Neighbourhood collaboration in co-production: state-resourced responsiveness or state-retrenched responsibilisation?

Abstract

The co-production of public services involving service users and their communities is a form of collaboration of increasing appeal to governments around the world. Its increasing popularity has resulted in critical debates about its collaborative nature, in particular whether co-production assists the state to withdraw from service provision through prompting self-reliance. The research focuses on how the local state engages in co-production with neighbourhood-based communities of place under austerity, drawing from analysis of the discourses and practices of collaboration in the city of Cardiff, Wales. Problematizing how the term is understood and enacted by different actors sheds light on the power relations entailed and the scope for these to be challenged with the development of new ways of working. The research reveals radical potentialities in the case of timebanking, a form of co-production founded in reciprocal exchange. But findings underline that co-production entails a redistribution of responsibility and risk in managing and delivering services from the state to civil society, and from the local to the neighbourhood, revalorized as a site for community self-provisioning of formerly public services. The imperative that governments and communities pursuing co-production develop shared understandings of its precise nature, use and consequences is made clear.