Over the past decade, co-creation has emerged as a widely adopted concept, strategy and model for public governance (Ansell & Torfing, 2021a; Brandsen et al., 2018), not least in the Scandinavian countries. Despite the slight variations in definition found within scholarly literature, the majority of authors align the concept of co-creation with collaborations between diverse actors operating as equal partners, aiming to generate value for all participants (Torfing et al., 2019).

The application of this initially private sector concept (Payne et al., 2008) in the public sector means to generate public value by actively involving citizens, users, and stakeholders in the value-creation process (Brandsen et al., 2018; Røiseland et al., 2024). Creating public value this way have consequences for both the selection of partners which will be capable of realizing a certain value, the definition of the value one intends to realize, and the institutional design of the value creation process. These “who’s”, “what’s” and “how’s” have been described as crucial question any public leader needs to answer during any value creation process (Moore, 1995; Sancino, 2022), while the concept of co-creation depicts a specific type of such processes.

The introduction of co-creation in public service production and societal problem solving has many motives such as the need to mobilize resources, enhance innovation, create joint ownership and enhance democratic legitimacy (Ansell & Torfing, 2021b; Røiseland, 2021; Torfing et al., 2019). Co-creation is a form of collaborative governance (Ansell & Gash, 2008) that brings together relevant and affected actors in networks and partnerships that contribute to the production of public value.

However, despite the alleged virtues and blessings, co-creation may have disruptive consequences for both public and private actors and for the established forms of organization, leadership and democracy in the public sector (Acar et al., 2023; Andersen, 2020; Bisschops & Beunen, 2018; Pestoff, 2018). Creating value by co-creation poses challenges for public leaders, both administrative and political (Aagaard, 2024). At the societal level, we cannot ignore that the introduction of co-creation carries the risk of malfeasance, corruption, and misconduct, potentially leading to more value destruction than creation (Cluley et al., 2020; Engen et al., 2020; Parker et al., 2022; Røiseland, et.al., 2024). For administrative leaders, co-creation also poses risks. On one hand, leaders cede control to the involved citizens and stakeholders. On the other hand, they are typically still held accountable for the outcome (Ferlie, 2021; Ongaro et al., 2021). The active involvement of citizens, users, and stakeholders may also challenge the established values and protocols among leaders and professionals, potentially leading to unconventional solutions and actions that leaders and professionals would typically avoid (Breimo & Røiseland, 2024; Fox, 2024; Koppenjan, 2024; Steen & Tuurnas, 2018). For elected politicians in a representative system, co-creation also poses risks because involving citizens this way takes away opportunities for “political wins”, which is crucial in a system based in party competition and election, and also because the outcome of co-creation may conflict with party manifestos elected politicians feel committed to (Elk & Regal, 2023; Regal et al., 2024; Røiseland, 2021).

Therefore, conflicts will arise when co-creation is introduced in contemporary public governance. This paper digs into the way local public actors and local public institutions tend to cope with these conflicts. Following our research question in this article can be stated as follows:

RQ: How do local governments cope with the introduction of co-creation initiatives, and how are these coping strategies influencing on the selection of partners (who), the value determination (what), and the institutional design of co-creation (how)?

The paper is structured as follows: In the next section we start by some conceptual clarifications, followed by a brief overview of literature concerning conflicts and possible coping strategies to cope with these. Based on these contributions we develop a four-fold typology of coping strategies as an analytical framework for the following analysis. In section three methods and data is presented. In this paper we use data from nine Norwegian co-creation initiatives, mapped based in document studies and informant interviews. In the subsequent section we analyse these cases to identify actual coping strategies employed. This section is organized in line with the who-what-how-questions – referring to a) the selection of partners for value creation, b) the determination of value, and c) the institutional design of the process. A final section sums up, conclude, and draw some implications for future research and practice in this field.

In many Western countries, and among both scholars and public leaders, it is argued that we are witnessing a gradual and ongoing shift in the perception of the role of citizens in public governance (Barber, 2003; Fung, 2006; Voorberg & Bekkers, 2016; Warren, 2009). In recent times, this has often been referred to as “co-creation”, and constitutes part of a larger change, commonly conceptualised as New Public Governance (Osborne, 2010). “Co-creation” is arguably a bricolage of concepts and theories taken from public service management, urban planning and innovation (Brandsen & Honingh, 2018; Lund, 2018).

