Think about the last time you interacted with a public service. Maybe you visited a public health clinic, enrolled your child in a local school, or reported a pothole on your street. In each of these moments, you were probably thinking of yourself in a fairly passive role — the recipient, the user, the person on the receiving end of something the government provides. You showed up, you received the service, you left. That mental model of citizenship in relation to public services is deeply embedded in how most of us think about government, and it is also, increasingly, being challenged at a fundamental level.
What if the model of citizen as passive consumer of public services is not just incomplete but actively harmful — to the quality of those services, to the health of democratic communities, and to the relationship between governments and the people they are supposed to serve? What if citizens have far more to contribute to the production of public services than we typically recognize, and what if activating that contribution could transform not just the efficiency of government but the very nature of democratic life?
These are not idle philosophical questions. They are at the heart of one of the most important debates in contemporary public administration — the debate about co-production. And the more you dig into it, the more compelling and the more complicated the case for it becomes. So let us explore it fully, honestly, and with the genuine curiosity it deserves.
What Does Co-Production Actually Mean?
The term co-production gets used in a variety of ways across different fields and different contexts, so it is worth establishing clearly what we mean by it in the public services context. The concept was developed primarily by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues in the 1970s, who noticed something interesting about how effective public services actually worked in practice. They found that the best outcomes were not produced by professional service providers working on passive recipients, but rather through active collaboration between service professionals and the people they served.
In its most straightforward definition, co-production refers to the active participation of citizens, service users, communities, and civil society organizations in the design, delivery, management, and evaluation of public services. It is the shift from a model where government does things to citizens or for citizens to a model where government does things with citizens. That preposition shift — from for to with — might seem small, but it represents an enormous conceptual and practical transformation.
Co-production exists on a spectrum. At the less intensive end, it might mean citizens providing information that helps services target their needs more accurately — a patient completing a detailed health history form, a parent providing information about a child’s learning style, a resident reporting safety hazards in their neighborhood. At the more intensive end, it might mean citizens actively delivering services alongside professionals — community members providing peer support in mental health programs, parents volunteering as classroom assistants, neighborhood watches complementing professional policing. At the most transformative end, it might mean citizens and communities designing and governing services themselves, with professional support but with genuine control over what services are provided and how.
The Origins of the Idea: Where Co-Production Came From
To understand co-production properly, it helps to trace its intellectual origins, because those origins reveal something important about why the concept emerged and what problem it was trying to solve. Ostrom’s original observation came from studying urban services in the United States in the 1970s. She was comparing cities that had consolidated their police departments — merging small neighborhood-based forces into large, professional, centralized agencies in the name of efficiency — with cities that had maintained decentralized, neighborhood-based policing.
The efficiency logic predicted that consolidation would produce better outcomes. What Ostrom found instead was that the cities with smaller, neighborhood-embedded police departments often had better crime prevention outcomes. Why? Because effective policing requires an enormous amount of locally produced information — knowledge about community members, local dynamics, patterns of normal and abnormal activity — that citizens in close relationship with their local police could provide in ways that centralized professional operations could not replicate. The citizens were, in effect, co-producing safety alongside the police, and when that co-production relationship was disrupted by centralization and professionalization, the quality of the service declined even as its formal efficiency metrics improved.
This insight applied far beyond policing. In healthcare, the effectiveness of treatment depends enormously on patients’ own behaviors, their adherence to treatment plans, their willingness to change lifestyle factors, their engagement with their own health management. In education, student learning depends as much on what happens outside the classroom — on family engagement, community resources, peer relationships — as on what happens inside it. In almost every domain of public service, the professionals cannot produce good outcomes alone. The citizens, the service users, the communities are essential partners in production, whether we acknowledge that fact or not.
The Failure of the Consumer Model: Why Passive Recipients Produce Poor Outcomes
The dominant model of public service delivery over the past several decades — particularly in the era of New Public Management — has been built on a consumer metaphor. Citizens are customers. Government agencies are service providers. The quality of service is measured by customer satisfaction. The goal is to give people what they want as efficiently as possible.
This model has some genuine virtues. It forced public services to take responsiveness and user experience seriously in ways that producer-dominated bureaucracies historically had not. It introduced quality consciousness and accountability mechanisms. It challenged the paternalistic assumption that professionals always know best. These were real improvements over what preceded them.
