The co-production of public value in community development: can street-level professionals make a difference?
| Author | Joris Voets,Daphne Vanleene,Bram Verschuere |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852318804040 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
The co-production
of public value in
community
development: can
street-level professionals
make a difference?
Daphne Vanleene
Ghent University, Belgium
Joris Voets
Ghent University, Belgium
Bram Verschuere
Ghent University, Belgium
Abstract
This article deals with the different roles of the street-level professional in achieving
public value in a co-productive community development project. The article focuses, in
particular, on the question of how engaged street-level professionals combine different
roles – as friend, leader, representative and mediator – in order to empower and
include their target audience, thereby contributing to public value creation. This ques-
tion was explored in a qualitative case study in a community development project in
Ostend (Belgium). The study indicated that the street-level professional needed to
adopt different role combinations in a well-considered way in order to influence
the co-productive process that affected public value creation. More specifically, the
combination of friend–leader, as well as the leader–mediator combination, can empow-
er co-producers and thus create personal value for these co-producers. Moreover,
professionals carefully consider the combination of friend–leader to support
Corresponding author:
Daphne Vanleene, Department of Public Governance and Management, Campus Mercator, G1.028,
Henleykaai 84, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium.
Email: daphne.vanleene@ugent.be
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
2020, Vol. 86(3) 582–598
!The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0020852318804040
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community value over personal value. Also, by combining the friend, leader and rep-
resentative roles, professionals can include more co-producers and create a stronger
sense of community value. This article concludes that there is a need for an engaged
professional who has sufficient time and autonomy to apply the combinations as
needed. Additionally, we note that more research on these different role cocktails is
necessary in order to provide a clear framework of the different combinations that
professionals can apply.
Points for practitioners
From our research, we can make two key recommendations for practitioners. First, in
order to empower and include vulnerable participants to co-produce, professionals
need to develop the right skill set to fulfil the roles needed to engage with participants.
Second, and relatedly, this also implies sufficient autonomy (vis-a-vis policymakers) for
the professionals at the street level, which will enable them to consider what is needed
for the co-production project to become successful in terms of inclusion and
empowerment.
Keywords
community development, co-production, empowerment, inclusion, public value,
street-level professional
Introduction
One of the essential questions in the literature on co-production concerns the
active role of the professional (Buckwalter, 2014; De Graaf et al., 2015; Durose,
2011; Tuurnas, 2015, 2016b; Vanleene et al., 2018). More specifically, it is often
assumed that street-level professionals can make or break a co-production project.
Indeed, the extent to which citizen co-producers are willing to participate in the co-
production of a public service, and the extent to which the cooperation between
street-level professionals and citizens leads to desirable outcomes, will depend on
how these professionals behave and how they interact with citizens (Buckwalter,
2014; De Graaf et al., 2015; Durose, 2011; Halvorsen, 2003; Herian et al., 2012;
Vanleene et al., 2018).
However, where previous studies are mostly constituted of preliminary argu-
ments for civic entrepreneurship (Durose, 2011) and the professional’s influence
towards achieving this (De Graaf et al., 2015; Vanleene et al., 2018), we will look at
how the street-level professional applies and combines different roles in order to
successfully influence the process (i.e. including and empowering the citizens) and
how doing so influences the outcome (public value achieved). Therefore, in this
article, the key question is what (combination of) roles street-level professionals play
in creating public value by influencing the co-productive process.
Vanleene et al. 583
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