Inside co‐production: Ruling, resistance, and practice

It might be argued that a narrative of co-production has come to re-define contemporary social and public policy. Elinor Ostrom’s pioneering work on co-production, that started in the 1970s and was awards the Nobel prize for economics in 2009, offers a way to bridge the gap between the market and the state through involving citizens in the production of common goods (Ostrom et al. 1978; Ostrom 2015). This ‘disarmingly simple’ idea (Alford 2014) is now engrained within contemporary policy-making and public service delivery (Ansell and Gash 2008), symbolising a more humane and inclusive alternative to New Pubic Management (Newman 2005) and cornerstone to New Public Governance (Osborne et al. 2016).