Abstract
I. Introduction: The Trajectory of the Co-Production Concept
This collection of papers offers an opportunity to review a concept that was first considered, in terms of development debates, in the mid-1990s. After that, development literature, for the most part, ignored the concept for eight years. Since 2004,(1) however, there has been a renewed interest. The concept has been revived both in the global North, where it focuses on debates about community involvement in public service delivery, and in the global South, where the rationale for co-production emerges across the ideological divide on state responsibilities and citizen entitlements.
The empirical evidence that catalysed the first conceptualization of co-production in the 1990s had little focus on development programme design or planned state interventions. Rather, the concept emerged from observations of policing on US streets, and a recognition that security depended on the relations between street-level police officers and local residents.(2) Unless local residents shared a broadly similar vision of the public order, the job of the police was not possible. Security is not delivered by the police – rather it is the product of relationships, negotiation and collaboration. This research highlighted the limits of bureaucracy, state control and an authoritarian dictate. From this work developed the understanding that health and prison services were also more effective when they grew out of collaboration.(3)
The application of these ideas to development in the global South gained traction with a special issue of World Development in 1996.(4) From the perspectives of both economics (Ostrom(5)) and political science (Evans(6)), co-production was recognized to offer more efficient delivery of services (with labour contributions from local residents replacing unavailable state resources) and more effective state plans (through synergistic planning between organized communities and the state).
With reference to the global South, the concept of co-production has been supported, on the one hand, by those concerned with public service provision in the context of a weak state with limited delivery capacity. While such practices may be justified by some, as is also the case in the global North, they are viewed with suspicion by others; they are seen as strengthening neoliberalism and passing on responsibilities that should be taken up by the state. Other observers, on the other hand, focus on the breadth of the gap between those who design and deliver services within bureaucratic public management systems and the disadvantaged low-income citizens who are too frequently excluded from provision. They argue that well-designed co-production processes can strengthen community capacities, enabling community members to build collective processes along with an understanding of effective design. Aided by solidarity, an associated capacity to organize, and developed precedents that demonstrate to government agencies what is required and what it costs, low-income urban communities, often informal, are able to contest power, negotiate and collaborate around their needs. In the process, they can secure enhanced citizenship.(7)
There continue to be diverse trajectories, both for co-productive action and for understandings of the concept. And across North and South, debates continue about whether the concept subverts or supports the status quo. Hence Bell and Pahl recently argued that co-producing knowledge may be understood as a utopian research method, challenging the existing distribution of power and opening up possibilities for the reform of processes that generate ideas and associated knowledge.(8) And Durose and Richardson discuss the scale of public policy failure in the face of growing complexity and diversity of needs, arguing that only a co-productive approach, going beyond the elites of politics and technocracy, can address this “wicked” problem.(9)
Attention to diversity is relevant, and in this special issue of the journal, Vanesa Castán Broto and Susana Neves Alves engage with diversity in their discussion of co-production and intersectionality. However, it is also evident that for another set of authors, Luisa Moretto, Giuseppe Faldi, Marco Ranzato, Federica Natalia Rosati, Pierre Ilito Boozi and Jacques Teller, Durose and Richardson’s assumption that the function of co-production is to support more inclusive approaches would be an oversimplification. Co-production, as elaborated by Moretto and co-authors, may include processes that exclude as well as those that empower. Such discussions reflect the increasingly widespread use of co-production both as a label and practice. In the context of this increasing use of the term and associated generalizations, this issue of Environment and Urbanization offers diverse perspectives and contributes to the evolving trajectory of this concept.
In this introduction we aim to give coherence to the collection and advance readers’ grasp of the diversity of definitions and understandings that are found in the papers that follow. We also seek to highlight the concept’s relevance to perspectives on more equitable cities, by analysing findings that have secured positive outcomes for low-income and disadvantaged residents. We reflect on five cross-cutting topics as a framework to highlight the continuing contribution of co-production, both the concept and its practical application, to liveable and inclusive cities. This framework also enables analysis of co-production’s potential to shift power relations in order to reduce inequalities and expand the space for urban citizenship.
II. How is Co-production Defined in this Collection?
Most of the authors in this special issue begin from the perspective that co-production in urban areas involves the co-delivery of basic municipal services, with roles for both government and organized citizens. However, almost immediately they move on from this aspect to a more substantive social purpose. Most position the actual delivery of services as almost ancillary to the relationship implications of the co-production process. They move, in effect, from considering co-production as a means to meet essential ends to co-production as a means of altering essential relationships and ongoing practices.
