Editorial: Co-production – key ideas
Editorial: Co-production – key ideas
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社论:联合制作——关键想法
DOI:
--
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发表时间:
2018
影响因子:
3.7
通讯作者:
S. Bartlett
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
D. Mitlin;S. Bartlett
This collection of papers offers an opportunity to review a concept that was first considered, in terms of development debates, in the mid1990s. After that, development literature, for the most part, ignored the concept for eight years. Since 2004,(1) however, there has been a renewed interest. The concept has been revived both in the global North, where it focuses on debates about community involvement in public service delivery, and in the global South, where the rationale for co-production emerges across the ideological divide on state responsibilities and citizen entitlements. The empirical evidence that catalysed the first conceptualization of co-production in the 1990s had little focus on development programme design or planned state interventions. Rather, the concept emerged from observations of policing on US streets, and a recognition that security depended on the relations between street-level police officers and local residents.(2) Unless local residents shared a broadly similar vision of the public order, the job of the police was not possible. Security is not delivered by the police – rather it is the product of relationships, negotiation and collaboration. This research highlighted the limits of bureaucracy, state control and an authoritarian dictate. From this work developed the understanding that health and prison services were also more effective when they grew out of collaboration.(3) The application of these ideas to development in the global South gained traction with a special issue of World Development in 1996.(4) From the perspectives of both economics (Ostrom(5)) and political science (Evans(6)), co-production was recognized to offer more efficient delivery of services (with labour contributions from local residents replacing unavailable state resources) and more effective state plans (through synergistic planning between organized communities and the state). With reference to the global South, the concept of co-production has been supported, on the one hand, by those concerned with public service provision in the context of a weak state with limited delivery capacity. While such practices may be justified by some, as is also the case in the global North, they are viewed with suspicion by others; they are seen as strengthening neoliberalism and passing on responsibilities that should be taken up by the state. Other observers, on the other hand, focus on the breadth of the gap between those who design and deliver services within bureaucratic public management systems and the disadvantaged low-income citizens who are too frequently excluded from provision. They argue that well-designed co-production 791931 EAU Environment & Urbanization