New Public Governance, the Third Sector, and Co-Production ed. by Victor Pestoff, Taco Brandsen, Bram Verschuere (review)

Co-production of public services has been around for centuries. It can involve charities and non-profit organizations delivering contracted services or programs; neighbourhood residents reporting suspicious individuals or missing persons to local and national authorities; or, in modern welfare states, citizens volunteering (in both informal and formal ways) their time, skills, and resources in the delivery of child care, public education, health services, and recreational activities. Over the last 40 years—with public-choice theory critiques of contemporary government, the ascendancy of neo-liberalism in many democracies, the emergence of new public management, followed more recently by new public governance—the role of service users in the design and delivery of public services has become both a concerted intellectual topic of research and a constant institutional object of reform. At root, co-production relates to fundamental questions of the nature of citizenship and the community—in other terms, of the relationship between the state, society, family, and economy.

Published in a series of critical studies in public management, this book is intended for academics and students, as well as policy-makers and practitioners in contemporary public administration and governance of public services. The series is broadly directed at three levels of analysis: intraorganizational management, interorganizational relations, and intersectoral arrangements. Aspects of all these are clearly evident in this well-organized and readable volume on the co-production of public policies and public services between the public sector and the third sector. That there are addressed issues of democracy and citizen engagement, social programs and housing, along with issues of service efficiency and quality, will certainly widen the appeal of the book. There is also a welcome comparative dimension to the countries and public services surveyed. For students of indigenous governance, however, there is an absence of discussion on indigenous communities and the inter-sectoral and constitutional relationships between settler states and indigenous governments.

The book is assembled into four parts. In the first, five chapters explore the question of what co-production is by examining conceptual issues and offering various theoretical perspectives. In addition to co-production, the reader is introduced to the concepts of co-management, co-governance, and co-construction. The common thread is the provision of publicly financed services within democratic political systems that have some degree of partnership between societal and state actors. Whereas co-production implies a focus on the delivery of services, the notions of co-management, and (even more so) co-construction, suggest citizen participation in the planning and design of policies. Co-governance, as described in this book, entails the institutionalization, both in law and through organizational arrangements, of participatory mechanisms. A simultaneous strengthening of civil society structures and state organizations is said to be the promise of co-governance. Throughout the volume, different chapters take up one or more of these notions of policy-making and inter-organizational relations.

The second part of the book addresses the questions of how co-production should, and actually does work, with empirical cases from public education services in the United States, housing and small-scale cooperatives in Germany, as well as new information technologies in public service delivery and police work. How co-management works is the topic of the book’s third part, with chapters focused especially on local government issues: homelessness in Australian communities; urban regeneration in Northern Ireland and in England; local government-citizen initiative partnerships in Belgium; regulation partnerships in German local authorities; and non-profit government partnerships for promoting citizen involvement at the local level in Japan. The fourth part of the book looks at particular effects of co-production, namely: service quality, accountability, and democracy. Again, a range of countries and policy fields are examined, including child care in the Swedish welfare state, privatization processes in Italy and Norway, Flemish child care, and pre-school child care services in eight European countries.

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