Ellis Adams and Godfred O Boateng, for instance, in a study of water services in Lilongwe (Malawi), adopt the Joshi and Moore definition of institutionalized co-production: “the provision of public services (broadly defined, to include regulation) through a regular long-term relationship between state agencies and organised groups of citizens where both make substantial resource contributions”.(10) Their discussion focuses on the co-production of water services through a partnership between the public-owned utility and water user associations, with the latter supported by a range of civil society organizations. Adams and Boateng see co-production as compensating for the inefficiencies of the state around services; this is also consistent with Joshi and Moore’s findings. But Adams and Boateng go on to describe its function as enhancing synergies between communities and service providers, and building community social capital.
Wayne Shand also begins his discussion of co-production in Harare (Zimbabwe) with a focus on services, noting that “the provision of quality services requires inputs not just from the state, but from users who have an instrumental role in determining the final outcome of a service” (page 519). But he continues by noting that co-production is possible “where there are complementarities sufficient to incentivize change in the behaviours of producers and consumers of a service” (page 519). In other words, the changes in behaviour are as fundamental as the services. The process is associated with service improvements (in this case in tenure, housing and services) – but more fundamentally it is about municipal officials changing their relationships with low-income communities, and the potential inherent in this change.
For Moretto and co-authors, similarly, an examination of multiple cases of co-production in the provision of water and sanitation services becomes a discussion of a “renewed vision of citizenship, based on residents’ voice, participation, and control in the decision-making process” (page 439). David Simon, Henrietta Palmer, Jan Riise, Warren Smit and Sandra Valencia, along these same lines, see the objective of co-production (in their case the co-production of research and knowledge) as being “to bring different stakeholder groups together in an attempt to overcome often longstanding antagonisms and wide asymmetries of power by working or researching together to improve outcomes, whether of services and research, and their legitimacy” (page 481). The services delivered – or in this case, research outcomes – are clearly secondary to the tackling of antagonisms and power imbalances.
Castán Broto and Neves Alves, also referring to Joshi and Moore, describe co-production as an array of strategies to access public services initiated by community-based organizations or grassroots groups, often presented as a practical strategy to deliver services in what they refer to as unorthodox contexts. But like Adams and Boateng, Shand, Simon et al. and Moretto et al., Castán Broto and Neves Alves expand this basic service-focused definition. They see co-production as a tool to advance social justice and urban sustainability, and to challenge the structures that reproduce inequalities. But even this broader definition, they say, is just a starting point. Castán Broto and Neves Alves refer to the questions of intersectionality that “increasingly permeate…debates about the co-production of urban services” (page 368). An intersectionality lens, they argue, “invites scholars and activists to reformulate the challenges at the core of co-production processes” (page 369).
While a primary purpose of Castán Broto and Neves Alves’s paper is to advance our theoretical understanding of co-production, they also intend to produce practical insights for activists and practitioners. Kate Lines and Jack Makau move in the other direction, exploring how action on the ground can produce new insights for those engaged in theory. Their analysis leads them to expand accepted definitions. Through analysing the work of the Kenyan grassroots network, Muungano wa Wanavijiji, they define co-production as “a situation in which the state and citizens come together to find a solution to a challenge, with both parties going beyond their normal processes and building an altogether new solution based on their synergy” (page 420). They conclude, on the basis of Muungano’s experience, that “for co-production to occur it is not always necessary for the state and its citizens to work under one organizational framework, or to be focused on the same specific project, or even the same geography” (page 421).
If these papers as a group share a primary emphasis on relationships and processes rather than on specific interventions, they part ways when it comes to considering where the control lies within these relationships. For some, the simple existence of the collaborative relationship is the defining characteristic here. For others, co-production necessarily implies a shift in the usual power relations and the ceding of greater control to disempowered communities.
Several authors recognize the potential for organized communities to be the drivers of co-production, and see this, furthermore, as fundamental. This perspective emerges especially from the paper by Somsook Boonyabancha and Thomas Kerr on CODI, the state-financed Community Organization Development Institute in Thailand. Co-production is defined here as “a process that opens space for poor communities to work with their local governments and other public and private stakeholders to deliver various development goods” (page 444). But what is clear in CODI’s work is that this process needs to be demand-driven – that is, catalysed by community objectives and effort. CODI considers a co-production project to be viable only if communities “determine what they need, lead the development process, and set the direction and nature of CODI’s support” (page 445). The state, in this context, moves from being a provider to a facilitator, albeit one that engages alongside organized communities to find effective alternatives to evictions and support settlement upgrading.
