Abstract
Despite numerous attempts to define the core traits of co-production, it remains an heterogeneous concept. Building upon existing literature, we engage in legal reasoning to identify the co-producer, especially in those cases where she does not directly benefit from the service being co-produced. Introducing and relying on the concept of proximity, we argue that co-production should be centred in an administrative citizenship, which associates residence within a community with a set of rights and duties towards the public administration. Among those obligations, participation in co-production is a pathway towards active citizenship. We justify why co-production can be non-voluntary, or compelled by law to realise public interests. Yet we caution that co-production as a management scheme requires flexibility, and embedding it too strictly within a legal framework can diminish its effectiveness.
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Notes
- 1.
Following Osborne and Strokosch (2013), by ‘public services’ we mean services ‘created through the public policy process and regulated by (central or local) government but which can be provided by a range of “public service organizations” (PSOs) in the public, third and private sectors’ (Osborne and Strokosch 2013).
- 2.
- 3.
In the definition published within the NESTA report, co-production has been defined as a way of delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals, people using services, their families and their neighbours. However, Bovaird and Loeffler (2012b) contest this definition because the condition of an equal and reciprocal relationship is rarely met. For this reason, they take a ‘slightly different stance’ and adopted a definition of co-production that, while emphasising the reciprocity of the relationship between ‘the public sector and citizens’, is ‘less anchored to equality in relationships’ (Bovaird and Loeffler 2012b, 1121).
- 4.
Parallel productions are those services similar to those provided by public agencies, but are produced without the co-operation with public agencies (Rosentraub and Warren 1987, 76).
- 5.
Ancillary actions are expected forms of behaviour for citizens, such as reporting crimes, obeying laws, and following regulations (Rosentraub and Warren 1987, 76).
- 6.
Among the others, Brandsen and Honingh (2016) claimed that co-production is about collaboration between public agencies and citizens for the production or provision of public services, thus excluding from its action field those interorganizational collaborations that Brandsen and Pestoff (2006) refer to as ‘co-management’ and ‘co-governance’. Moreover, they use a narrow interpretation of co-production, that does not include advocacy or inputs outside an organization to avoid that co-production becomes ‘virtually synonymous with participation in a broader sense’ (Brandsen and Honingh 2016, 428). Pestoff (2006), on the other hand, identifies the main requisites of co-production in the public financing and supervision of the services in which citizens-co-producers are involved.
- 7.
‘Coproduction necessitates of an active input by individual citizens in shaping the service they personally receive. This distinguishes coproduction from passive clientelism or consumerism: it is not enough simply to receive or use a product’ (Brandsen and Honingh 2016, 428).
- 8.
‘For instance, the participation of family members of children has been an often-studied topic’ (Brandsen and Honingh 2016, 428).
- 9.
It may be argued that the societal impact of the flood recovery will be felt at a broader level than the region, but it would be a difficult conception of co-production to accept if it were to be mandated as broadly, say, as required national military service.
- 10.
The connection between the notion of territory and citizenship can be traced to the origins of the term. As mentioned by Turner (1993): ‘The Western notion of citizenship is closely associated with […] membership of a city […]. Thus, the French term citoyen is derived from cité, which refers merely to an assembly of citizens who enjoy certain limited rights within a city. In English, equally the idea of citizen is closely associated with that of a denizen, and both indicate the idea of living a city’ (Turner 1993, 9).
- 11.
‘What the citizenry receives is public value, whereas a client receives private value’ (Alford 2002b, 34).
- 12.
‘A citizen is part of a collective “we”, who express their aspirations through the manifold “voice” mechanisms, such as voting and other forms of political participation, which make up democratic political processes. By contrast, the clients act (or are acted on) as individuals who signal their preferences, if at all, through market purchases or surrogates such as complaint departments or consumer surveys, and in any case the service is often determined for them by governments’ (Alford 2002b, 34).
- 13.
This text is particularly relevant as, to the best of our knowledge, it is one of the rare cases in which the term ‘co-production’ is used explicitly in a legislative context. Indeed, despite the not negligible amount of academic discussion on the concept, this term seems to be almost absent from the legislations consulted—the Italian, European Union and United States legislation. In those legal frameworks, ‘co-production’ is used either to generically indicate the private agreements among two or more co-producers or with specific reference to the audio-visual co-production (see, for instance, the European Convention on Cinematographic Co-production).
- 14.
- 15.
Public Law 99-280—Apr. 24, 1986.
- 16.
The law provides that these centers be federally funded through direct grants to nonprofit community-based organisations for the purpose of delivering comprehensive primary health care in deprived urban neighbourhoods and rural areas (Stivers 1990).
- 17.
The provision states: ‘Al fine di realizzare…la partecipazione alla gestione della scuola dando ad essa il carattere di una comunità che interagisce con la più vasta comunità sociale e civica…’.
- 18.
Salamon and Anheier (1994, 2) note that ‘the concept of the nonprofit sector at least has a coherent place in American law and usage’. By contrast, British common law constructs ‘a reasonably prominent notion of an organizational space outside the state and the market, but a far more complicated one than in the American setting’ (3).
- 19.
‘Nowadays, the rights of political citizenship (association, meeting, manifestation of thought, etc.) are recognised everywhere, but differences can be seen in the recognition of the rights of administrative citizenship, which is more difficult to define. These rights, which are recognised elsewhere, seem to be neglected in Italy. With the “Citizen’s Charter”, and with the single charters of public services, including local ones, the phenomenon of citizens’ charters, in the past exclusively limited to the constitutional law and the political sphere, has extended to the administrative one and minute rights begin to be guaranteed […]. With a certain emphasis, it is stated that the citizen-user is sovereign and that his judgement on the activities of the public authorities must be heard’ (Cassese 1998, 29–30).
- 20.
‘For the recognition of administrative citizenship, Italy is rather distant from the English model, and from the French one. In Great Britain, indeed, the administration’s relationship to the citizen is characterized by […] a cooperative attitude of the administration towards the citizen. In France, […] initiatives intended to make it easier to make contacts with the administration are proliferating’ (Cassese 1998, 60–61).
- 21.
l.n. 241/1990.
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Bertelli, A.M., Cannas, S. (2021). Law and Co-production: The Importance of Citizenship Values. In: Loeffler, E., Bovaird, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Co-Production of Public Services and Outcomes. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53705-0_10
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