P25 Co-Production in Times of Uncertainty

Panel Chairs

Corresponding chair

• Elke Loeffler, School of Government and Society, Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV), University of Birmingham. e.loeffler@bham.ac.uk

Chairs and Co-Chairs

• Trui Steen, KU Leuven.
• Alessandro Spano, Department of Economics and Business Sciences, University of Cagliari.
• Taco Brandsen, Radboud University.
• Bin Chen, City University of New York.
• Tanja Klenk, Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg.
• André Lino, University of Essex.
• Caitlin McMullin, Roskilde University.
• Greta Nasi, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Università Bocconi.
• Bram Verschuere, Ghent University.
• Shefali Virkar, Institute for Public Management and Governance, Vienna University of Economics and Business.

Description of the Panel Topic

Governments and other organisations in public administration are operating under growing uncertainty, political and social turbulence, and recurrent crises. In such contexts, citizens may lose trust in these institutions and feel they have little influence over them, while public organisations face increasing pressure to respond to complex problems with limited resources. Co-production—the active involvement of citizens, service users, communities and civil-society organizations in the planning, design, delivery and evaluation of public services—offers one way to rebuild ownership, legitimacy and collective capacity. At the same time, digital technologies in general and artificial intelligence (AI) in particular, are transforming how co-production can be organised, scaled and sustained.

This panel examines how co-production can contribute to crisis prevention, resilience and public-service performance in times of uncertainty, and how AI and other digital technologies may enable, reshape, constrain or undermine these processes. We understand co-production broadly, including co-commissioning, co-design, co-delivery and co-assessment, and welcome studies covering different stages of the problem-solving cycle: mapping emerging risks, co-designing preventive strategies, identifying early-stage crises, responding to disturbances, strengthening user, community and organizational resilience, and learning for future adaptation. Crises may be sudden, such as natural disasters, or continuous, such as chronic health conditions, loneliness and social isolation.

We invite theoretical and empirical contributions addressing questions such as (but not limited to):

• Do crises stimulate co-production, and is it sustained once the immediate crisis passes?
• Under what conditions does co-production strengthen service quality, responsiveness, democratic legitimacy, social cohesion and resilience?
• How can co-production be managed effectively during political and social turbulence?
• How do AI, digital platforms, conversational agents, participatory data systems, digital assemblies, living labs and other technologies affect the scale, speed, inclusiveness and quality of participation?
• Can AI reduce participation costs, improve the recruitment and involvement of relevant actors, support deliberation, process large volumes of citizen input and identify emerging needs while preserving meaningful human involvement?
• Can co-production itself improve the legitimacy, safety and quality of public-sector AI through citizen involvement in design, oversight and evaluation?

The panel also welcomes critical perspectives. Digital and AI-enabled participation may reproduce bias, privilege data-rich forms of knowledge, exclude digitally marginalised groups, weaken transparency, increase dependence on private technology providers, deter potential participants who fear surveillance, or turn participation into symbolic consultation or data extraction. These tensions raise questions about power, accountability, professional discretion, privacy, equality, inclusion and public value, as well as the cost-effectiveness of participatory approaches.

We welcome conceptual, qualitative, quantitative, comparative, experimental, mixed-methods, participatory and longitudinal studies across policy sectors, administrative traditions and geographical contexts. Relevant perspectives include co-production and public service logic, new public governance, public value, collaborative governance, resilience, institutional theory, sociotechnical systems, digital inequality, responsible innovation and algorithmic governance.

Relevance to the Conference Theme

Co-production has been a central topic in public management research for the past two decades, reflecting wider efforts to improve public-service responsiveness, legitimacy and social cohesion by engaging citizens’ knowledge, capabilities and resources. Yet important gaps remain concerning whether co-production can be sustained under conditions of crisis, political turbulence and institutional distrust, and whether it can contribute not only to service delivery and treatment but also to prevention, preparedness and resilience.

The panel will also address the rapidly developing intersection between co-production and AI-enabled public administration. AI may strengthen analytical capacity, communication, personalization and participation at scale, while co-production can provide the contextual knowledge, legitimacy and collective capacity needed to address wicked problems and grand challenges. Their interaction, however, creates unresolved challenges concerning inclusion, bias, privacy, accountability, professional discretion, transparency, digital dependency and democratic control, reinforcing the need for human-centered approaches to public-sector AI.

By bringing together research on co-production, crisis prevention and resilience, digital participation and AI, the panel directly engages with core concerns of contemporary public management: how administrations can mobilize distributed knowledge, coordinate diverse actors, prevent avoidable crises and adapt public services under uncertainty. It will foster interdisciplinary and international dialogue and generate both theoretical advances and practical guidance on how to design participatory arrangements that are effective, inclusive, resilient and consistent with public values.