The co-production of public value in community development: can street-level professionals make a difference?

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 question 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 empower co-producers and thus create personal value for these co-producers. Moreover, professionals carefully consider the combination of friend–leader to support community value over personal value. Also, by combining the friend, leader and representative 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.