This is not simply an issue of who controls the process, but also of the stage(s) in the process when co-production occurs. Moretto and co-authors distinguish between co-production and co-management/co-learning. They point, like Boonyabancha and Kerr, to the fact that involvement at the planning stages of a process is quite different from involvement in the management of a service already planned prior to resident involvement. This raises the issue of whether co-production should refer only to those processes that give citizens some control and ownership over the direction that is taken in all components, including design, planning, management, implementation, finance and learning.
Lautaro Ojeda, Gonzalo Bacigalupe and Andrea Pino describe a co-production process that many would hesitate to categorize that way. The process involved the construction of replacement housing in the aftermath of a devastating forest fire in Valparaíso, Chile, which destroyed dwellings in a number of informal settlements. This process did not by any means entail a genuinely co-productive process for all of its eight stages, many of which were top-down. Beneficiaries of the process reportedly took the lead in a design workshop, where they put together 3D models of the houses they hoped to build. However, the design process was defined by the plastic parts they were supplied with, and, more importantly, participants were unfamiliar with the building regulations that determined whether or not the municipality would allow them to proceed with their plans. This was just one among the many hitches in the process, which beneficiaries found frustrating in various ways. Co-production opportunities here were structured such that some choices remained entirely under state control. The authors make the point, however, that this was a far more responsive process than an earlier reconstruction after a more extensive fire three years earlier. From the authors’ perspective, the project created a starting point from which the theoretical commitment to more co-productive governance could be challenged to evolve and improve.
The paper by Bingqin Li, Bo Hu, Tao Liu and Lijie Fang (which will appear in the April 2019 issue of Environment and Urbanization) also explores a top-down version of co-production with a pre-defined and limited role for communities, although on a considerably larger scale. In China, in response to a 2010 policy shift, a widespread co-production effort has been initiated, geared towards “more responsive service provision, infrastructure improvement, and community building through state-enabled decision-making, self-organization and self-service delivery on the part of communities”. Within urban areas, this top-down initiative has the overarching goal of relieving the pressures on the state imposed by an influx of rural migrants and rapid urban growth. The authors look at communities in four cities to explore the success of the model. Although local officials have limited enthusiasm and community members may be hesitant about their contributions, Li et al. suggest that, as in Chile, the provision in question has become more participatory than it used to be. They further suggest that it may “inspire and ignite” more genuine co-production.
The complexities go beyond the stages at which communities are involved. Also critical for the purpose of urban transformation is the level at which the co-production project or activity is attempted. There is a significant difference in communities being involved in a specific local project and being included in the planning of the city or in citywide service delivery. (We return to this in Section IV, which explores scale.) Beth Chitekwe-Biti describes a process that was community-driven and -informed in many ways, but where the municipality retained control in a critical regard. She discusses the co-productive relations between the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia (SDFN) and the City of Windhoek in their efforts to ensure that low-income rural migrants find a home in the city. The Federation of low-income communities was successful in negotiating for improved shelter solutions through changes in regulations and City programmes, but was not included in the larger spatial planning process. Ultimately it failed to move the City towards a genuinely inclusive model for urban development.
Matthew French, Abdul Popal, Habib Rahimi, Srinivasa Popuri and Jan Turkstra (whose paper will appear in the April 2019 issue of Environment and Urbanization) raise further questions about the boundaries of co-production in their discussion of participatory upgrading of informal settlements in post-conflict urban Afghanistan. The participatory processes introduced by UN bodies draw residents in to partner with national and local government. Development needs are so acute that – given a low level of local government resources – significant financial contributions from residents are also required. The emphasis on the upgrading of informal settlements, home to an estimated 78 per cent of the population in the provincial capitals, strengthens the imperative for effective community engagement. And the introduction of community contractors further strengthens the relationship between state and residents. As French and co-authors note, there is a difference between meaningful engagement and simply using community networks and processes to “get things done”. However, it is also true that not all participation is co-production.
Beyond the matter of what is being co-produced, and who drives the process, there is the issue of “for whom”. Is it co-production when it intensifies inequities for some? There are numerous references to the differential ability of particular groups to participate in specific projects. Ojeda, Bacigalupe and Pino, for instance, highlight that tenants and those without a land claim were required to relocate after the Valparaíso fires, while those with landownership could access resources to rebuild homes in situ. Only the latter process involves co-production. Moretto and co-authors, with reference to Kinshasa’s co-produced water and sanitation solution, note also that only plot owners are represented, while tenants and sub-tenants, a substantial proportion of the households, have no role in decision-making.
