New Public Management and Governance Research Papers (original) (raw)

This report sets out the findings of a major research study into the role of co-production between citizens and professionals in the delivery of public services in five EU states. It draws on data from a representative citizen survey in five European countries, including Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany and
the United Kingdom in May 2008 and from expert focus groups undertaken in those countries in early 2008. It is intended to contribute to the debate on how public agencies can deliver public services which best meet the needs of service users, citizens and taxpayers and the challenges for improving the future quality of public services.

2 Increasingly, we are seeing greater involvement of citizens in service delivery.Some of these developments have been driven by advances in ICT, particularly the internet, but there are also instances where citizens have begun to share with professionals some of the key service delivery tasks. It has also become clearer to service professionals over recent years that effective public services require the active contributions of both parties. Consequently, more and more service providers in the private and public sectors are seeking to co-operate with service users in order to tailor services better to their needs and to cut costs.

3 As a result, the relationship between service users and service professionals has changed profoundly, making service users less dependent, while, at the same time, giving them more responsibility. This has raised new interest in issues of co-production, a concept that is closely related to the inherent character of services. In particular, the literature on co-production highlights that production and consumption of many services are inseparable, which implies that quality in
services often occurs during service delivery, usually in the interaction between the customer and provider, rather than just at the end of the process. Therefore, the concept of co-production is a useful way of viewing the new role of citizens as
active participants in service delivery. Various objectives are being pursued by means of co-production, including improving public service quality by bringing in the expertise of the service
user, and often that of their families and communities as well,
into providing more differentiated services and increased choice, and making public services more responsive to users.

The definition of co-production used in this study is the “involvement of citizens in the delivery of public services to achieve outcomes, which depend at least partly on their own behaviour”.

4 Clearly, there is a wide range of citizen co-production roles in service delivery – from ‘hero’ to ‘zero’. Therefore, a citizen survey was undertaken to explore the level of this co-production between citizens and the public sector. However, to set this in context, the survey also explored the extent to which citizens sometimes become engaged in improving outcomes without any involvement with public sector agencies. In particular, the survey focussed on the following issues:
o How big is the role which citizens play in delivering public services?
o How does the involvement of citizens change their attitudes and expectations towards public services?
o Is the role of citizens in public service delivery likely to be more important in the future than at present? What are the obstacles and drivers of co-production in the public domain?

5. The survey was conducted by telephone from April 16 to May 5, 2008, among a representative random sample of 4,951 adults (18 years of age or older), with about 1,000 interviews in including Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. The countries were chosen in order to get a wide range of different administrative cultures. The results presented in this report are sweighted according to each country’s representation in the European Union. In all the cases where we compare results across sectors or countries, the differences highlighted are statistically significant. Furthermore, the study focused on three different sectors which reflect distinctly different types of government functions:
o Community safety, as an example of coercive action on the part of the state
o Local environment, as an example of the regulatory function of the state
o Public health, as an example of the welfare improvement function of the state.

6. One key result of the survey is that, contrary to the assumptions made by focus group participants, there are significant levels of co-production by citizens in the five countries studied in all three sectors. Citizens are particularly active in taking steps to look after the local environment (index score 61), to a somewhat lesser degree in health improvement initiatives (index score 52) and considerably less active in prevention of crime (index score 45).