Institutionalising co-creation? Challenges and opportunities

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Submitted by Anna Paola QUAGLIA on

Institutionalising co-creation? Challenges and opportunities

Carrying out citizen engagement is not just a matter of taking the decision to do it. Public administrations face difficulties in changing their focus towards more inclusive, collaborative and participatory decision-making. Moreover, such processes not only need to be initiated, but also maintained overtime. Enabling conditions for meaningful citizen engagement have to mature through practice. BiodiverCities offers valuable lessons learnt on challenges as well as solutions.

On February 16, 2023, from 12 to 13:30 CET, the Competence Centre on Participatory and Deliberative Democracy organized an online lunch seminar to present the results of the research work conducted by researchers Ann Karin Tennås Holmen (University of Stavanger) and Helena Junyer Puig (University of Utrecht).

The research projects investigated the institutional challenges to co-creation encountered by local partners, whether local municipalities or non-governmental actors, from the ten European cities involved in the BiodiverCities project. Mauricio Mejia (OECD) as well as Franca Marsh (Palma Nana, Palermo) and José Ferreira (Municipality of Valongo, Portugal), representing two of the participating cities, joined the discussion. You can see the agenda of the event here.

Few takeaways and reflections from the seminar:

  1. Doing citizen engagement is not just a matter of taking the decision to do it. Public administrations face difficulties in changing their focus towards more inclusive, collaborative and participatory decision-making. Moreover, such processes not only need to be initiated, but also maintained overtime. Enabling conditions for meaningful citizen engagement have to mature through practice.
  2. Political support and administrative/organization anchorage: as Ann-Karin Holmen argued, testing new ways of working requires support at all levels and by all actors involved – from the European to the local scale. However, political support by as well as administrative anchorage in public institutions is essential and a condicio sine qua non. This holds validity both from the perspective of public institutions and non-governmental actors, as highlighted by Helena Junyer in her account;
  3. There is an increasing need to create learning platforms to enable institutions, including public administrations, to experiment and learn how to do citizen engagement, and how to do it “right”. This is important to develop knowledge, experience, experiment solutions and share practices with other territories and institutions, facing similar challenges. There is also a need to learn from failures in policymaking and institutional functioning;
  4. Institutional change requires more than a three-year project to take place, but projects like BiodiverCities can provide a learning arena to start building a different kind of institutional infrastructure;
  5. Co-creation is not a one-size fit-all approach and processes are context-dependent, path dependent and have an “experimental” character. Citizen engagement processes are embedded into contexts when meaningful - this condition of ‘embeddedness’ emerging as a condition for institutionalisation and the making of new institutional arrangements;
  6. Citizen engagement processes can increase or decrease trust among actors involved, particularly those more vulnerable, if expectations are not managed well and there is no follow-up. But, more importantly, co-creation builds on trust and a genuine appreciation that citizens are resourceful partners in the design of public services and policies, and their implementation.
  7. Power dynamics matter and they are of different kinds (e.g., organizational, inter-institutional, identity-related). Moreover, citizen engagement implies a less centralised and hierarchical mode of governance, to address complex and wicked issues and power sharing. Who is ready to share and what does this mean?

How to go about these challenges?

  • Introduce institutional patterns that welcomes experimentation, sharing of tools, methods and knowledge;
  • Create and maintain learning platforms (e.g., BiodiverCities and many others) and non-competitive environments to enable collective learning;
  • Enhance reflexivity within public institutions and policy officers. 

You can read more about institutional challenges here.

Please note that the research findings will be published in the forthcoming "BiodiverCities Atlas: A participatory guide to building biodiverse urban futures".

 

About the Author
Anna Paola works as Policy Analyst at the JRC, supporting the work of the Competence Centre on Participatory and Deliberative Democracy. BiodiverCities is one of the project she is involved in.