Co-Production and Public Service Management

12Co-Production and the Third Sector in the 21st Century

New Schools of Democracy and Participatory Public Service Management

A. Background

Today, leading scholars of international public management note that co-production has become one of the cornerstones of public policy reforms worldwide (Osborne, 2017). Earlier, a seminal OECD report (2011) on co-production called for rethinking traditional public service delivery in a new socio-economic environment. It argued that existing models of public service provision are not only tenuous, but also not affordable in the long-run. This lent greater urgency to developing alternative models that focus on citizen participation in the design and delivery of public services or co-production. But, it also ...