Co-Production and Public Service Management

11Reframing Co-Production

More Definitions or New Schools?

A. Introduction

A growing chorus of scholars and practitioners has called into question current attempts to define and delimit co-production. They argue that it is ill defined, poorly formulated or a muddled concept. Their solution is to propose a new definition that can hopefully encompass more elements and provide a more wholistic approach to the study of this phenomenon. However, the problem may not lay in definitions per se, but rather might be a question of different approaches, models or schools of study that color our understanding of this phenomenon.

The co-production of public services is a complex phenomenon that has attracted significant scholarly interest in recent years ...