ABSTRACT
All over the world new initiatives emerge in which citizens play an active role in public service delivery processes. Sometimes governments create opportunities for citizens to take up responsibilities; in other instances, citizens themselves request a more active role. But regardless of who the initiator is, for public service employees it means they collaborate with these citizens: the so-called “co-producers”. As a result, they need to share tasks, power, and responsibilities. In this chapter, we focus on the co-production of public services: the process in which citizens and public employees collaborate to, among other things, secure the quality and continuity of public services (Ewert and Evers, 2012; Brandsen, Pestoff and Verschuere, 2012; Brandsen and Honingh, 2016).
