This paper is a summary of research for teaching and knowledge sharing purposes, and should not be cited. The paper referred to can be found at the reference below:
Van Elk, S., & Regal, B. (2023). The opportunities and challenges of politically designed co-creation platforms. Policy and Politics, 51(3), 579-601. https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16799905123057
Introduction
Contemporary governments face both dwindling resources and electorates who feel increasingly distant from political systems. To address this, researchers and public servants increasingly explore models centred on ‘co-creating’ services with citizens (Torfing et al., 2021). However, successful experiments with co-creation have been small-scale and have highlighted how time-consuming and costly such approaches can be (Ansell and Torfing, 2021).
Accordingly, interest has grown in so-called ‘platforms’ for co-creation, which promise to provide enabling structures that make widespread co-creation more viable. For some, the promise of platforms points the way to a new style of government that operates by creating enabling structures to facilitate local co-creation (Ansell and Miura, 2020; Ansell and Gash, 2018). However, research on co-creation platforms remains in its infancy.
Consequently, we investigated how and why government-designed platforms enabled and/or constrained co-creation by other actors. To investigate this, we conducted a detailed case study of the inaugural year of the London Borough of Culture (LBoC) programme. This initiative, overseen by the Mayor of London and the Greater London Authority (GLA), supports yearlong cultural festivals run by different London Boroughs each year. We found evidence that platforms like LBoC can indeed enable local co-creation; but that they simultaneously inhibit it due to the politically led nature of their governing bodies.
Co-creation and platforms
There are many ways to think about more collaborative ways of governing. Recent research, however, has coalesced around the idea of ‘co-creation’, defined as occurring when ‘two or more private or public actors’, including citizens, ‘attempt to solve a shared problem, challenge, or task’ (Torfing et al., 2016, 2021). It is hoped that by working with citizens, governments can not only help those citizens feel more connected to governance, but can also benefit from previously untapped resources (Ostrom, 1996; FitzGerald et al., 2022). Today, writers increasingly talk about co-creation as a potentially central part of an overall approach to governance (Ansell and Torfing, 2021).
However, it is important to emphasise how local, small-scale and time-consuming most successful approaches to co-creation have been. This is partly because successful co-creation entails participants jointly figuring out what they see as the underlying problem, then gradually designing and testing solutions. These are intensive conversations that require time, flexibility and relatively small groups of participants (Ansell and Gash, 2018; Ansell and Torfing, 2021). This seems a major threat to hopes that co-creation can become central to our way of governing: after all, governments could not possibly participate in every such highly local discussion, and nor could they centralise such processes without losing much of what makes co-creation desirable.
This has sparked considerable interest in utilising so-called ‘governance platforms’ for co-creation. Governance platforms are adaptable infrastructures to enable multiple instances of a way of governing. The analogy here is technological platforms like the operating systems which drive computers or smartphones. These provide infrastructure which allow many programmes or applications to run, despite the significant differences between those programmes. Examples of governance platforms include ‘Living Labs’, European Capital of Culture and Ireland’s Local Community Safety Partnerships.
Platforms are seen as a promising way to centrally facilitate multiple instances of co-creation, for three reasons. First, they provide their users with the financial resources and knowhow (Ansell and Miura, 2020) which are known enablers of co-creation (Voorberg et al., 2015; Jukić et al., 2022). Second, they are structured around a minimal set of ‘design rules’ which ensure they function while remaining highly adaptable (Ansell and Miura, 2020); this is likely to foster the kind of flexible policy and political environments that are central to co-creation (Baptista et al., 2020). Third, they engage in ‘intermediation’, linking up their users with potential collaborators (Ansell and Torfing, 2021); this is likely to help rapidly build trust, which is vital to co-creation (Siebers and Torfing, 2018; Baptista et al., 2020). For these reasons, platforms are thought of as promising ways for governments to strategically foster co-creation at arms’ length.
Yet there are also reasons to temper our expectations. Advocates of co-creation cast it as evading what they see as governments’ traditionally hierarchical style (Torfing et al., 2016). Yet if governments are so hierarchical, we might ask, will they be well suited to designing highly flexible, accommodating platforms? Indeed, while we have some related evidence, we know very little about how effectively governments can build co-creation platforms and how such processes play out. That is what we set out to discover.
Our study
We investigated how and why government-designed platforms enable and/or constrain co-creation through a detailed case study of one such platform. London Borough of Culture (LBoC) is a collaborative platform operated by the Mayor of London and the GLA. Each year, through a process of competitive bidding, one of London’s 33 local authority areas is selected as LBoC and receives £1.35m towards running a yearlong cultural festival. In forming the programme of activities, both residents and the local cultural sector are to act as ‘co-creators and decision makers’ (Greater London Authority, 2017).
