the Offenbach Employment Agency,
Victor Pestoff, Robin Surgeoner, Lucie Stephens, Gareth Symonds and
Jörgen Tholstrup.
This book aims to inform current and future co-production research
in the (post-COVID) world, so that richer evidence becomes available
on how citizen voice and action can make a difference, as well as on the
limitations and potential pitfalls of co-production. More than that, I hope
this book also helps policymakers and practitioners in public services, by
providing a wealth of case studies and revealing practice examples. Conse-
quently, I will very much welcome contacts from researchers, policymakers
and practitioners who have contributions to add to those highlighted in
this book.
So, my final message is to these groups of researchers, policy makers
and practitioners, and indeed to all my readers—I hope you find this book
interesting and helpful, both in your work and in your life. And, in the
spirit of co-production, I’m looking forward to your feedback, so that the
ideas in this book can be taken forward and improved upon by all of us.
A final note of explanation: One of the penalties of having a name
which is unusual in English is that spelling issues arise. In my academic
work, I write my surname as ‘Loeffler’ (without an Umlaut) in the case of
English publications but for publications in German I write it as ‘Löffler’.
ix
x CONTENTS
Index 429
List of Figures
xiii
xiv LIST OF FIGURES
xv
xvi LIST OF TABLES
1.1 Introduction
User and community co-production has experienced renewed interest
internationally in both academia and practice since the early 2000s, after
its original short burst of prominence in the US around the 1980s. In the
words of John Alford (2009, 4), “co-production is (back) in fashion”.
This has been accompanied by an exponential growth of publications
on all aspects of co-production. Furthermore, the term co-production is
increasingly used by a wide range of stakeholders in the policy commu-
nity and public services—perhaps most obviously in countries such as
the UK and Netherlands, but also in many other parts of the world
(although rather less in Germany, France and the USA). Many govern-
ments have published reports on the potential of co-production, while
the European Union has funded a considerable number of co-production
research projects within its Horizon 2020 programme and other initia-
tives. European umbrella organisations such as the European Platform for
Rehabilitation (2016) have also commissioned studies and briefing papers
on co-production.
This chapter will explore the contextual factors which help to explain
the rise of interest in co-production. This analysis uses a PESTEL
framework, which covers political, economic, social, technological, envi-
ronmental and legislative drivers of co-production. This is necessarily
quite a brief tour through each of the relevant factors—however, some
was in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a period of economic uncer-
tainty and even recession in the US. Similarly, the recent renaissance of
co-production research around the world has occurred in the context of
financial austerity, which has meant a reduction of government spending
and lower living standards in many countries (Loeffler 2016, 325).
It is therefore tempting to assume that interest in co-production is
essentially an offspin from austerity and, in consequence, that it is being
used as a strategy for cutting public spending. Indeed, it sometimes
suggested that co-production is just a cover for ‘dumping government
responsibilities on the public’ and that public sector interest in the
potential benefits of co-production is actually just a pretence. From
this perspective, co-production is simply a nice way of describing how
responsibility for citizen wellbeing has been passed to those least able to
cope—essentially it is the public sector saying ‘make better use of your
own resources, because you can’t have ours’. As a community activist
commented in 2012 on the launch of a major co-production initiative of
the London Borough of Lambeth: “It was a top-down initiative. There
had been no large-scale attempt to engage the community and volun-
tary sector in debating and shaping it [before it was announced]. Many
affected treated it with a great deal of scepticism, as a cover for a Labour
council to make massive budget cuts palatable” (Creighton 2012). Seven
years later, another local resident blogged: “Lambeth Council is still offi-
cially a Co-operative Council. This may come as a surprise for some
residents, especially those living on estates threatened with unwanted
regeneration, or those fighting to keep their libraries open or people
who don’t want to see their precious parkland handed over to private
companies every year” (Cobb 2018).
This perceived “deliberate rejection of responsibility” (Steen et al.
2018, 284) by the public sector points to an aspect of the ‘dark side’ of
co-production. However, far from being the purpose of co-production,
‘hollowing out the state’ by transferring full responsibility for public
services to citizens actually means the end of co-production. This book
is about both public service organisations and citizens contributing to
improvements in quality of life, not one side dumping all responsibility
onto the other.
However, perhaps surprisingly, there is actually little evidence that co-
production has been even considered by managers in local public services
as a budget saving strategy, at least in the UK. While evidence from case
study research in English local authorities shows the importance of a wide
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