Moretto et al. take a novel stance on the issue of “for whom”, claiming that co-production is not by definition “ontologically beneficial” to all end users. These authors argue that, while co-production is an opportunity to deepen citizenship for those immediately involved, “it may have contradictory effects on the relationship between individuals and the society at large” (page 439). They offer the example of Hanoi, where exclusive, high-income “New Urban Areas” have self-contained water treatment plants. No responsibility is taken for the wastewater discharged outside their boundaries, and it often floods neighbouring villages. This example is an outlier in various ways, given not only the elite status of the residents, but also the fact that these joint ventures between state and market developers lie outside what is generally defined as co-production. However, in this case, while the management boards of these housing developments are controlled by the developer/investor, citizens are organized through the Communist Party at the level of residential apartment blocks, and in some cases are self-organized into cooperatives that have taken over the management of their infrastructure. It is complex to define terms related to state–citizen cooperation in a context where more fundamental changes in the alignment of state, market and citizen roles are ongoing.
Unlike the other authors, Diana Mitlin does not attempt to position or define co-production. She discusses the observed strategies of urban social movements, and argues that movements change strategies to advance their needs and interests. Co-production or collaboration with the state, in her view, is just one possible strategy that needs to be understood within a comprehensive analysis of all the possibilities. Rather than commenting on the relative benefits of the co-production, she argues that movements advance when they strategically deploy three approaches: engagement, contention and subversion. Engagement is more typically associated with co-production, but contention and subversion, often used in tandem with engagement, can also create space for action.
III. The Material, Spatial and Environmental Aspects of Co-Production
Although these papers focus primarily on the relationships and ongoing practices implied by these examples of co-production, there is, of course, still a material aspect to most of these processes. This also deserves consideration, especially because the material solutions often contribute to the changing practices and relationships that are of greater interest here. These relationships, as Shand puts it, are constructed through and within the material projects of co-production.
Chitekwe-Biti, for instance, in her paper on Windhoek and the work of the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia (SDFN), highlights the significance of what is co-produced to the relationships that emerge and what those relationships are able to achieve. The City of Windhoek faced a significant challenge – serious deficits in housing and service provision in the context of independence, political transformation and rapid in-migration. These deficits needed to be addressed, but with full cost recovery. The emerging self-help shelter solutions of Federation members helped push the City towards “a more permissive paradigm”, but also demonstrated to the authorities the capacity of organized residents in achieving this goal. Lines and Makau demonstrate that in Nairobi, similarly, co-production emerged from efforts to protect informal settlements and the realization on the part of the authorities that alternatives to eviction could be found and developed.
Li and co-authors make the same point, but for a different side of the partnership. They argue that the satisfaction of material needs can push community members to take a more collaborative stance and engage city authorities. When migrants to urban neighbourhoods who are marginalized and disengaged receive the services and amenities they need, it encourages them to feel more like citizens, to establish relationships with others within their neighbourhoods, and even to contribute more willingly to efforts to improve the lives of others. Having material needs met, in this Chinese case, can be an incentive to engage for more reasons than simply the material outcome.
Moretto and co-authors discuss the use of affordable and local technologies by unserved communities (what Joshi and Moore referred to as “(smart) adaptations to prevailing local circumstances”(11)) and demonstrate the potential of co-production to contest and provide alternatives to established systems and norms, whether physical, social or institutional. This hearkens back to Mitlin’s discussion of contestation and subversion as strategies that can advance the objectives of a social movement. Mitlin points, for instance, to the Federations’ use of “precedents” – innovative solutions to material problems that may subvert bureaucratic norms, but that, when demonstrated to the authorities for their practical value, become a constructive focus for negotiation and engagement. The material solution emerging from co-production, as in Windhoek, becomes a way to challenge existing norms and negotiate for better interventions.
Related to the material aspect is the concept of spatiality, which some of these authors introduce as integral to the co-production equation. Shand, for instance, points out that the institutionalized and unequal relationships that form the primary barrier to inclusion are “exercised through bureaucratic procedures that govern access to services, identity and use of space” (page 520). (He also discusses, by extension, the creation of metaphorical spaces for political action, where communities can organize, negotiate and challenge the status quo. This aspect will be discussed further in Section VI on power.)