As typifies platforms, LBoC operates through a small set of rules which characterise the programme (Ansell and Miura, 2020). For instance, bids had to be Council-led but community-supported; programmes were to be structured around ‘big moments’ that would ‘engage and attract a large number of people’ and so forth (Greater London Authority, 2017). The programme offered individual local authorities both funding and coaching support alongside municipal and national contacts normally beyond the reach of an individual Council.
We followed the programme’s inaugural year, focusing on both the GLA and Waltham Forest Council, the first winner. During September 2019-October 2020, we conducted 46 interviews with staff, collaborators and citizens involved in LBoC and related initiatives. We complemented these with 20 observations of relevant meetings. As we examined these data, we noticed elements of co-creation, but not as much as we had expected in a programme set up to facilitate it. This led us to look more deeply into how elements of the programme enabled or inhibited co-creation and to consider this in light of existing knowledge about the barriers to, and drivers of, co-creation (Baptista et al., 2020; Voorberg et al., 2015).
This showed us that the programme both enabled and inhibited co-creation. The enablers which the platforms literature anticipated did indeed seem to be effective: the provision of knowledge and financial resources helped; the platform facilitated flexibility; and intermediation fostered trust. Yet some of LBoC’s characteristics also made things harder. The use of bids to select the winner –typical in UK public sector bodies– led to that winner having already committed to many details of their year of events, leaving little scope to co-create them. Municipal political dynamics led to the programme having very short timescales that inhibited local trust-building. And the programme’s highly visible, politicised nature reduced Waltham Forest’s risk appetite, encouraging approaches less risky than co-creation. The remainder of this section elaborates these findings and how they impacted Waltham Forest’s year.
Fostering collaborative capacity
LBoC radically increased Waltham Forest’s cultural team’s capacity. With what had been a team of three people, engaging closely with communities was a tall order. LBoC meant that ‘money existed, on a really fundamental level’, as one interviewee explained. The team radically expanded and was able to engage in considerably greater work with their communities.
This greater funding also enabled greater ‘capacity’ in the sense of capability. When recruiting new staff, the Council could hire people experienced in community collaboration. Equally, the platform offered non-financial support, such as access to sector-specific co-creation knowhow, formal training and reflective learning. In some of the most successful co-creation projects we encountered, local authority staff demonstrated real expertise in working closely with community bodies, fostering and deepening collaboration. One such community body enthused about the intense, flexible support they provided: ‘that’s not normal for a Council’.
Fostering a flexible environment
The GLA was keen not to obstruct this kind of local collaboration. When we spoke to one GLA officer, they emphasised that LBoC represented a departure from ‘plonking big ideas’ into places: the ‘most successful [LBoCs] will be…sort of grown,’ ground-up. Accordingly, they gave Waltham Forest considerable freedom over how they operated. For instance, they were free to directly involve residents in disbursing funding for resident-led cultural work in a way that suited their contexts. Equally, the fact that an initiative was part of LBoC could help bypass what might otherwise be inflexible rules. A participant in one co-creation project enthused that LBoC empowered their Council contacts to unblock obstacles the project encountered. LBoC’s flexible design rules not only avoided obstructing but actively facilitated flexible environments suited to co-creation.
Yet such flexibility was difficult to sustain. As a politically-led body, the GLA faced extensive scrutiny, particularly when disbursing public funds. Consequently, they ensured procedural legitimacy by funding LBoC through competitive bidding. Yet this required applicants to make significant commitments about their programmes very early. While Waltham Forest’s bid had involved consultation, it was created before funding brought the staff capacity that facilitated co-creation. By the time co-creation was enabled, many key choices had been made. LBoC’s political structuring led to early commitments that limited co-creation.
Fostering trusting environments
LBoC was a high-profile programme well supported by the GLA. It brought, in one Council officer’s words, the ‘sort of kudos of being a flagship Mayor of London cultural project’. This helped build connections with potential collaborators, which could be vital to co-creative projects. The GLA also actively supported the building of connections. They were cast by the same Council officer as ‘absolutely amazing…around enabling relationships’. Active and passive intermediation fostered trust, particularly with new contacts operating above the borough level.
