Research Summary 18, Institutionalised Co-production: Unorthodox Public Service Delivery in Challenging Environments.
Abstract
This paper seeks to expand the menu of ideas about service delivery arrangements in poor countries. There is broad agreement that monopolistic provision of services by state agencies is often not feasible. But policymakers thinking about new approaches, including partnerships between the state and different parts of the private sector, may have too limited a view of the options because of the conceptual framework they are employing. This tends to be limited to a small number of organisational types. But in practice services are being delivered in a great variety of ways that do not fit these standard categories, and which blur accepted boundaries between public and private action. They therefore tend to get overlooked, or dismissed as hangovers from traditional practices. The paper introduces the concept of 'institutionalised co-production' to try to capture the diversity of these arrangements. The definition offered is 'the provision of public services (broadly defined, to include regulation) through a regular long-term relationship between state agencies and organised groups of citizens, where both make substantial resource contributions'.
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Citation
Brighton, UK: Institute of Development Studies, 2 pp.
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