Conservatism Of Co-Production In Public Services

The concept of co-production was a challenge to policymakers in reforming public service by encouraging users to design and deliver service in equal partnership with professionals. One phenomenon in the United Kingdom mentioned that there are some barriers in public service due to the New Public Management (NPM) (Boyle & Harris, 2009). NPM centralized targets, deliverables, standards, and customer relationship management. All of these narrowed the focus of many services and often undermined the relationship between professional and patients or service users. The mechanism of bureaucracy in NPM could not solve the problems in public administration that were more complex, especially at the local level and ignored the relationship between service providers and users. In terms of the education sector, the obstacle was that a single central policy or education provisions could not meet the needs of diverse communities. Therefore, the challenging ideas of solving the public service qualities respectively came up. The examples are the Welfare State, the New Conservatism and the Third Way (which includes co-production).
4.3.1 The Definition of Co-production
Boyle and Harris (2009) define co-production as delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals, public service users, their families and their neighbors.
Both services and neighborhoods become far more active agents of change. Moreover, Ostrom (1996, p. 1073) provides a widely accepted definition of co-production, as “the process through which inputs from individuals who are not “in” the same organization are transformed into goods and services.” The table below explains who can co-produce the services and examples of co-production in public
service: