Mid Sweden University

a monograph that brings together my recent works on citizen participation, the third sector and co-production as a means for democratizing the welfare state.

A growing number of scholars question the sustainability of liberal representative democracy and a welfare state dominated by the big organizations in both the public and private sectors. The state is over extended and democracy is stretched to its limits. Walzer proposes to democratize the means of distributing welfare services by greater citizen involvement, while Hirst calls for devolving many of the functions of the state to civil society. However, missing from such macro proposals is a micro perspective of citizens co-producers. The first part of this presentation introduces the concept of co-production, with a focus on greater citizen participation in the provision of public services. A review of the literature demonstrates several advantages of co-production, but also some major hurdles. The second part ties the concept of co-production to a discussion of parents' participation in the provision of childcare services in Europe. Finally, the importance of co-production for promoting the development and renewal of democracy and the welfare state is discussed.

In recent years, public management research has paid increasing attention to the third sector, especially to its role in the provision of public services. Evidence of this is the rising number of publications on the topic, as well as a growing number of sessions and papers on the topic in academic conferences of the EGPA and IRSPM. However, much of the discussion on its role is motivated at least as much by ideology as by fact. We still lack a comprehensive empirical understanding of what happens when the third sector is drawn into public service provision. In this collection on Co-Production: The Third Sector and the Delivery of Public Services, we will try to enhance this understanding by presenting several new studies on the subject. We also introduce the concepts of co-production, co-management and co-governance as a conceptual framework that enables us to better understand such developments.

Research on the roles of the third sector in the delivery of public services has so far been scattered. However, there is much to learn from drawing the different manifestations of third-sector involvement together, as each represents an element of the third sector within the public services, expressed in different ways. An interesting question for research and practice is how different combinations of such elements are and should be embedded, given the variations in national structures of service provision. The studies presented in this collection have offered a stepping-stone in progressing towards an answer. Here we offer some suggestions for a future research agenda. These concern, respectively, the relationships between different roles of the third sector, links with the analysis of welfare state reform and the function of co-production.