Chitikwe-Biti’s investigation identifies, among other things, the way the relationship between SDFN and local authorities has influenced the spatial form of the city – or more accurately, how it has failed to influence this spatial form. Although the City’s policy framework became more progressive and permissive as a result of the Federation’s efforts, and while the housing options open to low-income households improved, the locations where families could settle were predetermined by the City’s pre-existing zoning preferences as specified within the spatial plan. Only settlements developed to the northwest of the very overcrowded black township of Katatura were eligible for upgrading. Although there were practical reasons for expanding the city along this transport corridor, the net effect was that spatial divisions established during the apartheid era remained substantially intact, and the city remained racially and economically divided.
Moretto and co-authors consider how inequalities are expressed through spatial configurations in the provision of water and sanitation services, which fragment the city into served and unserved areas and affect power relations at a local scale. The four cases of water and sanitation service co-production they consider include various combinations of networked and non-networked solutions. While progress in provision has more generally been considered in terms of the expansion of networked systems, the solutions explored by Moretto et al. involve the hybridization of service solutions and the development of an “archipelago” of self-sufficient local alternative technologies through which citizens fill the gaps in the official networked solutions. These are not just alternative options – they may at some point become integrated into the larger network and are hence as much a stage in the evolution of networked solutions as an alternative to them. These authors also point to changes in the relationship between citizens and their spatial environment in the course of these experiments. They see the co-productive process as having “an element of spatial reconnection, mostly operated directly by people with the different water redistribution and buying/selling practices instead of through purely physical networks” (page 440). These socio-spatial relationships echo the concept of “people as infrastructure”.(12)
Li et al.’s paper raises another spatial issue – that involving the relationships in urban neighbourhoods between long-time residents and newcomers from rural areas. Their new spatial proximity generates tensions that are often expressed in disengagement and hostility. Migrants are also ignorant of many of the rules, formal or informal, that govern community living and public safety. A major incentive for this Chinese “co-production” is to turn communities of strangers into “friendly communities” through measures to raise awareness, meet unaddressed needs and bring people together in public space. Where Shand’s local partners need spaces for political action, Li et al.’s need spaces and events where deep-seated differences can be overcome.
Related to the spatial and material concerns are the environmental and resource considerations. The paper by Moretto and co-authors is the only one that gives explicit attention to these concerns. They point out that all four of their cases of water and sanitation co-production ”fail to address the closed-loop nature of the water service cycle, due to poor or even absent wastewater treatment” (page 435). The co-produced solutions they discuss have promoted stewardship but also intensified use of a scarce resource.
The paper by Ojeda and co-authors implicitly tackles environmental concerns. Many of the authorities’ choices and decisions have to do with the conundrum of protecting the rights of local informal settlers, while at the same time taking into account the precarious nature of the steep ravines where they live and want to continue living. The bureaucratic regulations that frustrate the rebuilders are presumably also measures that may protect these areas and their vulnerable inhabitants. The authors make it clear, however, that involving these people more fully and with greater awareness could only help the situation. As Moretto and co-authors remind us, “the kinds of relationships established among the actors in governing the resource have an impact on the ways resources are processed and the ecological system is maintained” (page 428). Boonyabancha and Kerr also hint at the greater inclusion of environmental considerations when they discuss the expansion of CODI to rural communities, where the work includes awareness of and potentially concentration on natural resources and the need, for example, to manage watersheds.
IV. The Significance of Scale
Given its significance, relatively little attention has been given to the scale of co-production and the way this can change relational possibilities. But the significance of such a scalar analysis emerges clearly from the papers here. “Scale” in this context relates to the extent of the co-production across the city, but also to the level and depth of the engagement. It relates, in other words, not only to the difference between one water kiosk and a water provision system that reaches everyone, but also to the complexity of the arrangements that underpin the capacity to reach everyone. Moving towards universal access at the lowest level (the water kiosks) appears to be helped by co-productive approaches. But it is limited. Organized communities need to be engaged at higher levels to work with the utility on a range of support choices. This requires all those involved to build their capabilities to work together. But as we see from both Adams and Boateng and Chitekwe-Biti, in the urban context it requires an integrated approach. The utility’s water supply depends on choices made about watershed management. The quality of housing locations in Windhoek depends in part on the master plan.
Adams and Boateng point to the limitations that emerge from a level of engagement that is not deep enough to resolve the major issues related to the demand and supply of urban services. As they explain (page 476), with reference to water user associations (WUAs) in Lilongwe, Malawi, “Community WUAs have the will to address deep-seated problems with water infrastructure, but this is not an easy fix. They inevitably have to deal with factors beyond their capacity and issues within the jurisdiction of the water utilities they work with – including limited or spotty electricity to pump-treated water, and unplanned urban and peri-urban settlements, which pose a formidable challenge to pipe-system extension. Even if WUAs were willing to improve infrastructure, a bureaucratic partnership arrangement constrains their decision-making autonomy. In the long term, these community-based piped systems will not improve water service delivery without sufficient backstopping to local communities and sufficient coordination within the CPP [community–public partnership].”
