Co-production is not a new concept but it is one with renewed prominence and reach in contemporary policy discourse. It refers to joint working between people or groups who have traditionally been separated into categories of user and producer. The article focuses on the coproduction of public services, offering theory-based and knowledge-based routes to evidencing co-production. It cites a range of ‘good enough’ methodologies which community organisations and small-scale service providers experimenting with co-production can use to assess the potential contribution, including appreciative inquiry, peer-to-peer learning and data sharing. These approaches have the potential to foster innovation and scale-out experimentation.
There is a critique of research conducted in communities which fails to include communities in its design and undertaking. In parallel, academic research is increasingly being measured according to its benefit to the wider society. Co-productive research is a response to these challenges which offers a way of recognizing the resource contribution of communities to research and emphasizing the conduct of research 'with' communities rather than 'on' communities. This article identifies the reliance on 'text' in the research process as a barrier to delivering meaningful co-productive research with communities. 'Beyond-text' tools are emerging across academic disciplines and include story-telling, performance, art and photography. Recent research emphasizes the empowering potential of these methods by facilitating greater reflection on the lived experience of those involved. This article looks at examples of research which have employed 'beyond text' methods to consider their potential to deliver co-produced research with communities. It also asks whether it is the application of specific technical approaches and methods, or the underlying ethos within which research is conducted that is most critical to challenging unequal power relationships. It argues that beyond-text methods need to be applied within a wider set of values which re-conceptualize the role of the researcher working with communities.
The UK has been a high profile policy innovator in welfare-to-work
Public sector commissioning has risen rapidly to prominence as the central mechanism for the 'purchase' of services in an increasingly mixed economy of public services in the UK and this has wide-ranging consequences for non-state actors including those in the third sector. Academic consideration of commissioning has been rather fragmented, concerned with particular service fields or sectors. This paper provides an overview, with a focus on the relationship between the state and the third sector. The paper begins by questioning whether commissioning is really 'new' or a continuation of existing trends around procurement and contracting and whether it constitutes a genuinely transformative relationship between the state and third sector. It considers some core debates about the likely impact of commissioning on the third sector and its relationship with the state. In doing so, the paper advances two main arguments: that commissioning remains highly fragmented in policy and practice, between different localities and scales of government; and that there is a tension within commissioning policy between the 'rhetoric' of the 'full cycle' approach based on needs assessment and planning, and what appears to be an emerging reality of resource-constrained, large-scale and Payment by Results-based contracting. These raise real concerns for organizational and service quality outcomes.
This paper develops a critique of the current model of research governance ethics which casts communities as vulnerable subjects. The paper constructs an alternative approach to thinking about the twin challenges of research governance and reflexive research practice through reframing ideas of public value and rejecting a public harm model. We use the insights of coproduction as a way of positively rethinking the relationship between researchers and 'the researched' to create new ways of thinking about public value. We argue that reflexive research practice should draw upon the principles and examples of empowerment within governance. These aspire to work 'with' communities and create space for greater community control in defining and creating publically valuable research.
political economy , city‐regional governance , financial crisis , Manchester ,
The UK has been a high profile policy innovator in welfare-to-work provision which has led in the Coalition government's Work Programme to a fully outsourced, ‘black box’ model with payments based overwhelmingly on job outcome results. A perennial fear in such programmes is providers' incentives to ‘cream’ and ‘park’ claimants, and the Department for Work and Pensions has sought to mitigate such provider behaviours through Work Programme design, particularly via the use of claimant groups and differential pricing. In this article, we draw on a qualitative study of providers in the programme alongside quantitative analysis of published performance data to explore evidence around creaming and parking. The combination of the quantitative and qualitative evidence suggest that creaming and parking are widespread, seem systematically embedded within the Work Programme, and are driven by a combination of intense cost-pressures and extremely ambitious performance targets alongside overly diverse claimant groups and inadequately calibrated differentiated payment levels.
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