But the consumer model also has serious and increasingly apparent limitations. Consumers are passive receivers of goods and services produced by others. The production process is the seller’s business, and the consumer’s role begins only at the point of transaction. Applied to public services, this model treats citizens as bundles of needs and preferences to be satisfied rather than as active agents with knowledge, capabilities, and responsibilities that are essential ingredients in producing good outcomes.
A diabetic patient who understands and actively manages their own condition is not just a better customer of health services — they are a genuine co-producer of their own health outcomes, contributing knowledge, effort, and behavior change that no amount of professional medical expertise can substitute for. A parent who reads with their child, engages with teachers, and creates a home environment that supports learning is not just a satisfied customer of educational services — they are a fundamental producer of educational outcomes alongside teachers and schools. When we reduce these active agents to passive consumers, we both misrepresent what is actually happening and create systems that systematically underutilize the most important resources available for producing good outcomes.
The Knowledge Argument: Why Citizens Hold Essential Information
One of the most powerful arguments for citizen co-production is an epistemological one — it is about knowledge, and specifically about the kinds of knowledge that citizens possess and that professional service providers do not, and cannot, easily obtain. This argument builds directly on Ostrom’s original insight and on a broader tradition of thinking about the limits of centralized knowledge in complex systems.
Citizens possess what the economist Friedrich Hayek famously called local knowledge — detailed, contextual, experiential knowledge about their specific situations, communities, and needs that is extraordinarily valuable for producing effective services but that is essentially impossible to transmit in full to distant service providers. A family knows things about their own situation — the dynamics, the history, the strengths, the vulnerabilities, the informal support networks — that no professional assessment, however thorough, can fully capture. A community resident knows their neighborhood — the informal norms, the problem places, the trusted people, the real needs — in ways that external service providers simply cannot replicate from their institutional positions.
When citizens are positioned only as service consumers, this knowledge is largely wasted. The service provider makes decisions based on whatever standardized information they can collect, and the rich, contextual, locally specific knowledge that citizens hold either never enters the picture or enters it only in distorted form through formal assessment processes that inevitably reduce complex human realities to manageable data points. When citizens are positioned as co-producers, their knowledge becomes an active input into service design and delivery, and services become dramatically better informed and more precisely tailored to actual needs.
Community Capacity: The Hidden Resource That Co-Production Unlocks
Beyond the knowledge argument, there is a compelling case for co-production rooted in the enormous and chronically underutilized capacity that communities possess. Every community, however deprived, contains people with skills, relationships, time, local knowledge, and genuine care for their neighbors that represents a vast resource for social problem-solving. When public services are organized on the assumption that professionals are the producers and citizens are the recipients, this community capacity sits largely untapped alongside professionally delivered services that are chronically under-resourced.
Consider the challenge of social isolation among elderly people, which is one of the most significant public health problems in many developed countries. Professional social care services can provide some support, but the scale of the problem vastly exceeds the resources available for professional intervention. Meanwhile, most communities have numerous able and willing community members who could provide companionship, practical assistance, and social connection to isolated elderly neighbors — if there were mechanisms to connect, support, and organize these willing contributors. Time banking schemes, befriending programs, and community care networks that co-produce elder support by combining professional services with organized community contribution have consistently demonstrated both better outcomes and better resource efficiency than purely professional models.
The same pattern appears across virtually every social policy domain where the scale of need exceeds the capacity of professional service systems to respond. Community mental health support, youth development programs, environmental management, local economic development — in each case, the gap between what professional services can provide and what communities need can be substantially closed by genuinely activating and supporting community co-production capacity.
The Democratic Argument: Co-Production as Civic Renewal
Beyond the instrumental arguments about better outcomes and more efficient use of resources, there is a deeper democratic case for citizen co-production that deserves serious attention. Democracy, in its fullest sense, is not just about voting periodically and then leaving governance to elected representatives and professional administrators until the next election. It is about genuine citizen agency — the active participation of people in shaping the common life of their communities. And public services are one of the primary arenas through which that common life is constituted.
