Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive of over 1,500 titles.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
This chapter offers new perspectives on front-line managers and workers as potential social innovators, detailing how co-creation transforms their identities, roles and relationships drawing on the emerging activities in a pilot conducted in a social care context in Sweden working with people with complex needs. The chapter illustrates how in different national contexts achieving readiness for co-creation, rather than building structures, requires new approaches to governing the collaborations across professional and organisational boundaries and managing cultural change. The chapter also highlights how service professionals and first-line managers work with reconceptualising their roles and relationships in welfare services to achieve greater social justice for the targeted individuals. It argues how co-creating meaningful service value may take much more in terms of efforts and time than pure organisational, administrative or technical changes which are rather seen as the outcomes of an (ongoing) shift in the approaches and mindsets about service delivery and management.
This chapter focuses on one of the key challenges of co-creation policy and practice which has been that vulnerable people have traditionally been seen through problem-based lenses and have been excluded from co-creation possibilities because they have been framed as ‘hard to reach’.
As the focus has shifted more to strengths and assets, the opportunity of digital tools and technologies has created new spaces to engage in young people’s social worlds. This chapter reports from the pilot conducted in Finland, ‘Youth Co-empowerment’, which targeted to young people not in employment, education or training (so-called NEETs) using social media tools and social hackathon methods. The rationale behind the pilot was the importance to gain understanding about their situations and challenges, as well as to pilot new ways to involve them in society. The chapter shows how young people are willing and able to participate and innovate public services shaping them to be more suitable for their needs.
Following the conceptual exposition of co-creation in the previous section this chapter highlights its advance in public policy and emphasises the association of co-creation with social innovation and how this is put into practice. Social innovation is specifically about human needs and there is an emerging consensus that core features include forging new relationships and enhancing assets and capabilities. The next two sections of the chapter comprise policy-focused discussion of co-creation and social innovation. Then we introduce examples from the pilots of co-creative innovations in different public services in three countries, Estonia (social care), Hungary (improving household economies) and Spain (business start-up support for citizens adrift from the world of work). Across these examples we note common themes under which co-creation and social innovation intersect: shifting the balance of control; innovations in governing; roles of professionals; and extended or adapted the usage of digital technologies.
Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
This book examines the idea and practice of co-creation in public services. Informed by practical action, lived experience and research from 10 countries across Europe, including the UK, it shines new light on the theory and reality of co-creation by conceptualising it in terms of human rights, social justice and social innovation.
Focusing on human dimensions, the book presents real life examples in public services as diverse as social care, health, work activation, housing and criminal justice. It also highlights the ways digital technologies can accelerate or hinder co-creation.
The book confronts a paradox at the heart of co-creation: standardisation and inflexibility in planning and resourcing, or ‘concrete-ness’, counters the ‘elasticity’ required to sustain co-creation in complex contexts.
This chapter focus is the conditions of inclusion and participation in the initial phases of the co-creative process in the context of the Italian CoSIE pilot on childhood obesity. It investigates whether and how these conditions contribute to producing – besides efficiency and effectiveness – social justice in co-creation.
It argues that scholars and practitioners need to address the issue of social justice in co-creation much earlier in the process. While much research focuses on the co-production of the service, we emphasise the necessity to organise and manage the inclusion and participation of stakeholders – including but not only the beneficiaries – from outset in the processes of co-governance and co-management. It concludes that the quality of social justice is achieved by the whole process of co-creation and relies on the criteria of inclusion used to constitute the collective responsibility of the project and the way in which each stakeholder actually exercises their capabilities by participating in the process.
This concluding chapter summarises the book’s central premise, drawing from conceptual and empirical contributions of our collective experiences and reflection of enacting social innovation through co-creation. Throughout the volume we have explored thinking and practices around co-creation. We have emphasised in particular the turn towards relational ways of thinking in the framing of individuals and communities as having their own goals, capacities and mechanisms of change.
This needs to be brought together in various combinations to form the sorts of mutuality envisaged by proponents of co-creation and co-production in policy and practice. In this final chapter we now turn to considering the transition needed from the current focus on pilot projects and interventions or experiments in co-creation, which almost always begin with a plan and end in what is an apparently concrete and impactful solution. The problem with these short-term investments, as many have come to realise, is that although we learn from them, we can rarely sustain or scale beyond the original resourcing. Therefore, we conclude that there is a need to cultivate a relational approach for social justice and present a model that combines context-specific structures with reusable infrastructures able to support and sustain successive initiatives.
This chapter explores the extent to which digital storytelling – specifically the Community Reporting methodology – can be used as a tool to connect citizens with services. Focusing on pilot services from the CoSIE project, the chapter examines how Community Reporting has been utilised as tool for co-creation within public services across Europe showing how digital storytelling can be practically applied as a tool for connecting citizens and services.
The pilots examined within this chapter draws from evidence primarily generated in three pilots. First, Spain, where the pilot aimed to create an entrepreneur support service suited to the needs of unemployed people in the region; second, the Netherlands, where the focus was on improving services for unemployed citizens in order to increase citizen participation in the community; finally, the chapter draws from work in Poland, where the focus was the co-housing of seniors and the co-creation activity with stakeholders to improve older people’s lives. Drawing on reflections from the pilots’ actors, the chapter demonstrates the opportunities and challenges of working with stories as a means to develop services in a way that draws upon the existing assets of the people and communities that the services support.
This chapter reports and reflects on one of the key challenges of co-creation policy and practice, which has been that of largely unfulfilled promises with regard to the adoption of digital technologies and co-creation in the context of criminal justice.
The aim of the pilot in the UK was to help people on probation become more active participants in their own rehabilitation, build on their strengths and thus embed elements of co-creation in probation. The pilot partner was one of the private sector Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) then contracted to deliver probation services in England for people deemed ‘low to medium risk’. in the north of England. The chapter uses the empirical focus of co-creation extended to a domain where it appears extremely challenging – criminal justice – to evaluate an attempt to use digital technologies to an asset-based approach with sector and population who have been excluded from co-creation.
This chapter summarises the evidence base for the impact of co-creation and related aspects of social policy such as asset-based working and personalisation. The evidence base for the impact and outcomes of co-creation is surprisingly weak. After many years of research and evaluation there is a dearth of robust, widely accepted evidence. The reasons are various. They include the interconnectedness and complexity of services, making it difficult to specify and agree measurable outcomes to evaluate. Another related factor is that objectives of co-creation may not be clearly formulated. There are also different views of what counts as convincing evidence. The relational dimension of services tends to favour context specific, experiential forms of evidence which perfectly fit co-creation as understood by many practitioners/advocates to meet demands of governments/public agencies for measures and outcome indicators.
The chapter follows an overview of the evaluations undertaken in CoSIE. University based partners in each participating country evaluated the pilots, working with local partners who were locally responsive and flexible while following broad guidelines/common reporting elements. There were varied assumptions about what counts as good information and reliable evidence. Inspired by learning from the CoSIE project, we proffer a new strategy for evaluation of co-creative interventions in future.
This chapter sets out the premise of the book, which describes the current landscape of co-creation in the context of public services and refers to citizens’ contribution to implementing and shaping the services that affect them. We set out to show how co-creation is grounded in practical service dilemmas and lived experience, from a diverse range of settings and policy domains across Europe. Despite the notable achievements of many initiatives, we recognise that pilots, experiments, demonstrators and the like rarely appear to sustain or expand their promised outcomes. Because of this we have come to characterise this as the ‘sandcastles’ approach – washed away by the next tide or kicked over by an incoming political administration, leaving little trace of previous efforts.
