Co-creation: a silver bullet?
National and local governments and international organizations are now being very vocal about incorporating ‘co-creation’ in service delivery and governance. This Public Money & Management (PMM) collection includes a selection of recent articles about how to make co-creation work in the real world. Co-creation is a time-consuming activity and this collection provides researchers, policy-makers and public sector and NGO managers with tested roadmaps for a way forward. The collection includes articles showing how co-creation can successfully be used in child welfare and protection, child, disability and elderly care services and climate policy; as well, the collection looks at prisons, mental health and supporting minorities. Models are provided, including a list of 15 tasks for public managers to perform as part of their increasing efforts to use co-creation as a lever for green change. An important part of the collection is devoted to using co-creation to create public value. In addition, the risks of creating disvalue are outlined and how to mitigate those risks. The collection recognizes that social innovation is not always good and, importantly, that there are issues of scale and context to consider — co-creation is fashionable but it is not a universally-applicable silver bullet.
Edited by
Michaela Lavender(Managing Editor, Public Money & Management)