Co-creation and the boundaries of democracy: institutional tensions in the Nordic welfare municipality

This article critically examines the optimistic assumptions common in co-creation and collaborative innovation literature, widely promoted in public sector reforms. We contribute with an empirical analysis of co-creation experiments in Norwegian municipalities, and show that municipal actors often resist or reinterpret co-creation when it challenges established democratic structures. Our findings reveal a mismatch between theory and practice: co-creation theory underestimates the role of political dynamics, overstates the alignment of actors, and lacks sensitivity to the embedded institutional contexts. We conclude that without addressing these tensions, co-creation remains a normative ideal disconnected from how public organizations function.