The utility is open to engaging communities through their WUAs in the retailing of water. But delivery depends in part of the availability of water, which has not increased in recent years, and there does not appear to be any role for community engagement in resolving these system-wide issues. Adams and Boateng quote Ostrom and Bakker(13) to suggest the inherent limitations in community engagement, but it is not clear if the potential of communities has been fully explored here.
Chitekwe-Biti’s analysis of Windhoek and the work of the Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia (SDFN) also highlights the significance of the level of engagement to what can be co-produced. SDFN demonstrated its capacity to help solve the housing conundrum facing the City of Windhoek (as described in the previous section). But while the government was co-producing housing with the communities, supported by central government funds, the strategic plan for Windhoek was neither co-produced nor pro-poor. As the community began to undertake larger-scale mapping of informal settlements in Windhoek, this tension became more evident. Without an expansion of the co-production to include SDFN’s involvement in the strategic plan for Windhoek, it is hard to see how an equitable city can be secured.
In Kenya, by contrast, Lines and Makau explain that Muungano wa Wanavijiji has been able to grow significantly in scale with the increasing complexity of its co-production. The Federation and its professional support agencies (together sometimes called “the Alliance”) have shifted from individual interventions to now working with Nairobi County in upgrading in Mukuru with over 100,000 households, and with a recognition of the need to integrate the informal settlement into the city. Early on, the Alliance’s role was seen as the development and promotion of “strong-enough” process models that the state would feel drawn to replicate. Over time they realized “that no upgrading model or plan, just by existing, will change the urban landscape” (page 421). Rather than co-producing models designed for scaling up through state replication, they recognize that their process co-produces the relationships that enable the grassroots organization to be central to upgrading. A critical component is the fact that community groups are networked, and hence able to function as a co-production partners at the scale of the city. Demonstrated success has led to a deepening of the partnership.
The potential and constraints represented by a scalar understanding of co-production also emerge from Shand’s analysis of the engagement of the Zimbabwe Federation with the City of Harare. For the City, the primary focus has been on the Dzivaresekwa Extension settlement, where informal residents are supported to upgrade their neighbourhood first with wells, eco-sanitation and shacks, and then over time, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with piped water, waterborne sanitation and brick homes. However, for the Federation, the programme of collaboration is not just about creating an exemplar neighbourhood – their objective is to go to city scale. So alongside their neighbourhood activities, they have established a city fund, catalysed by their own savings contributions and funds from SDI (the transnational network to which the Zimbabwe Federation and its support NGO Dialogue on Shelter belong), and enhanced by a City contribution. Also important have been activities to reform regulations and reach out to vulnerable communities across the City. The Federation and Dialogue completed a city mapping, profiling more than 85 per cent of informal settlements, some years previously.(14)
Aiming to go from individual interventions to the citywide scale, or larger, forces a recognition that, however innovative and effective community groups may be, they need that deep engagement with the state to achieve more far-reaching change. This comes through clearly in the paper by Boonyabancha and Kerr, who explain (page 449): “Another principle embedded in CODI’s work is connecting all the good progress and scattered projects on the ground into something greater than the sum of its parts: a more comprehensive and more structural change.” This is not just a matter of connecting scattered projects. Rather there is the recognition that, while community networks can function at a considerable scale, supporting each other and connecting their efforts, there are limits to what they can achieve (particularly in a formalized context such as Thailand) if they do not actively collaborate with city governments to plan and implement improvements. CODI’s experience over the years points to the inherent limitations of projects undertaken without being integrated into robust citywide programmes of activity and support.
A deepening of the level at which co-production takes place appears a necessary condition to achieving scale – or at least achieving a scale that can address the complexities of citizen needs. The deepening appears, at the same time, to be critical to the empowerment of disempowered populations, enabling them to be engaged with substantive governance choices and not relegated to simply a role in service delivery. Involvement at the local level engages communities and other stakeholders in local-level actions. However, co-production at this local scale takes place in a constrained context where broader issues of redistribution and regulatory reform are excluded by design. Drawing on the discussions in this issue of Environment and Urbanization, we understand that achieving the empowerment necessary to go to the next level may require a further dimension: there is an emerging recognition of the importance of ideas and knowledge. We return to the discussion of co-production and power after the following section.
