Some Political Costs of Coprovision: The Case of the New Orleans Zoo

The concept of coproduction has often appeared in urban service delivery literature, particularly in papers by economists and political scientists from choice school.' In a recent paper, Ferris (1984) extends coproduction concept by emphasizing what he calls coprovision. Ferris defines coprovision as the voluntary involvement of citizens in provision of publicly provided goods and services or close substitutes.2 Time and money donations are major ways in which citizens voluntarily provide public service. While Ferris paper is a highly useful addition to literature, there are some problems with his conceptualization. For one thing, Ferris sees citizen influence on policy formulation as not relevant to coprovision. Anyone who is familiar with literature on community power, urban renewal, and public-private partnerships is aware that citizen influence on policy formulation can be highly significant, without embodying sort of time and money donations that Ferris has in mind.3 In this paper, we shall examine concept of coprovision in an era of fiscal scarcity. We will conduct this examination through a case study of coprovision by citizen volunteers at New Orleans Zoo. It is