Co-production: the new face of public services

We have come to accept over the past 50 years or so that the agencies of government have a dominant monopoly over the delivery of public services: they provide; we consume. However, the new generation of ICT-savvy connected citizens is challenging this monopoly, stepping up to co-produce services when governments are too slow or do not meet community needs.  

What’s old is new again

The logic of co-production has been part of public policy thinking since the phrase was coined in the 1970s by Elinor Ostrom at Indiana University. Co-production involves agencies and citizens working jointly together to achieve an outcome (versus more mechanistic models where the agency is a service provider and the citizen merely a passive consumer). Classic examples include agencies, community groups, and citizens collaborating to co-produce better health outcomes (versus hospitals providing services to treat illness) or to promote safer communities and address the neighborhood causes of crime (versus police providing services to arrest offenders).

Enthusiasm for co-production has been on the rise over the past few decades given the irreconcilable tensions between society’s growing expectations of government and the constraints of fiscal austerity and an ageing workforce. The logic of co-production, once seen as an intriguing adjunct to core services, is emerging as an essential strategy for enabling agencies to achieve their policy and service delivery outcomes with fewer resources.

The Internet is accelerating co-production

Internet technology is emerging as a surprisingly powerful enabler of co-production. Up until the last few years, co-production tended to be localized and community-centric. Individuals and small networks of volunteers or NGOs worked closely with individual agencies in response to specific challenges and opportunities, often associated with helping society’s most disadvantaged or vulnerable. Many of the successful examples of co-production were situation- or person-specific. Replicating and scaling up successful local initiatives required investments in processes, systems, and technology which were beyond the means of volunteers and community groups.

However, the rise of ubiquitous mobile and broadband networks, open source software, social networking, cloud computing platforms, and the skills of a new generation of digital natives is putting powerful ICT capabilities in the hands of organizations of any size – and even individual citizens. Government agencies are no longer the only institutions capable of building systems to deliver public services.

Public emergencies reveal leading-edge ICT-enabled co-production

The rise of open source and volunteer created websites and online services for assisting with public emergencies is one of the clearest examples of the way ICT is accelerating the ability of communities of volunteers to co-produce public services.

In emergency situations there is a trend towards co-produced web and mobile phone services being faster off the mark, and more responsive and scalable than those provided by government agencies. As good examples of this trend, my colleague Kevin Noonan often cites the Christchurch Recovery Map website in New Zealand, the use of Google People Finder in Japan following the tsunami, and Queensland Police integrating use of Facebook in its flood response website.

A global volunteering event called Random Hacks of Kindness (RHOK) recently took place in cities around the world. This year the Australian event was hosted in Melbourne, with groups working on developing and refining a range of web and smartphone solutions. These included crowdsourcing earthquake intensity maps, providing essential information during bushfires and floods, and assisting people with chronic disease to access life-saving medication during a natural disaster. This was the third global RHOK event; each year the range and sophistication of the solutions builds and evolves. Many of these solutions are based on Ushahidi, an open source platform for crowdsourcing and visualizing information from many sources such as email, SMS, Twitter, and the Web.

Co-production: embrace or be left behind?

The agility, speed of response, and scalability of some of the recent examples of ICT-enabled co-production in public emergencies is an important trend. It raises many questions and issues for public policy, but the ICT-enabled co-production “genie” is out of the bottle. Agencies now need to nurture and embrace co-production by design, or risk either failing to harness this new resource or being left behind like old-style monopolists in an increasingly dynamic and competitive public services market.