When citizens are positioned only as consumers of public services, their relationship with democratic institutions is fundamentally passive and transactional. They assess whether services meet their needs, they reward or punish service providers through satisfaction surveys and, loosely, through electoral choices, but they do not engage as active participants in the collective enterprise of providing for shared needs. This consumer citizenship is a thin and ultimately unsatisfying version of democratic life. It produces what political theorists call a democratic deficit — a gap between the formal structures of representative democracy and the genuine civic agency of citizens.
Co-production, at its best, offers something richer and more demanding. When citizens participate genuinely in designing, delivering, and governing public services, they develop civic capacities — the ability to work with others across differences, to understand complex trade-offs in resource allocation, to take responsibility for collective outcomes, to engage with institutions not just as users but as stakeholders. These are precisely the capacities that healthy democracies need and that consumer citizenship systematically fails to cultivate.
What the Evidence Says: Does Co-Production Actually Work?
The debate about co-production should not be purely theoretical, because there is now a substantial body of empirical evidence about what happens when co-production models are genuinely implemented. That evidence is largely encouraging, though it also contains important caveats and complications that honest advocates of co-production need to acknowledge.
In healthcare, the evidence for the value of patient co-production is extensive and robust. Active patient engagement — in chronic disease management, mental health recovery, rehabilitation after injury or surgery — consistently produces better clinical outcomes than models where patients are passive recipients of professional treatment. Self-management programs for conditions like diabetes, asthma, and heart failure, which equip patients with knowledge and skills to actively manage their own health, have demonstrated both improved health outcomes and reduced healthcare utilization and cost. These are not marginal effects — they are substantial improvements that professional care delivered to passive patients cannot replicate.
In education, the evidence for the importance of family and community engagement as co-production is similarly strong. Children whose families are genuinely engaged with their education — not just satisfied customers of school services — consistently achieve better educational outcomes across socioeconomic contexts. Community school models that embed education within broader community support networks, and that actively cultivate relationships between schools and families as partners in educational production, produce better outcomes than schools that maintain professional distance from the communities they serve.
In community safety, in environmental management, in urban planning, in local economic development — the pattern repeats. Models that genuinely engage citizens as active contributors to the production of outcomes consistently outperform purely professional service delivery models, particularly in contexts where local knowledge, community relationships, and citizen behavior are important determinants of outcomes.
The Social Capital Connection: Co-Production and Community Wellbeing
There is another dimension to the case for co-production that is less directly instrumental but deeply important for understanding its full significance. When citizens participate actively in co-producing public services with each other and with professionals, they build social capital — the networks of trust, reciprocity, and civic connection that are the connective tissue of healthy communities and that are themselves powerful determinants of wellbeing, health, safety, and economic opportunity.
The sociologist Robert Putnam famously documented the decline of social capital in American communities over the latter half of the twentieth century — the bowling alone phenomenon — and its costs for community health, democratic participation, and economic resilience. Much of what drives this decline is structural: the design of physical environments, the organization of work, the atomizing effects of certain kinds of media consumption. But the design of public services also plays a significant role. Services designed around the consumer model — delivered to individuals and households rather than through community relationships — provide people with what they need without connecting them to one another in ways that build social capital.
Co-produced services, by contrast, necessarily involve people working together, building relationships, developing shared commitments and shared identities. A community garden that co-produces healthy food and green space draws people into relationships with one another that generate social capital alongside the tangible service outputs. A neighborhood watch that co-produces safety builds community relationships that have value far beyond crime prevention. A parent cooperative that co-produces childcare creates a network of mutual support that benefits families across dimensions far beyond childcare itself. Co-production, in this sense, is not just a service delivery mechanism — it is a community-building mechanism with profound implications for social wellbeing.
The Equity Challenge: Who Gets to Co-Produce?
We would be telling only part of the story if we presented co-production as an unqualified good without engaging seriously with its most significant challenge: the equity problem. Not everyone has the same capacity to participate in co-production, and models that depend on active citizen participation risk producing better outcomes for those with more resources, time, and social capital while leaving the most vulnerable behind.
