Literature on co-production is booming. Yet, most literature is aspirational and methodological in nature, focusing on why coproduction is important for environmental governance and knowledge production and how it should be done, and does not address the question why these processes often fail to achieve stated objectives of empowerment and societal transformation. In this review, we address this gap by reviewing literature on the political and power dimensions of co-production. Our review shows how depoliticization dynamics in co-production reinforce rather than mitigate existing unequal power relations and how they prevent wider societal transformation from taking place. Drawing on literature about participation, deliberative governance, and democracy, the review concludes by emphasizing the importance of (re)politicizing co-production by allowing for pluralism and for the contestation of knowledge.

This article is made publicly available in the institutional repository of Wageningen University and Research, under the terms of article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, also known as the Amendment Taverne. This has been done with explicit consent by the author.Article 25fa states that the author of a short scientific work funded either wholly or partially by Dutch public funds is entitled to make that work publicly available for no consideration following a reasonable period of time after the work was first published, provided that clear reference is made to the source of the first publication of the work.This publication is distributed under The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) 'Article 25fa implementation' project. In this project research outputs of researchers employed by Dutch Universities that comply with the legal requirements of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act are distributed online and free of cost or other barriers in institutional repositories. Research outputs are distributed six months after their first online publication in the original published version and with proper attribution to the source of the original publication.

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