History of Co-Production™

Co-Production™: The Emerging Imperative

Co-Production™ is a framework to address social problems.  It operates on two fronts simultaneously, which can make it a little difficult to grasp at first.  But as an approach that double-edged aspect is extremely important, so it is worth sitting with the idea. On one level, Co-Production™ calls for individuals, families and communities to work together with social welfare staff and professionals to achieve desired outcomes and rebuild community.  On the second level, it calls for resources and services in the money economy to work with home, family, neighborhood and community as a powerful, non-monetary economy that for most of us is quite invisible as an economy, but which operates alongside and conjunction with the money economy. (In 2003, economist Neva Goodwin gave this non-monetary economy the name, the “core economy” – and we have called it that ever since.)

For Co-Production™ to exist, the two sets of relationships just laid out must operate in accord with five core principles which call for those applying Co-Production™ to:

1. Work on the assumption that every one of us has something to give. (That includes those whom society has excluded.)
2. Honor the real work of building home, family and community that the market fails to value.
3. Empower the recipients of services through reciprocity – by asking them to contribute in turn
4. Respect and attend to the voices of the excluded and powerless.

Co-Production™ was independently developed by Edgar Cahn in the 1980s as the result of trying to work out what made Time Banks sustainable and successful. It is not the only version of coproduction that exists. In the 1970s political economist Elinor Ostrom developed a similar framework that in some ways is very like Co-Production™ and in other ways is quite different. It’s worth taking a moment to look at the history of the two versions of coproduction and the differences between them, because from their differences one gets a deeper understanding of them.

The First Discovery of Coproduction.  In the 1970s, political economist Elinor Ostrom had saw that public goods – like education, health, or infrastructure services such as water and sewage treatment, -- were very often assigned to government agencies to produce, while the public was given the passive role of consumers and clients. But she also saw that the public need not be passive. She studied various situations where citizens had been actively involved in producing public goods and services of consequence to them, such as the construction of sewage systems in the favelas of Brazil, schools in Nigeria, neighborhood alert patrols in ghettos, and recycling in Brazil.

In every one of these cases, she found that involvement by the recipients of services led to improved public goods at reduced public expense.  By providing their own free labor to the production process, citizens could ensure that public goods were more effectively and efficiently produced. Ostrom called this coproduction, which she defined as “the process through which inputs used to produce a good or service are contributed by individuals who are not “in” the same organization.”  Following in her footsteps, a number of political economists began to study this phenomenon. For about a decade, coproduction was vigorously studied, but the studies started falling off.  Much more recently, it has begun to receive renewed attention.

The Second Discovery: Co-Production™  

As described in his book No More Throw-Away People, Edgar Cahn independently created the Co-Production™ as he figured out what was the “factor X” that made some Time Banks succeed while others failed. Time Banks had set out to build strong communities – but they were having a hard time getting the funds they needed to pay for their infrastructure. The ones that succeeded in staying alive, he saw, were the ones that achieved a public purpose for which a government agency or non-profit organization or philanthropic foundation was willing to pay.  Since all Time Banks at that time were seeking to build community, Cahn realized that what he had called “factor x” was, in effect, a special kind of partnership between the agency, seeking specific outcomes on the one hand, and the stronger sense of community, being supported by the Time Bank, on the other. Somehow, what was being created through the Time Bank was a “win-win” situation for the agency and the community, operating on the two levels described above.

The Differences between the First and Second Versions

Cahn’s version of Co-Production™, like Ostrom’s, was built on the core insight that the public has a role to play in producing public goods.  There were some important differences, however. Coproduction as analyzed by Ostrom looks at how the public directly contributes to a public good which the government or another organization has been called upon to supply.  Co-Production™, as laid out by Cahn had two different aims in mind at the same time:  for the agency, it was the public good in question – but for the community it was a strong, resilient, mutually supportive community – one that could assure its members that their needs would be met.  In Cahn’s version, Co-Production™ is the interaction between these two separate goals – and that is extremely important. Together, the interacting goals set up dual, but complementary sets of dynamics to ensure that public goods being supplied by the agency are more effective, or that the need for government services is greatly reduced. 