This is not a hypothetical concern. There is evidence from multiple co-production initiatives that participation tends to be dominated by more educated, more affluent, more socially connected citizens, while those with the most complex needs and the fewest resources participate least. When co-produced services depend on voluntary contributions of time and capacity, those contributions tend to come from people who have time and capacity to spare — which is not always, or even usually, the most disadvantaged members of a community.
The equity challenge does not invalidate co-production as a principle, but it requires serious attention in the design and implementation of co-production initiatives. Genuine equity in co-production requires actively reaching out to and supporting the participation of the most marginalized community members. It requires providing the practical support — childcare, flexible timing, language accessibility, peer support — that removes barriers to participation. It requires recognizing and valuing diverse forms of contribution, not just the forms that are easiest for educated, confident, socially connected citizens to make. And it requires ensuring that co-production complements rather than substitutes for adequate professional service provision for those whose needs are too complex and too intensive to be met through community-level co-production.
Professional Resistance: Why Service Providers Sometimes Push Back
One of the most consistent barriers to co-production in practice is resistance from professional service providers — the doctors, teachers, social workers, planners, and other professionals whose working practices and professional identities are challenged by the shift from expert provider to collaborative partner. This resistance is sometimes portrayed uncharitably as mere professional self-interest, but it is often rooted in genuine and legitimate concerns that deserve to be taken seriously.
Professional training instills deep commitments to quality, safety, and evidence-based practice. Professionals are rightly concerned that co-production models that involve non-professionals in service delivery may compromise these standards — that the enthusiasm of volunteers may not substitute adequately for professional expertise, that community-led initiatives may not maintain appropriate safeguards, that the messiness of genuine community participation may undermine the consistency and reliability that good services require. These are real risks, not imaginary ones, and they need to be addressed in the design of co-production models rather than simply dismissed.
But professional resistance also reflects something less admirable: the tendency of professions to protect their authority and their monopoly over service provision in ways that serve professional interests more than citizens’ interests. The medical profession has historically been resistant to patient self-management models that threaten medical authority, even when the evidence for their effectiveness is strong. Teachers’ professional associations have sometimes resisted community engagement models that they perceive as challenging professional control over education. This kind of defensive professionalism needs to be challenged, gently but firmly, in the interest of the citizens who depend on public services.
The Role of Technology in Enabling New Forms of Co-Production
Digital technology has created new possibilities for citizen co-production of public services that would have been practically impossible in earlier periods, and it is worth exploring these possibilities with both enthusiasm for their potential and clarity about their limitations. Platforms that enable citizens to report local problems, track the response, and evaluate outcomes — like FixMyStreet in the UK — essentially create a co-production infrastructure for local environmental services that dramatically improves both the coverage of reporting and the accountability of response.
Open data initiatives that make government data available to citizens enable community-level analysis and advocacy that can improve service targeting and accountability. Digital peer support communities allow people managing chronic health conditions, parenting challenges, or mental health difficulties to co-produce support for one another at scales that professional services cannot match.
But we should also be clear-eyed about the equity implications of digital co-production. Digital participation requires digital access, digital literacy, and the time and confidence to engage with digital platforms — all of which are unevenly distributed across populations. Co-production models that rely primarily on digital channels will systematically under-represent the people with the most complex needs and the fewest resources, replicating offline equity problems in a new medium. Effective digital co-production must be accompanied by robust offline alternatives and active outreach to ensure that digital divides do not become co-production divides.
Co-Production in Fragile and Divided Communities
The case for co-production is most straightforwardly compelling in communities with strong social cohesion, high levels of civic trust, and relatively homogeneous interests. But many communities — particularly those facing significant social problems and those that public services most need to reach effectively — are characterized by fragmentation, conflict, low trust, and contested interests. How does co-production work in these more challenging environments?
The honest answer is that it is harder but often more important. In communities with histories of conflict between different ethnic, religious, or class groups, co-production initiatives that bring people together across these divisions can be powerful tools for building the mutual trust and shared civic identity that service delivery improvements depend on. But they require much more careful facilitation, much more explicit attention to power dynamics, and much more sustained commitment from all parties — including public service providers — than co-production in more cohesive communities demands.
Community development traditions have developed extensive practical wisdom about how to support genuine participation and co-production in divided and fragile communities, and this wisdom needs to be much more systematically drawn on in the design of public service co-production initiatives. The answer to the challenge of difficult communities is not to abandon co-production but to invest in the community development capacity that makes genuine participation possible even in difficult conditions.