V. Co-Producing Ideas and Knowledge
The primary emphasis in this set of papers is on the co-production of material interventions, whether through design, planning, management, implementation, financing, or monitoring and evaluation.(15) But there is also a consideration in many of the papers here of the co-production of knowledge and ideas. One paper, by Simon and co-authors, focuses exclusively on this aspect. Others consider knowledge co-production as part of the more general process of co-production. Of interest too is the flip side of the co-production of knowledge – the way knowledge (and the capacity that accompanies it) contributes to the development of co-production. Interest in the co-production of knowledge generally draws on longstanding traditions of collaboration between academics and practitioners. This has been strengthened in recent years by greater recognition of the value of academics having “impact”, together with a recognition that this is facilitated by stakeholder involvement early in the research process.
Simon et al.’s paper considers the Mistra Urban Futures (MUF) research centre and associated research platforms in Sweden, the UK, South Africa and Kenya, which conduct research involving the collaboration of academics and practitioner researchers from different disciplines and backgrounds. The emphasis on “inclusiveness and iterative, deliberative negotiation as the mechanism for building shared understandings as a precondition for making progress jointly” (page 482) is a departure from more conventional expert-led research. The focus of research has moved from specific countries to a comparison across the platforms, with the objective of analysing how themes of social justice and urban sustainability are operationalized in these different settings and open up a better understanding of possibilities for change. It is still early days on this front, and 12 projects are underway. But the learning is already accumulating on how to address the concerns of diverse participants, and how to disseminate findings to maximize their impact.
The co-production of knowledge challenges the idea of research on disadvantaged and marginalized groups, demanding the recognition of research processes with organized citizens. Such processes also open the potential of radical change. Social movement leaders and other activists blend knowledge creation with social action because of their political engagement. In terms of interventions, social movements argue that there should be “nothing for us without us”. In terms of knowledge related to social inclusion, poverty reduction and marginalization, activists might argue for “nothing about us without us”.
Deanna Ayson, discussing the co-production of knowledge between organized communities and local government, presents an alternative to the co-production of knowledge centred on academics working in collaboration with others. She explains how Philippine community groups, organized by the Philippine Homeless People’s Federation, in Muntinlupa City undertook the mapping of their informal settlements so they could “use the information generated to negotiate with the government and other stakeholders” (page 512). For these groups, mapping became a participatory process of increasing significance, as they secured the commitment of both the barangay (ward-level) and the city government. They also use this information to work out their own solutions to the problems they face. The challenge for the Federation is to resist letting professionals and students lead the process. However, Ayson argues, the local government does need to be involved so that it owns the mapping results and resources the process. This collaborative mapping strengthens the community and helps to build the relations that open up new opportunities for informal settlement upgrading.
It is not all about creating knowledge or information. The way authorities share – or fail to share – information also affects the quality of relationships and the level of control that can be experienced by community members. Ojeda et al., again, describe the municipality’s failure to share regulatory constraints with post-disaster beneficiaries before they designed their houses. This led to frustration and tension, as well as undermining both the efficiency of the reconstruction process and the evolving relationship among would-be partners.
Possession of this kind of information can be critical to full citizenship. Castán Broto and Neves Alves emphasize how the debate has shifted from co-production of service delivery to co-production processes as “alternative ways of knowing the city”, with “the participation of citizens at the intersection between knowledge production and policy formulation” (page 370). Chitekwe-Biti also stresses the degree to which power differentials are anchored in knowledge and information. “With information”, she writes, “comes power, and without information the options of the poor are limited and their strategies are shaped by what they know” (page 405).
VI. Co-Production and Power
Adams and Boateng, as noted above, describe co-production as enhancing synergies between communities and service providers, and building community social capital. But are these ends in themselves? What is the reason, ultimately, for enhancing those synergies, and building that social capital? Most of these authors would surely agree that the purpose is to address power differentials and to create the space for the marginalized, impoverished and excluded to take their seats at the table. This is not something that can be done by fiat. Boonyabancha and Kerr note, “The shift in power and the change in relationships and structures that comes with empowerment – and which constitutes real development – is something that can only be done by people themselves” (page 460).
Many of these papers remind us that people are the infrastructure, are the changed process that underpin a shift to more equitable development. The potential offered by co-production appears to lie both in having enhanced relationships and the capability to manage and deepen these relationships. Mosse’s argument that poverty is caused by adverse relationships that emerge from political and economic structures is helpful here.(16) If this is the case, and if the associated representations further disadvantage low-income households and encourage compliance with such inequities, then the significance of co-production becomes clearer. Co-production enables community organizations to develop new relationships, enhance their existing relationships, and legitimate their own role to a wider set of stakeholders. We understand co-production as both a process of material improvement and a process within which knowledge, capacity and relationships are built. But it is also very much a process through which the agendas of social movements are advanced – and sometimes the means through which these social movements take shape and are constituted. The materiality of co-production offers opportunities for movements to understand how their members’ needs and interests are best addressed, and the practices of co-production enhance the relationships and processes that help take those interventions to scale.