The word “co-creation” has been applied in many different disciplines and research fields since at least WWII (Røiseland, 2024). When “co-creation” entered public sector research about 20 years ago, it was not least inspired by research on markets and production systems in the private sector, reflecting the idea that value is created in the interaction between a provider and a consumer (Bernhard, 1965; Payne, et.al., 2008). Typical contemporary examples would be tourism, social media, “Web 2.0” and similar types of consumer-producer interactions (Ramaswamy & Ozcan, 2014). The “co” of co-creation indicates that a collaborative process involving different kinds of actors and resources is taking place, while “creation” tells us that something is achieved that would otherwise not have been realised. This “something” is value, which in this context has a wide meaning as something useful for the involved and the society as a whole (Benington, 2011; Sancino et al., 2018).

After entering the public sector, the concept of co-creation has developed into something of a fashionable concept applied in many different public sectors and contexts (Brandsen et al., 2018). As with many similar and contemporary words, co-creation has characteristics of being a “magic concept” (Pollitt & Hupe, 2011). From a critical point of view, it is difficult to argue the concept itself is labelling something completely new. To the extent anything is new, it must be the apparently willingness among public sector leaders to put these ideas into practice by defining co-creation as an overall strategy of their organizations (Røiseland & Lo, 2019; Breimo & Røiseland, 2021).

“Co-creation” belongs to a family of concepts commonly used to describe more recent trends in governance and public problem solving. Similar or neighbouring concepts include co-production (Brandsen et al., 2018)), interactive governance (Torfing et.al., 2012), collaborative governance (Ansell & Gash, 2008) and social innovation (Voorberg, et.al., 2015). Among scholars, each and every one of these concepts frame their own academic discourses. However, on closer inspection, a significant overlap can be found, where the same authors are moving between different concepts, but still within the same conceptual family. This rather messy conceptual landscape strengthens the need of a clearcut definition of co-creation.

The conceptual choice this article follows is much in line with Torfing (et al. 2019), arguing that co-creation is a broad concept ranging from the co-creation of individual services to more advanced types of collaboration among equal parties. It follows that co-creation can be defined as “a process through which public and private/civic actors attempt to resolve a shared problem, challenge, or task through a constructive exchange of different kinds of knowledge, resources, competences, and ideas” (Torfing et al., 2019, p. 802).

What does this definition imply in relation to the three pronouns mentioned in the title of this article? Regarding the “who”, co-creation means boundary-crossing collaboration among equal partners rooted in different parts of society. While there will be actors from the public sector involved when co-creation is applied in the public sector, these will interact with persons and actors from civil society and/or businesses. The reason why these different actors can be assessed as equal despite their different roots, lies in the assumption about mutual dependency – all actors possess some kind of resources that the remaining actors need in order to reach a common goal. This leads us to the “what” of co-creation. Co-creation is about resolving a shared problem, challenge or task, which can only become real if all involved actors take part in the determination and definition of the goal of the collaboration. Turning to the “how”, co-creation is a process of “constructive exchange” of various resources. Such a process can be institutionalized in different ways, but it must take a form where different actors act on a common institutional level. This means that following the definition above, co-creation cannot unfold within a strict hierarchical context.

Co-creation as described above clearly collides with the type of governance predominating contemporary societies. Regarding “who”, in real life it is more common that the actors who deal with societal challenges and task are rooted in representative democracy, either as elected politicians, or administrative leaders hired by elected politicians (Hendriks et al., 2020). Regarding “what”, the problems, challenges and tasks one tries to solve follows from political party manifestos or protocols among professionals. And regarding “how”, classic hierarchical governance where politics are separated from administration, and where both politics and administration is divided into silos, seem to thrive despite some supplements of neo-liberalism and network governance (Osborne, 2010). No surprise than that the “who”, “what” and “how” related to co-creation will give rise to conflicts when introduced in the public sector.

Conflicts arise when two or more alternatives appear to be incompatible, and the more one attain the first alternative, the less able one is to attain the second (Jaspers, 2021, p. 280). Conflicts may present themselves as competing logics with each their supportive constituency, or as an antagonism where the two poles in the conflict are seen as each other’s enemy, thus making peaceful co-existence impossible (Mouffe, 2013). In the context of co-creation, one such conflict would be between the representative democratic logic, claiming that only elected political representatives are accountable and can make authoritative decisions. This logic conflicts with the inherent logic of co-creation that says that relevant and affected actors should be involved in making decisions that affect their lives (Torfing et al., 2024). Another example would be the norm that public managers and employees should treat all citizens equally, which conflicts with the inherent idea of co-creation to involve citizens to create needs-based solutions that may vary from citizen to citizen.

