Partner guideline 3: Where assistance is desired from the public, consider how to enhance the public's ability to provide that assistance.
In that spirit, a local government in Aarhus, Denmark, recently experimented with providing language support to assist immigrant parents in developing their children's Danish-language abilities. In a field experiment designed by the government's academic partner, immigrant parents with three- to four-year-old children enrolled in a public child care center were randomly assigned to control or treatment groups in which
Each child in the treatment group received a “language suitcase,” developed by language development experts, containing children's books, a game, and a video tutorial on how parents can help their children learn Danish. The childcare employees presented the suitcase to the families, suggested how they could use it, and included the suitcase as a part of the regular discussions with the families about their children's language development. (Jakobsen 2013, 36)
The results showed the assistance had “a positive effect on coproduction for the families with the greatest need for the service” (Jakobsen2013, 49).
Managers can also appeal to people's sense of what is “right” by seeking to activate social norms to encourage coproduction:
Partner guideline 4: Where assistance is desired from the public, consider how social norms and social networks can be activated to motivate that assistance.
The experience of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District illustrates how this principle can be applied. In an effort to increase energy conservation, the district began in 2009 to put “smiley faces” on the bills of consumers whose energy usage fell below that of similar households in the area. After six months, an analysis showed that “customers who received the personalized report reduced energy use by 2 percent more than those who got standard statements,” presumably in response to what they had learned about how they fit area norms (Kaufman 2009). As that example also hints, normative appeals may even enhance coproduction in situations in which “free riders” are visibly not contributing (e.g., by not conserving energy, by not recycling, by driving during air quality alerts).
The strategy of appealing to social norms may hold even more potential for spurring coproduction in the current era of pervasive social media. Consider how one randomized experiment showed social media influencing political behavior:
The strategy of appealing to social norms may hold even more potential for spurring coproduction in the current era of pervasive social media.
[P]olitical mobilization messages delivered to 61 million Facebook users during the 2010 U.S. congressional elections . . . directly influenced political self-expression, information seeking and real-world voting behavior of millions of people. Furthermore, the messages not only influenced the users who received them but also the users’ friends, and friends of friends. (Bond et al. 2012)
Public managers might consider similar, if smaller-scale, use of these media to activate social norms conducive to coproduction.
In contrast to social norms, material or financial incentives have a poor record of increasing coproduction (Alford 2009, 192). By their nature, material rewards invoke a sense of precisely specified exchanges unlikely to motivate much coproduction, in part because most coproductive work in the public sector “is difficult to specify in advance.” Material incentives are better employed as part of a larger strategy:
Partner guideline 5: Where assistance is desired from the public, use material incentives only in combination with other incentives to motivate that assistance.
As a case in point, neighborhood residents were persuaded to join in community environmental policing in parts of California and Louisiana by a combination of the anticipated personal benefit of better air quality and the sense they gained of contributing to their community (Laurian2004).
Finally, sanctions also do not perform well as a primary incentive for coproduction. People often take offense at the threat of sanctions, especially if they are already inclined to cooperate. In addition, sanctions typically prompt cooperation only while people feel that they are being monitored, and governments lack the resources for sustained monitoring (see Alford 2009, 198–99). In a Washington State study of seat belt usage, for example, the threat of sanctions for not buckling up appeared to exert only a modest influence on compliance (Curtis, Thurman, and Nice 1991).
Yet sanctions serve two positive functions that make them a necessary element for many forms of coproduction. First, “when they are visibly wielded, sanctions deter the resistant clients from non-compliance, or punish them when they fail to contribute.” Second, in so doing, sanctions also guarantee “to the potentially cooperative that the process to which they are contributing is fair” (Alford 2009, 198–99)—that is, those who are likely to comply can see that they are not naively cooperating while others flout the law with impunity. Those arguments lead to this guideline:
Partner guideline 6: Where assistance is desired from the public, retain the option for applying sanctions if and when reasonable cooperation does not occur based on other incentives.
Responding to the Public as Citizen
Involving the public in administrative decision making promises a number of benefits for both public agencies and the public. For agencies, benefits can include (1) better information, as when citizens contribute ground-level knowledge that otherwise would be unavailable to decision makers (e.g., Beierle 2002, 746); (2) greater likelihood of the public accepting any decision it helps make, which can facilitate program implementation; (3) improved governmental performance, as documented in such disparate venues as state departments of transportation in the United States (Neshkova and Guo 2011) and rural water supply projects in India (Prokopy 2005); and, perhaps, (4) increased citizen trust. For citizens, the benefits can include (1) better fit of public policies and programs to community preferences, (2) improved community capacity for other joint efforts, and, ultimately, (3) better quality of life.
Yet public involvement also brings problems. Those who become involved seldom constitute a population cross-section, sometimes looking instead like an odd lot of “the curious, the fearful, and the available” (McComas, Besley, and Trumbo 2006, 691–92). Public involvement can also be costly by requiring more time of public administrators to work with the public, by undermining necessary quality standards, and by raising program costs to meet the public's demands. One study found that “involving the public in science and decision-making costs about twice as much for a project than when the work is performed without public involvement” (Till and Meyer 2001, 377).
Fearing these problems, many public managers historically have sought to avoid public involvement. They would be better advised to view public involvement as a contingent proposition, desirable under some circumstances but not others and, when desirable, best pursued with strategies that vary by issue. A handful of guidelines can help in understanding and responding to these contingencies.
To begin with, whenever an issue arises for a public agency, its managers should consider whether public involvement in deliberating the issue might be desirable. These issues could concern implementation of a new program, a perceived problem with an existing program, or some other community concern related to the agency's programs or mission. Faced with any of those issues, managers should ask whether they need (1) more information to make a better decision and/or (2) public acceptance of the decision in order to achieve its implementation (see also Bryson et al. 2013, 26; Thomas 1990).
In the area of information, administrators may feel that they do not know what citizens want from a program or what the community context is like, with either kind of information providing grounds to engage the public. Even stronger grounds exist if (1) implementation of any decision requires the public's acceptance and (2) that acceptance cannot be assumed without involvement. Some administrative decisions do not require citizen acceptance to be implemented; the “consent of the governed” sometimes can be assumed when actions flow directly from the decisions of elected policy-making bodies. For the most part, though, administrative decisions that have a substantial impact on the public will require extensive involvement in order to gain the public acceptance necessary for implementation (Thomas 1990, 1993, 1995).
Absent either need, inviting public involvement can unnecessarily complicate decision making and should be avoided, if possible:
Citizen guideline 1: Do not invite public involvement (unless required) when neither more information nor public acceptance is needed to reach or implement a decision.
As Bryson et al. explained, issues fitting this description are likely to concern “problems that are primarily technical or operational” (2013, 25), concerns unlikely to hold much interest for the public. To be sure, any judgment that an issue does not require public involvement should be regarded as tentative, subject to change if events (e.g., new evidence of the public's interest) suggest otherwise.
When, on the other hand, the need for information and/or acceptance points to the desirability of public involvement, managers should consider whether their agency brings any essential goals or constraints to the issue, as this guideline recommends:
Citizen guideline 2: In advance of decision making with public involvement, define necessary decision constraints, such as decision standards (e.g., scientific or technical), budget constraints, time constraints, and/or limit