LIST OF PANELS

Co-production is of interest to both research and practice but despite the fact that it has been the focus of many scholars in diverse fields, there have been too few opportunities for exchange across disciplines and approaches. We propose a panel that sheds light on the following topics, among others: Co-production and policy change: conceptual tools Administrative traditions and co-production practices: do institutions matter? Co-production and co-design: similarities and differences Managerial challenges of co-production Performance evaluation of co-production Conceptualizing the revolutionary or evolutionary nature of policy change related to co-production Comparing co-production in different national and policy contexts Co-production in health care services: patient engagement and unwilling clients Co-production and local public utilities Technologies supporting co-production policies Papers may be either theoretically or empirically focused. The panel encourages submissions that reflect diverse political-administrative contexts and is open to contributions from any perspective useful to providing concrete ideas and lines of action. The panel has a strong international and inter-disciplinary orientation, and both junior and senior researchers are invited to participate.

Since Ostrom’s seminal work (1981), the study of the co-production of public services, intended as the beneficiaries’ input to the design, production and delivery of public services (Jacobsen, 2013), has developed as a major interest in diverse types of research on public policy, management, psychology, and sociology. Participation of the individuals served is most important for services such as education and medical services that are intended to influence how people develop and function (Bifulco and Ladd, 2006), although co-production has significant potential to deliver tangible and intangible benefits also in other policy areas. Yet this great potential is not unconditional. Engaging citizens as co-producers of service outcomes requires not only support and training of the former but also relational coordination between service providers and service takers (Weinberg, Lusenhop, Gittell, Kautz, 2007). The issue for public managers is whether the organization or the service recipient will better perform the task (Alford and O’Flynn, 2012). Co-production adds another layer of uncertainty and complexity to the work of the policymakers. When it comes to policy change, the issue of which strategy and tools best engage the service recipients cannot be tackled solely from the economic and legislative viewpoints, despite their obvious importance. Moreover, the choice of which solutions to adopt is not only technical (i.e., based on the logic of efficiency), but also political. Each policy tool generates specific relations of power between the policy actors, promotes specific policy visions and can benefit some interested parties more than others (Capano and Lippi, 2010). Framed in this context, the aim of the panel is to bring together scholars working on diverse disciplines and diverse streams of co-production research that have a common interest in advancing the field. To that end, policy studies are absolutely crucial to analyze co-production practices as these reveal their multiple dimensions, the lights but also the shadows.