Facing pain to reach gain in co-creation: A systematic literature review of participants’ coping strategies

Co-creation is seen by scholars and practitioners as an enticing way to enhance the quality and legitimacy of public decisions and services, especially at the local level (Torfing et al. 2021). Collaboration among different actors has been shown to generate a better understanding of the problem being debated, to encourage mutual learning, to facilitate joint ownership of new solutions, and to enable coordinated implementation (Torfing 2016). On the other hand, while co-created solutions benefit from the diversity and the disruption and learning derived from the clash between different views and forms of knowledge, collaboration is often predicated on a high degree of commonality between the actors that makes it easier to get along (Torfing 2018). Finding a common ground for a diversity of actors to deal with their differences and address the tensions and conflicts that inevitably arise is, therefore, of utmost importance (Torfing et al. 2020). These may include, for instance, value conflicts and tensions, such as tensions between efficiency and effectiveness, inclusion and efficiency, individual freedom and effectiveness, etc. As when dealing with the stress and difficulties arising at the frontline of public service provision (see Tummers et al 2015 for review of the relevant literature), public officials and other actors involved in co-creation processes are expected to adopt a variety of coping strategies. Jasper and Steen (2018) propose seven different strategies to cope with co-creation-related tensions, i.e. ‘bias’, ‘building firewalls’, ‘cycling’, ‘casuistry’, ‘hybridization’, ‘incrementalism’ and ‘escalation’, and argue that citizens normally tend to escalate or avoid coping. Although not specifically addressing coping strategies, Nederhand and Edelenbos (2022) similarly deal with the ambiguity of public managers initiating public participation to enhance the legitimacy of public decisions, with the actual impact of citizens’ input being however mostly low, contributing to a loss of legitimacy. Their research shows that politicians either prefer participation that is conditioned by government or participation that empowers citizens to speak up. Despite a growing interest for the study of the tensions and conflicts which may hinder the success of public participation, and of co-creation processes in particular, relatively scant attention has been devoted to the coping strategies that public and private actors enact to address such tensions. Therefore, this paper relies on a systematic literature review (Chalmers et al. 2002; Donaldson et al. 2002) to explore how public servants and citizens cope with the challenges of co-creation, in order to enhance (and not obstruct) the realization of public values. In this perspective, the aim of our work is to engage with the repertoire of coping strategies as developed by Jasper and Steen (2018) and analyze their framework from an empirical perspective. Our findings firstly provide evidence of the use of different coping strategies within co-creation processes. Secondly, they identify bundles of strategies that are often employed together, thus suggesting the opportunity to further explore their effectiveness through a configurational approach. Thirdly, our findings shed light on the simultaneous presence in coping strategies of factors that may be related to the bureaucratic, managerial and governance approaches.