The hidden side of co-creation in a complex multi-stakeholder environment : when self-organization fails and emergence overtakes

Abstract

Co-creation has become a kind of a ‘silver bullet’: something to provide a solution for the fiscal and service delivery problems faced by governments and public service organisations worldwide. Co-creation has been justified on several grounds, of which the most alluring are perhaps that co-creation conceives service users as active partners rather than passive service users, co-creation promotes collaborative relationships between service providers and users, and co-creation puts the focus on the effectiveness of services. Seemingly, co-creation is based on the ideal of active citizenship and on the logic of effective production combining the complementary and substitutive capabilities possessed by different stakeholders, particularly citizens who use services. Hence, co-creation can be conceptualised as a mode of cooperative action, which is based on the complex combination of both top-down steering (from government and service providers to service users) and bottom-up organising (from service users and service providers to government).