Beyond co-production: value creation and public services

This present paper is a conceptual one that responds to this debate. It argues that PAM has traditionally focused on the production of public services, whilst a holistic model must integrate this with their use/consumption. This deficit has begun to be rectified in recent years (e.g. Hodgkinson et al 2017) – with a core debate being about understanding the nature of value creation within public service ecosystems (Petrescu 2019) – and with co-production as part of this larger debate. However, the concept of ‘value’ continues to be under-theorised and poorly understood in PAM – in theory and in practice (Jo & Nabatchi 2016). This paper is a response to this gap. It offers a novel three-dimensional appreciation of value creation and co-production in public services that links their production and use/consumption.