Conflicts can have positive as well as negative consequences for organizations. On the positive side it may lead to enhanced creativity, innovation, and higher quality decisions, but conflicts may also end in dysfunctional outcomes as sabotage, reduced productivity, and deterioration of relationships (Song et al., 2006). Most people and organizational members will therefore try to avoid situations ending in negative conflicts and stalemate. There is a wide spectrum of academic literature discussing how actors and organizations can manage conflicts, and the various options actors are faced with. One such example would be Michael Lipsky, analysing the ever-lasting conflict between service needs and available resources among street level bureaucrats. According to Lipsky, street level bureaucrats tend to cope with this conflict by for example ration out their services and try to control their clients (Lipsky, 1980). Another example is the Thomas-Kilmann model for conflict management, emphasizing conflicting actors who, in varying ways are focused about either satisfying their own concerns (assertiveness) or satisfying the concerns of their opponent (cooperativeness) (Thomas & Kilmann, 1974). In the following analysis, however, we will take departure in a more tailor-made typology inspired by research on value conflicts in co-production – a research field which is often seen as equivalent to co-creation (Brandsen et al., 2018).

Our typology covers four basic, possible and substantially different behavioural patterns: avoidance, separation, compromising and integration. These four types denote raising levels of ambition when it comes to solving the conflicts between co-creation and established forms of governance.

Avoidance. This is a type of response which is also referred to as bias, and which means actors will give preference to values consistent with a broader set of values, at the expense of other values (Jaspers, 2021, p. 282). In a context where there is a bottom line of classic, hierarchical governance including public organizations, this strategy will mean avoiding any conflicts all together by not engaging in co-creation, either explicitly, or more implicitly by filling the concept of co-creation with something less challenging than described above.

Separation. By this strategy the aim is to build firewalls (Jaspers, 2021, p. 282) which structurally will separate conflicting values. In practical terms such a strategy will mean to allow for co-creation but keep conflicting governance logics apart in space and time. A typical example would be to organize co-creation in separate, temporary project organizations (Jacobsen, 2022), while the core organization follows a traditional type of governance.

Compromise means to find ways to balance opposed logics within a common system of governance. By this strategy actors create hybrids (Jaspers, 2021, p. 282; Jaspers & Steen, 2019, p. 610) by negotiating between different logics and find workable solutions which combine elements that are not fully compatible, for example by allowing oneself, in some specific cases, to deviate from core organizational values, like for example the principle of representative democracy.

Finally, integration is not a coping strategy per se but reflects an aim to find creative ways of dissolving the conflict altogether by combining incompatible governance logics in a synergistic way. Integration means to initiate and implement innovative changes that clearly break with former practices (Song et al., 2006), and where classic hierarchical governance and co-creation is transformed into a higher-order type of governance where the tension between the two opposed logics dissolves. For example, if the conflict is between ensuring equal and standardized service quality on one hand, and on the other engaging in needs-based co-creation on the other, the question might become: What does it take to provide the same needs-based solutions to all citizens? (Torfing et al., 2024, p. 52).

In table 1 we have suggested what these four strategies would possibly mean for the who, what and how of co-creation. Avoidance could for example mean reinterpreting co-creation into a tokenistic process where partners are pre-selected and controlled by professionals and political decisionmakers. Separation would typically mean to allow a limited number of partners to unfold in a time-limited project separated from the organizational core. When compromising, one will allow room for adjustments based on inputs from involved partners, but limited to certain politics, and still under professional and political control. Integration would mean engaging in real deliberation with pre- and self-selected partners within the core organization.

Even though both the idea of co-creation and the term itself has spread across many countries, the Scandinavian countries provide a particularly interesting case for such a study. As so-called Nordic welfare states, they are equipped with vast public resources with a strong tradition for classic public administration, and the public sector can in many cases afford and allow itself to act alone with minor contributions from private actors such as businesses, civil society and citizens. If the driver towards co-creation is rooted in scarce public resources, certainly we should not expect the Scandinavian countries to be among the most eager to embrace this idea. However, this is exactly what they do, and we find a great interest in the idea of co-creation in this region (Torfing et al., 2019; Røiseland & Lo, 2019). Even if parts of this interest in co-creation may be driven by rhetoric’s and organizational fashion, there are also good reasons to expect it is partly grounded in a felt need for building additional capacity to govern effectively and legitimately. And furthermore, there is every reason to expect that introducing co-creation in the Scandinavian public sectors will clash with established forms of governance and management, and that public actors would need to cope with many conflicts when different forms of governance become mixed.