Yet building relationships with local organisations grew harder. One Council officer identified the problem as being that ‘the turnaround time on all of these [programmes] is so quick that you don’t have that time to build that trust with a community’. This seemed a justified perspective: from being announced as winner, Waltham Forest had just ten months to hire their staff and be ready to deliver a yearlong programme. Officers at the GLA helped us understand why such timescales were set: it was down to ‘the sheer rush [of] going from election to designing the programme to awarding money and then delivering’. The aim was for a bidding round and two full years of LBoC to be complete by the end of the Mayor’s four-year term. Given these political rhythms, it was always likely to be difficult to give Council staff enough time to build the trust that co-creation needs.
Fostering risk
Co-creation is risky. Because problems are jointly defined, and solutions unpredictable, one can never know exactly what it will produce. Accordingly, a certain appetite for risk is necessary to its success (Voorberg et al., 2015). This grew difficult in Waltham Forest, with one officer feeling ‘there’s a lot of pressure, isn’t there?’. Another noted that ‘if you fail, you fail very publicly’. These feelings pervaded the Council and, as deadlines neared, the need to ‘just…get something on’ led officers to tend towards hiring trusted, established and often out-of-borough contractors, particularly for prominent initiatives.
This high pressure was partly inevitable – the glare of municipal publicity was always likely to be a lot for an individual borough to handle. However, it did not help that this was a ‘flagship’ policy which needed ‘cut-through’ to justify the continuation of LBoC and associated cultural initiatives. GLA officers recognised that this created ‘a lot of pressure’ locally. Unfortunately, this political visibility made it difficult to tolerate the kind of risk central to co-creation in the year’s major projects.
Summary
All of this pointed to the platform having an ambivalent impact on co-creation. In some ways, such as the provision of financial and nonfinancial resources, it clearly enabled it. In other ways, it straightforwardly deterred it, such as where political visibility reduced appetites for the kind of risk co-creation entails. Yet its impacts on trust and the flexibility of the policy environment were more complex, with both enabling and inhibiting impacts.
This pointed to a wider pattern. While research on platforms seemed to be right that features like resources, flexibility and intermediation could aid co-creation, features associated with LBoC’s politically-owned nature were more problematic. The pressures the GLA faced as a political body facing public scrutiny led to the political structuring, political rhythms and political visibility described above. This highlights that politically-led organisations may face unique challenges in designing and operating platforms to stimulate co-creation. The next section considers what this means for researchers and public servants.
Implications and Conclusions
Our research highlighted some of the benefits and challenges associated with co-creation platforms. Distinctively, it pointed to the obstacles which political organisations might face in designing and ‘owning’ such a platform. Notably, both the GLA and Waltham Forest Council made extended, good-faith efforts to co-create. The lessons of their experience are not to do with their organisational capacities or intentions but how being a politically-led organisation creates unique challenges for platform design.
This suggests several lessons for prospective platform designers:
- Political organisations considering creating a co-creation platform may consider doing so through third parties or arms’ length structures. They may feel that this could valuably reduce the platform’s political visibility, freeing participants to take the risks germane to co-creation. It may also reduce the political pressures which led to Waltham Forest having to deliver so quickly (political rhythms) and to a pre-determined specification (political structuring).
- Alternatively, political bodies may decide to create a platform themselves but armed with foresight about the challenges they may face. For instance, with awareness of the risks, they may be able to avoid any tendencies to seek success too quickly or in too predetermined a manner. If clear specifications are needed to justify and govern the use of public funds, it may be possible to focus them on the process of co-creation, not its outcomes. Alternatively, if political rhythms threaten to leave projects little time to create relationships, one might incorporate trust-building work into preparatory or bidding phases.
- Finally, this study may better inform political organisations about when co-creation platforms are likely to be the right solution. For instance, where the key obstacle to a desired co-creation initiative is capacity, such a platform may be ideal. Conversely, where actors are lacking a suitable risk appetite, such a platform could be counter-productive. These judgements are likely to be highly contextual and best made locally by those who know those settings.
This study can also inform prospective users of platforms owned by political bodies about the challenges they may encounter. They would be well advised to consider how much pre-existing trust they have with their prospective partners, and not to expect much time to develop this. If they proceed, they might anticipate needing (i) to manage tensions between preconceived targets and the open-endedness of co-creation and (ii) to shelter that process from the glare of external publicity. Developing strategies for navigating these challenges before they arise could be the difference between failure and success.
The full paper is available here: https://doi.org/10.1332/030557321X16799905123057
Funding Acknowledgement
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 770591.
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[i] Dr Sam van Elk, King’s Business School, Public Services, Management and Organisation King’s College, London sam.van_elk@kcl.ac.uk