What co-production is and isn’t?

“Co-production means delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals, people using services, their families, and their neighbours. Where activities are co-produced in this way, both services and neighbourhoods become far more effective agents of change.”

Along with this definition, it was also recognised that co-production is underpinned by six principles. These are common features of much co-produced support, and where all of them come together in one organisation they represent truly transformative co-production.

1. Assets: transforming the perception of people from passive recipients of services and burdens on the system into one where they are equal partners in designing and delivering services.

2. Capacity: altering the delivery model of public services from a deficit approach to one that recognises and grows people’s capabilities and actively supports them to put them to use at an individual and community level.

3. Mutuality: offering people a range of incentives to engage with, enabling them to work in reciprocal relationships with professionals and with each other, where there are mutual responsibilities and expectations.

4. Networks: engaging peer and personal networks alongside professionals as the best way of transferring knowledge.

5. Blur roles: removing tightly defined boundaries between professionals and recipients, and between producers and consumers of services, by reconfiguring the ways in which services are developed and delivered.

6. Catalysts: enabling public service agencies to become facilitators rather than central providers themselves.

Many of these principles are distinct practices, and some such as peer support and asset-based approaches, also have their own emerging evidence base. Although we will explore each of these principles within the catalogue, we recognise that it’s only when they come together that the service is fully co-produced.

Another helpful way of thinking about what co-production means in practice is to be clear about what co-production is not. Co-production has emerged from a rich and diverse literature and practice; today it has parallels, for example, in asset-based community development. However, there has been some confusion between co-production and service-user design, user ‘voice’ initiatives and consultation exercises.

Although co-production encompasses all these things, it cannot be reduced to any one of these approaches. To fall back on a well-worn cliché, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

At its most basic, co-production of public services is about ‘action’, for example people (including professionals and people who use services) coming together and producing a service or an outcome through the medium of public services.

Voice-based initiatives involve people expressing opinions and ideas to planning processes, but ultimately still only recognise professionals as capable of doing the work needed to deliver a service. Voice-based initiatives may be able to design better services than those that don’t engage with people, but ultimately, they are not aimed at unlocking the practical skills and capacities of people who receive services.

It is also important to note here the difference between co-production and ‘self-organised’ provision of support. Co-production requires a contribution in terms of time and resources from public service professionals as well as people who ‘use’ services.

The way in which time and resources are contributed may well look different from more traditional service provision but it is essential that this contribution is present. In this way co-production is not a cover by which it becomes possible to withdraw professionals entirely from services.

The above definition of co-production was developed by Nef and Nesta, in partnership with the co-production practitioners’ network and taking from there book “People Powered Health Co-Production Catalogue”. Nesta | UK innovation agency for social good