Institutional Design: What Organizations Need to Support Co-Production
For co-production to move from an inspiring concept to a genuine transformation of how public services are delivered, public service organizations need to redesign themselves in fundamental ways. Organizations built around the consumer service model have structures, cultures, processes, and performance management systems that are optimized for one-directional service delivery and that actively impede genuine co-production. Changing this requires much more than adding co-production initiatives at the margins while maintaining unchanged the core organizational systems that push toward professional control and citizen passivity.
Genuine institutional support for co-production means redesigning governance structures to create genuine citizen and community voice in service planning and evaluation — not token consultation but real power sharing. It means redesigning resource allocation processes to invest in the community capacity building and relational work that co-production requires, rather than allocating resources exclusively to direct professional service provision. It means redesigning performance management systems to measure outcomes that matter to citizens and communities rather than just the process metrics that are easiest for professional organizations to collect. And it means redesigning workforce development to build the skills of collaboration, facilitation, and community engagement alongside the professional technical skills that public service workers have traditionally been trained in.
International Examples: Learning From What Works
The global evidence base on co-production includes some genuinely inspiring examples from which important lessons can be drawn. Brazil’s participatory budgeting model, which began in Porto Alegre in the 1980s and spread across hundreds of cities worldwide, demonstrates that genuine citizen co-production of budget priorities — even in large, complex urban environments — is practically feasible and produces both better allocation of resources and stronger civic engagement. The model is not perfect, and its equity record is mixed, but it represents a serious institutional innovation in citizen co-production of a core government function.
Finland’s community co-production approach to welfare services, which involves extensive collaboration between professional social workers and community members in designing and delivering support for vulnerable groups, has produced outcomes that are among the best in the world by multiple measures. Kerala’s community health programs in India, which mobilize community health workers and women’s self-help groups as co-producers of primary healthcare, have achieved dramatic health improvements in contexts of significant resource constraint. These examples are not directly transferable, but they demonstrate that co-production at scale is achievable and can produce genuinely transformative results.
The Professional Co-Producer: Redefining What Public Service Workers Do
A fundamental shift in how we think about co-production requires a parallel shift in how we think about the role of professional public service workers. In the co-production model, the professional is not primarily a service deliverer who transfers goods or services to passive recipients. They are a catalyst, a connector, a capacity builder — someone whose professional expertise is deployed not to do things for people but to enable people to do things for themselves and with each other.
This is a genuinely different professional role, and it requires genuinely different skills. The ability to listen deeply, to facilitate group processes, to recognize and activate community assets, to build relationships of genuine partnership rather than professional authority, to support people in developing their own capabilities rather than managing their needs — these are skills that professional training for public services has historically underemphasized, and that need to be much more centrally embedded in how we prepare people for public service careers.
This shift also requires a different kind of professional humility — a willingness to acknowledge that citizens know things that professionals do not, that community wisdom has value alongside professional expertise, and that the best outcomes are produced through genuine collaboration rather than professional direction. For many professionals trained in traditions that emphasize expert authority, this shift represents a significant cultural and psychological challenge. But it is a challenge that genuine commitment to co-production requires meeting honestly.
Co-Production and Public Sector Reform: A Genuine Alternative
In the context of ongoing debates about public sector reform, co-production offers something genuinely distinctive and important. It is neither the traditional model of professional bureaucratic service delivery nor the New Public Management model of marketized, privatized, customer-oriented service provision. It represents a third way — one that takes seriously both the limitations of purely professional provision and the inadequacies of the consumer model, and that offers a vision of public services rooted in active citizenship, community capacity, and genuine partnership between government and the people it serves.
This is not just theoretical positioning. It has practical implications for how governments should allocate resources, design organizational structures, train public service workers, and measure success. A genuine commitment to co-production means investing differently — spending more on community development, on relational infrastructure, on building citizen and community capacity, and less on purely transactional professional service delivery models. It means accepting shorter-term efficiency costs for longer-term outcome gains. And it means genuinely sharing power and control with citizens and communities in ways that feel uncomfortable to institutions accustomed to professional authority.
