The effectiveness of the public services co-production process – results of a systematic literature review

Abstract

Nowadays co-production is seen as a valuable route to public service reform and to the planning and delivery of effective public services, which is gaining increasing attention. Despite this our understanding of co-production is limited and we still have a lot to learn about how and why coproduction works (and does not). Therefore there is a need to improve knowledge and ability to use co-production successfully. One of the unclear issues are the conditions under which co-production will most likely be effective and how important is trust in this context. This research gap was accepted as a research problem in the article. The main goal was to find answers to two research questions. First, what factors influence the effectiveness of the coproduction of public services process? Second, what is the place and role of trust among the factors conditioning the effectiveness of the co-production process? The research was carried out using the systematic literature review and then the word cloud technique as a visualization of word frequency in a given text. As a result of the study, six key conditions for the effectiveness of the service co-production process were identified. One of them is trust, which also affects other factors, however, this is not the most important condition of effectiveness among those indicated in the literature.