Underlying the recognition of the efficacy of co-production is an acknowledgement that state and non-state actors depend on each other. If the idea of co-production emerged from observed practices, then co-production has grown because it has been recognized as effective in delivering both goods and services and a desired relational change. After acknowledging the interdependency, the next step requires the more powerful members of the relationship to negotiate with the less powerful to agree on the way forward. Chitekwe-Biti, Ayson, and Simon et al. all explain how this happened in, respectively, Windhoek, Muntinlupa City, and the Mistra Urban Futures research network.
Efficacy and interdependency are endogenous to these examples, emerging from new understandings of the parties within the arrangement. However, the enhanced public legitimacy that organized communities and other civil society actors derive from their demonstrated involvement also builds their confidence and strengthens positive social identities. The demonization of low-income residents and those who live or work informally has long been recognized. These representations make it easier to marginalize and exclude these communities. Positive engagement, arising from co-production, provides opportunities to challenge these views and raise the social status of such groups. However, as argued by Mitlin, this is only one of several options open to movements that arguably advance their interests most effectively by using co-production strategically.
As discussed in Section IV on scale, there are limitations to empowerment. Chitekwe-Biti’s analysis, for example, highlights the fact that, while organized groups of citizens could negotiate on the development of land and support households to upgrade their shelter, they were not brought into discussions on how to make the city more inclusive and equitable. Local authorities retained this power. Scale, in the sense of a deeper engagement, is critical to the transformative potential of co-production. Adams and Boateng also argue that the improvement of collectively provided services can go only so far. There are significant limits to community autonomy, not only in the limitations of the larger water system, but in the power of the utility to define the extent of their involvement. Retail prices, for example, are set by the utility.
It is evident that processes of empowerment and the rebalancing of power are not easy. Shand returns to some of the earlier associations made by research on co-production with a description of the problems faced by low-income communities in Zimbabwe. Here, state-led development and a highly professionalized understanding of urban development have left little room for grassroots initiatives, specifically for incremental (and more affordable) upgrading processes. While recognizing that co-production might involve the “disciplining” of organized communities through Foucauldian-style governmentality, Shand argues that the ability of movements to engage with formality has been effective in advancing their cause. Essential to this engagement, he notes, is “the ability of local partners to forge spaces for dialogue, negotiation and joint action” (page 520). In this Zimbabwean case, the memorandum of understanding provides such a space. The MOU is powerful not simply because it provides a formal reference point to support the cause of low-income households and their organizations, but also because it gives legitimacy to the movement. This legitimacy enables the movement to build relations with other parts of the City of Harare, finding new openings through which it can advance needs and interests.
Castán Broto and Neves Alves argue that provision needs to be flexible if it is to cater for the diversity of needs, and in their discussion of intersectionality they highlight the potential of co-production to be disempowering. There are multiple risks, but two are particularly acute. First, a local elite may capture the benefits. Second, additional responsibilities may be passed to groups that are already vulnerable because their needs are not “normalized within existing processes of urban management” (page 374). However, citizen engagement in co-production may itself open the possibility for multiple identities to emerge. These authors highlight the significance of both micro-level processes and their influence on processes of co-production, and the dynamic nature of debates about intersectionality and co-production.
In summary, the papers here emphasize that co-production continues, for the most part, to be a diverse set of interventions. While some co-production initiatives aim to provide state services more efficiently, drawing on the capabilities of local communities, others have emerged from organized social movements determined to advance their needs and interests more generally. There is a broad continuum from state-initiated to community-initiated co-production. There are both points of consensus and dissensus. It is widely recognized that, while being inclusive of more groups of citizens, co-production is rarely inclusive of all. Questions of discrimination and exclusion remain, with our attention being drawn to particularly vulnerable populations.
The potential of co-production to secure the radical changes needed for transformation remains a point of tension between these contributions. Can co-production catalyse equitable, inclusive urban development? These papers suggest that progress is possible but not guaranteed. Co-production appears to be essential to social transformation, a necessary even if not a sufficient condition. Will organized communities challenge inequities and build the required political momentum, or will they buy into solutions that simply improve their own social mobility without transformative change?