Conclusion
Should citizens be co-producers of public services rather than just consumers? The evidence, the logic, and the democratic principles all point strongly in the same direction: yes, and the case for doing so is far more compelling than the current organization of most public services acknowledges. Positioning citizens only as consumers of public services wastes their knowledge, their capacities, and their genuine stake in the outcomes those services are meant to produce. It produces worse outcomes than genuinely collaborative models. It undermines the civic agency that healthy democracy depends on.
And it misrepresents the fundamental reality that good public service outcomes have always been co-produced — by families alongside schools, by patients alongside healthcare providers, by communities alongside police and social services. The question is not whether we want co-production — it already happens, whether we name it or not. The question is whether we design our public service systems to recognize it, support it, invest in it, and distribute its benefits equitably across all of society. That is the challenge and the opportunity that the co-production agenda places before us, and it is one of the most important conversations in contemporary democratic life.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is co-production the same as volunteering or unpaid labor for the government?
Co-production is related to but distinct from conventional volunteering. Volunteering typically involves citizens donating time to supplement professional services, without changing the fundamental power relationship between provider and recipient. Co-production, in its fuller sense, involves citizens as genuine partners in designing, governing, and delivering services — with real influence over how services are organized and what they prioritize. It also encompasses the essential contributions that citizens make to their own service outcomes through their own knowledge, behavior, and engagement, which are not voluntary extras but necessary ingredients of effective service production. That said, the equity concern about whether co-production amounts to asking people to substitute for public services they are entitled to is legitimate and requires ongoing vigilance.
How do governments measure the success of co-production initiatives?
Measuring co-production success is genuinely challenging because the outcomes it produces — community wellbeing, social capital, civic agency, long-term health and educational outcomes — are harder to measure than conventional service delivery metrics. Effective evaluation of co-production typically uses a combination of outcome measures (health status, educational achievement, safety indicators), process measures (levels and quality of participation, community capacity indicators), and democratic measures (civic engagement, trust in institutions, sense of agency and belonging). Participatory evaluation approaches, which involve citizens themselves in designing and conducting evaluation, are particularly appropriate for co-production initiatives and often produce richer and more honest assessments than external expert evaluations.
Can co-production work for highly technical services where professional expertise is essential?
Yes, though the form co-production takes will differ significantly across different service types. In highly technical domains, citizen co-production does not mean replacing professional expertise with lay knowledge — it means integrating the experiential, contextual, and values-based knowledge of citizens with the technical knowledge of professionals in ways that improve both the appropriateness and the acceptability of services. Patient involvement in medical research priority-setting, community participation in infrastructure planning, and family involvement in special educational needs assessment are all examples of co-production in technically complex domains that enhance rather than compromise the quality of professional practice.
What is the relationship between co-production and democratic participation more broadly?
Co-production in public services is one expression of a broader commitment to active citizenship and participatory democracy. It is related to but distinct from electoral participation, political advocacy, and community organizing. What co-production adds to these other forms of democratic engagement is a direct, practical connection between citizen participation and the everyday services that shape people’s lives. When done well, co-production can be a gateway to broader civic and political engagement, because it gives citizens experience of genuine influence over public institutions and develops the civic capacities — the ability to work collectively, to navigate institutional processes, to advocate effectively — that political participation also requires.
How can public service organizations start moving toward genuine co-production without overwhelming staff or alienating service users?
The most effective starting point for organizations new to co-production is to identify specific services or specific aspects of service delivery where citizen and community involvement would be most natural and most impactful, and to develop genuinely collaborative initiatives in those areas while investing in the staff development and community engagement infrastructure that genuine co-production requires. It is better to do authentic co-production in one service area than to implement shallow co-production rhetoric across all services. Learning from early experiences, being honest about what works and what does not, and building organizational capacity incrementally rather than trying to transform everything at once are the approaches most likely to produce genuine and lasting change in the direction of meaningful citizen co-production.
Kathy Jane is a writer who specializes in public administration and media communication. She has 17 years of experience covering these fields and keeping up with their main trends. Kathy holds a BSc and an MSc in Mass Communication, giving her the skills to explain government and media topics in clear, easy-to-understand language.
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