The research project from which data is derived, aimed to study the expectations, challenges and coping strategies employed by local government actors in Norway, in their efforts to use co-creation as a governance tool (Røiseland et al., 2024). Although co-creation arguably is a known practice with a long history in Norway, the term itself is rather new, and it is only recently surged as a strategy for renewing public governance. The idea that public governance could benefit from co-creation clearly collides with the grounding ideas about public governance that so far have dominated the public sector during the last 30-40 years. The main assumption driving the research project was that the current trend towards co-creation in Norwegian municipalities is demanding and challenging for elected politicians, public administrators, and maybe particularly for street level bureaucrats who are caught in the intersection between bureaucratic rule, New Public Management and co-creation.

The nine cases were identified informed by a Delphi-panel of national experts on co-creation (Okoli & Pawlowski, 2004; Røiseland & Breimo, et al., 2024). The panellists were asked to nominate municipalities which they considered to have introduced and implemented co-creation as an element in their strategy for governing and serving their local community. Based on these inputs, the research team selected three municipalities which serve as influential configurations (Seawright & Gerring, 2008). Put simply, the selection of case-municipalities expresses the idea that if co-creation does not make it there, it will not make it anywhere.

When selecting the nine cases of co-creation – three in each municipality – the research team actively searched for variation in policy content (Røiseland, 2024), spanning over functions such as legal authority, service delivery and regulation, represented by three Norwegian policy sectors, as shown in table 2 below: Child Welfare and protection (public authority), Elderly care (service delivery) and Climate policy (regulation) (Breimo, et.al., 2021).

In this section we will first explore how these nine cases answered the “who”, “what” and “how”, explained in the theoretical section. In the second part we will relate these responses to the four coping mechanisms developed earlier, in order to conclude on which of the four mechanisms are in play in the nine cases. In between the two parts the reader will find a table summing up the analysis as a whole.

Summing up, this analysis demonstrates that taking the introduction of co-creation into modern public sector seriously, is no easy task. Comparing what is actually happening in these initiatives with the theoretical ideal type we defined above, it is clear that practical co-creation initiatives tend to resemble less radical and more traditional forms of participation. Neither the selection of partners (who) or the identification of an aim (what) satisfies the ideal definition of co-creation we set forth in the introduction, and while there is a variety when it comes to organizing co-creation (how), in most cases co-creation is not influencing on the core organizational processes. Perhaps this is intended by the involved actors, using “co-creation” as a new, fashionable and “magic” label for types of participation which has a relatively long history in Scandinavian and Norwegian local governments (Pollitt & Hupe, 2011). Or, it could be an unintended outcome after applying available coping strategies to deal with conflicts following from the introduction of co-creation. In that case the intention is real, but actors are not able to realize these in full.

The typology of coping strategies we developed in the theoretical section, implicitly at least, define integration as the ultimate normative goal, where ideas of co-creation become deeply integrated in the system of governance by radical and innovative changes. Such a view point is put forward by several leading scholars in the field (e.g. Ansell & Torfing, 2021a, 2021b). This may be truth at a theoretical level. However, taking a more practical approach, one may wonder if the realization of these ideas is more effectively introduced into public sector by separating them from the core organization. Separation, for example by project organizations (Jacobsen, 2022), will allow actors to employ co-creation in full, and thereby testing to what extent this idea actually is delivering it’s claimed potential.

However, one can also interpret the analysis in a different way. In this paper the departing point was an ideal type of co-creation, or “pure co-creation”, which challenges existing ideas and practices, and therefore involves some coping strategies among involved actors. But acknowledging that new forms of governance never replace former practices, but rather are layered on top of older ones (Osborne, 2010), one can argue a different and relevant approach would be to ask the more modest question of to what extent governance processes have become influenced by the idea of co-creation? Assessing practical real-world co-creation efforts against “pure co-creation” is important for analytical reasons, and important for pointing out potentially arising conflicts. But studying to what extent co-creation actually improves public sector invites for questions about smaller and larger changes that in the longer run will develop public governance into something new (Koppenjan, 2024). In other words – claiming that real-world co-creation do not live up to its ideal does not mean the idea as such has failed.

The author wishes to thank Janne Breimo (Nord University), Hege Hofstad (OsloMet) and Trond Vedeld (OsloMet) for their contributions to data collection. The project was funded by Research Council of Norway (Grant #300761).