Co-production: the X-Factor

In the lead up to our first CoLab Exchange session on inviting citizen co-production I’ll be posting a series of thought-provoking extracts from Edgar Cahn’s No More Throw-Away People: The Co-Production Imperative.

Edgar Cahn created TimeBanking in 1980 and sees this as the beginning of his journey to defining and understanding co-production in the 1990’s. Relating his experience and conversations in the mid 1990s, in Chapter 2 of the book Cahn asks:

Could there be a constant, a missing factor that cut across the full spectrum of social problems? …

Educators complain that they can’t succeed if they can’t get students to do their homework.

Doctors and health professionals complain that they can’t get patients to change their lifestyles: poor eating habits, lack of exercise, smoking.

Police explain that there is no way they can make a neighbourhood safe without getting people to organise some kind of patrol or look-out programme…

Housing authorities describe how all their efforts to keep the buildings in good shape fail because they can’t get the residents involved …

There was an X-factor… It was clearly a factor of production. That was why we adopted the term Co-Production.

Co-Production worked as a label. People thought they knew what it meant. We knew we didn’t. It was not self-defining, though it created the illusion of being so.

I’ll be posting more book extracts and some videos on our blog each day this week. And if you’d like the chance to discuss this thinking and co-production in your context, do register to join us for a CoLab Exchange session next Monday, 1.30–4.00pm or 5.30–8.00pm.