The differences between the two versions of coproduction don’t stop there. At the heart of Cahn’s version of Co-Production™ is an interaction between the efforts of an organization to achieve its goals, and the efforts of individuals within a community to build a greater sense of community. Cahn understood that this interaction is critical, and it led him to develop a whole additional layer to his version. He saw that for the interaction to work in a healthy, constructive manner, specific conditions were called for.  Without those conditions, the interaction could be destructive and harmful – and, indeed, it very commonly is.  As he figured out the “factor X,” he had to figure out what the specific conditions were.  Ultimately he came to understand that the conditions could be described as core principles which became the backbone of  Co-Production™.  Cahn’s version, therefore, is prescriptive. It makes no bones about calling for these principles – and frequently it refers to them as values as well as principles. 

Ostrom worked as a political scientist. Cahn worked as a social architect. They had taken on two very different tasks, worked with two very different approaches to the world, and had come up with a similar idea to which they had given the same name. But their two different versions of coproduction are also very different.  Ostrom’s was a definition and analysis of an existing phenomenon.  Cahn’s was the design of a  specific set of practices in relation to the provision of social services.

Seeking Acceptance – Both Versions of Co-Production™

Something that Ostrom and Cahn shared was the discovery that what they had defined was much harder to get accepted than they could ever have conceived.

Having discovered the principle of coproduction, Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues expected – and hoped – that governments around the world would pick up the idea and begin involving citizens as coproducers  of public goods everywhere. They were disappointed. Instead of jumping at the idea and putting it into effect, government agencies resisted, fearing that it might undercut their case for more revenue and staff if free citizen labor could produce superior outcomes.  On the other side, communities generally failed to make the effort to demand co-production™, in part, because organizing from the ground up is hard; in part because public goods inevitably have free riders who will take advantage of the goods created by the labor of others; and in part, because, when it did happen, providing the free labor that is involved would lead to burn-out and attrition.  In sum, what looked like a natural step for achieving better government was far more difficult to get acceptance than Ostrom and her colleagues had imagined.

Cahn faced similar difficulties. The way of thinking that he had developed was very different from standard approaches to philanthropy and public services, and his efforts to secure support and backing to explore it more fully and to try it out in different arenas met with repeated rejections.  Convinced that Co-Production™  offered a whole new paradigm for the provision of social services, and that it also would create the sustainability that Time Banks so desperately needed, he persisted in promoting it relentlessly in every forum that he could.  But even in the Time Banking community it was a hard sell. Time Bank leaders saw the involvement of government agencies and specific missions as potentially threatening the spirit of community that was emerging in the Time Banks they had created.  On the other hand, members of the philanthropic community were confused as to whether Time Banking and Co-Production™ were the same thing or different. 

In fact, Time Banking and Co-Production™ are not wedded to each other.  They can work hand in glove. Time Banking then is the tool and Co-Production™ the framework. When this occurs, they each offer openings and possibilities for the other.  But Time Banking does not need to include Co-Production™. And Co-Production™ does not need to work through Time Banking.

All this was confusing to those inside and outside of the Time Banking community.  But an even greater challenge than this, for both Time Banking and Co-Production™, was how far outside the envelope of mainstream practice and thinking they have been.  As a result, both have been difficult to fund.  Inside and outside of Time Banking, a very small number of individuals has taken immediately to the idea of Co-Production™.  Being so few in number, their ability to demonstrate that Co-Production™ can work as powerfully as Cahn has always insisted has been much slower than it might otherwise have been. Only since 2005, both in conjunction with Time Banking and on its own, has Co-Production™ finally begun to receive significant attention from decision-makers in philanthropic and policy-making circles.  

In Sum

Time Banking made its base as an economic approach to building of family, neighbourhood and community and as the key to more resilient, stronger, happier individuals.  But the struggles of Time Banks to survive led, almost by accident, to the discovery of Co-Production™. It operates as a special kind of partnering that works on two levels simultaneously: between social service agencies and community, and between the world of money, which pays for professional services, and the non-monetary “economy” where members produce, distribute and consume goods and services not for money, but as an expression of their basic, universal capacities and needs.