Co-production before, during, and after the first COVID-19 lockdown: The case of developmental services for youth with disabilities
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00208523221134484 |
| Author | Monica Carminati,Dario Cavenago,Laura Mariani |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Co-production before,
during, and after the first
COVID-19 lockdown: The
case of developmental
services for youth with
disabilities
Monica Carminati
University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
Dario Cavenago
University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy
Laura Mariani
University of Bergamo, Italy
Abstract
Co-production was vital to support public services provision during the first wave of
COVID-19 pandemic, and one of the main challenges for service providers is to make
co-production sustainable. There are few empirical studies on the sustainability of co-
production from a long-term perspective. This study aims to contribute to this topic
by exploring the micro-level foundations of co-production persistence through a lon-
gitudinal qualitative study in three public service organizations providing developmen-
tal services for youth with disabilities. Co-production is analyzed along the service
provision process before, during and after the first COVID-19 lockdown, with spe-
cific attention on exploring how the conditions for sustainable co-production –
mutual commitment, complementarities and institutional arrangements –occur and
reinforce one another after an external shock. The findings suggest that the persist-
ence of co-production is a result of a process in which experimentation with new
Corresponding author:
Monica Carminati, Business & Law, University of Milano-Bicocca, Bicocca degli Arcimboldi, 8 I-20126 Milan,
Italy.
Email: monica.carminati@unimib.it
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
2023, Vol. 89(3) 864–882
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/00208523221134484
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
complementarities can enhance previous co-production experiences and generate a
context of mutual commitment that facilitates future co-production initiatives and
their institutionalization.
Points for practitioners
This article suggests how service providers can activate a potential virtuous cycle of co-
production by increasing the opportunities that foster and sustain users and families’
self-efficacy and reciprocal trust, and the contributions from wider social support net-
works of the most vulnerable people.
Keywords
microfoundations of co-production, public service management, conditions for
sustainable co-production, the sustainability of co-production, developmental services,
COVID-19
Introduction
Co-production is a central topic in recent research into public administration, and gained
particular attention during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic when citizens, civil
society, firms, and third-sector organizations strongly contributed to the implementation
of both public health policies and the regular provision of health, educational and social
services. This situation has been defined as a “gigantic co-production project”(Steen and
Brandsen, 2020) and one challenge for the future is to preserve the value generated
through these collaborative processes.
In the past, only a limited number of contributions adopted a long-term perspective
(Brandsen, 2020; Nabatchi et al., 2017), but the flourishing of co-production initiatives
in response to the emergency has offered opportunities to observe this phenomenon
from its origin.
This study aims to contribute to this topic by exploring the micro-level foundations of
co-production persistence. We explore the rise of complementarities and mutual commit-
ment among co-producers before, during, and after the spring lockdown from February to
June 2020, as well as the emergence of institutional arrangements aimed at steadying
co-production practices in the future.
We analyze co-production as a wide range of activities that occur—in the form of
co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery, and co-assessment—in the public service
cycle and involve regular producers and citizens who work together to produce benefits
(Nabatchi et al., 2017).
We conducted a longitudinal qualitative study in three public service organizations
within the Service for Autonomy in Lombardy, Italy, which is a program aimed at sup-
porting youths with disabilities to achieve autonomy through intellectual and develop-
mental services.
Carminati et al. 865
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