Bridging the great divide: toward a comparative understanding of coproduction

Coproducing Responses to COVID‐19 with Community‐Based Organizations: Lessons from Zhejiang Province, China

“…For scholars who study coproduction and government‐nonprofit relations, the experiences in Zhejiang offer invaluable opportunities to advance our general understanding of coproduction and the role of community‐based organizations in disaster response. Cheng (2020, 4) proposed that one of the key questions for studying coproduction from a comparative perspective is “how should we envision coproduction when the scale of population moves to another order of magnitude in Asian and African countries?” In Zhejiang, digital governance and the implementation of Zhejiang QR health codes provided the information platform to help address the scale problem for coproduction. However, will the digital divide and privacy concerns further complicate the social equity implications of coproduction, especially in localities where citizens are less equipped with digital devices and capacities?…”

From recovery resilience to transformative resilience: How digital platforms reshape public service provision during and post COVID-19

“…However, we still need to recognize the risk that the huge amount of data gathered via these platforms might make it easier for the government to control or monitor citizens, therefore pushing the government back to a control-based model of governance. Or, the availability of these data combined with the distributed decision-making patterns embedded in the digital platforms might push local governments to become more responsive and embrace its role as a platform and the facilitator of multi-stakeholder engagement (Cheng 2020).…”

“…In other words, will digital platforms merely contribute to recovery resilience, or are they capable of building transformative resilience for local communities? By sharply reducing the cost of citizen participation on these digital platforms, will this innovation solve the ultimate question of scale for coproduction and collaborative governance (Ansell and Torfing 2015;Cheng 2020)? This is a unique opportunity to answer these questions as the COVID-19 crisis is likely to be a game changer for public management (Ansell et al 2020).…”

“…2018), most studies focus on the platforms set up by large IT companies such as Google and Facebook. By examining the implementation and evolution of a government-sponsored digital platform, our work contributes to a better understanding of the role of government in a platform society and the coproduction of digital public services (Cheng 2020;Edelmann and Mergel 2021).…”

Defining and Measuring Coproduction: Deriving Lessons from Practicing Local Government Managers

“…To our knowledge, the study offers the first systematic examination of coproduction implementation based on large, representative samples of practicing public managers, here, local government managers of municipalities and counties across the United States. We also develop and validate the scale of coproduction using the latent trait model to aid comparisons of the perceived level of coproduction implementation by government managers across communities, thus responding to the call for measurement equivalence in comparative public administration (Cheng 2020; Jilke, Meuleman, and Van de Walle 2015).…”