Testing and developing theoretical relationships between enhanced coproduction types and empowerment outcomes from the contexts of two edible urban greenspaces in La Reina, Santiago de Chile

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Testing and developing theoretical relationships between

enhanced coproduction types and empowerment outcomes

from the contexts of two edible urban greenspaces in

La Reina, Santiago de Chile

Tobias Jones 11665270

Tobyjones200@gmail.com

Supervisor: Mendel Giezen

Second Reader: Fabio Castro

Date of submission: 20/06/2019

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Abstract:

Coproduction is critiqued and celebrated as a magic concept that straightforwardly promises to solve today’s public goods and service complex challenges by enrolling citizens as equal partners with the state in the production process. Despite the presence of power asymmetries and often contrasting socio-political characteristics between municipalities and citizen and/or community groups, ‘enhanced coproduction’ is theorised as an empowering, inclusive and ‘win-win’ process with the outcomes being worth more than the inputs that each groups contributes. This is because citizens not only participate in the operational mode of coproduction they also get to enact roles in the strategic mode meaning access to decision-making and the allocation of state resources. Although theorised as an antidote to the epidemic of technocratic managerialism in todays’ neoliberalising cities, empirical research on the outcomes of coproduction processes is left wanting and the socio-political dynamics remain under-theorised.

To address these gaps, the research adopts and tests Watson’s two-part coproduction typology as a valuable starting point to specifically understand how contrasting state-initiated and civic-movement coproductions of edible urban greenspaces relate to empowerment outcomes on multiple levels/scales. To test and develop the theory this research compares variations in the distribution and sequencing of citizen roles between two empirical cases of coproduction representing either side of Watson’s typology. The results evidence that enhanced coproductions of edible urban greenspaces, in the borough of La Reina, Santiago de Chile, correlate with empowerment outcomes particularly for the actively participating citizen/community groups.

Furthermore, the civic-movement initiated case correlates with more group and broader

community/neighbourhood empowerment outcomes than the state-initiated case. The empirical encounter utilises a complementary set of innovative qualitative to prove a data rich processural analysis which generates further understanding into the theoretical linkages between coproduction modes and the role of regular inter-group interactions. Rarely included perspectives of non-coproducing local inhabitants problematize

coproductions of public greenspaces evidencing the ‘win-win-lose’ outcomes which demand further research into how inadvertent processes of enclosure can be prevented.

Key words: enhanced coproduction, empowerment, public space, edible urban green space,

state-society engagement, community/citizen group, power asymmetries

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Chapter 1: Problem Statement & Introduction

State-society coproductions are conceptualised as inclusive, empowering, mutually-beneficial and ‘win-win’ processes with the outcomes being worth more than the inputs each groups contributes (Ostrom 1996, Bovaird 2007, Osborne & Stoksch 2013, Sorrentino et al. 2018, Stott-ESF 2018). Public administration and management scholars claim that coproductions can be the solution to solve today’s public goods and service challenges in the face of decades of neoliberalisation and a New Public Management regime which

increasingly adopt a market-oriented logics, forces public funding cuts, and outsources public responsibilities to private entities (Peck & Tickell 2002: 386, Head & Alford 2015, Sorrentino et al. 2018). Citizens can become empowered as equal partners in the coproduction of the goods and services they need and in the process improve their quality (Ostrom 1996, Bovaird 2007). The proliferation of ‘public-private partnerships’ can be counterbalanced public-citizen partnership and public managers gain a vital strategy to “increase efficiency and do more with less” (Sorrentino et al. 2018: 279).

Although coproduction has been theorised for three decades, it has only recently become an object of popular academic interest in the fields of urban planning and studies (Mitlin 2008, Watson 2014, Wolf & Mahaffey 2016, Nesti 2018, Chatterton et al. 2018). The concept has been explicitly refined to the co-production of added-value, transdisciplinary knowledge between assumingly complementary knowledge sets of professionals (planners, architects, designers, and researchers) and local lay citizens (Nesti 2018). Thus, coproduction has been (re)enrolled as a discursive engagement strategy where alternative knowledge is produced in the alternative contexts of urban living labs (Nesti 2018) or co-production laboratories (Chatterton et al. 2018). In such contexts organisational and disciplinary boundary-crossing occurs which theoretically facilitate generative discussions on matters of concern which “accelerate novel and progressive approaches to place-based innovation and civic enterprise” (Chatterton et al. 2018: 227). Again the theoretical expectations are high. Although rooted in social and ecological justice concerns and with aims noble aims to facilitate more community control over the production of space, coproduction remains explicitly focused on abstract discursive encounters (Wolf & Mahaffey 2016). There is a need to incorporate both the strategic and operational modes of coproduction processes and include the embodied social and material practices that go into the day to day management, implementation and maintenance of public urban spaces, goods and services. What happens after such innovative and transdisciplinary knowledge is coproduced?

Critical scholars question the validity of coproduction’s ambitious theoretical claims and ask why has it become such a seductive ‘magic concept’ (Pollitt & Hupe 2011) gaining increasing popularity across multiple disciplinary fields (Watson 2014, Voorberg et al. 2015, Jo & Nabatchi 2016, Sorrentino et al. 2018). Recent systematic reviews of coproduction literature reveal that the socio-political dimension of coproduction was and still remains significantly under-theorised (Watson 2014) and most academic studies focus on factors

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influencing coproduction processes ‘while hardly any attention is paid to the outcomes” (Voorberg et al. 2015: 1334). Such findings increase concerns that rather counteracting neoliberalism coproduction may only serve as a public sector reform strategy to pass public responsibilities onto citizens as a solution for political legitimacy deficits and austerity budgets (Voorberg et al. 2015). It becomes of critical importance, therefore, to understand whether state practices of coproduction are promoting ‘responsibility without power’ (Peck & Tickell 2002: 386) and how (dis)empowerment outcomes theoretically relate to particular forms of

coproduction.

The cautionary systematic reviews have recently motivated coproduction scholars to grant more theoretical attention the socio-political dimension, foregrounding rather than invisibilising the ‘inherent tensions’ and power asymmetries that exist between state and citizen co-producers (Pestoff 2012, Osborne & Stroksch 2013, Jo & Nabatchi 2016, Sicilia et al. 2015, Sorrentino et al. 2018, Nesti 2018, Bussu & Gallanti 2018). Correspondingly, Osborne & Stoksch conceptualise ‘enhanced coproductions’ (Osborne & Stroksch 2013, Stott-ESF 2018) to identify and work from more just exchanges where additional responsibilities equate to more power because citizens gain access to the strategic mode of coproduction where decisions are made relating to the allocation of state resources. Furthermore Watson (2014) suggests a two-part coproduction typology which distinguishes between ‘bottom-up’, ‘civic movement-initiated’ coproductions and ‘top-down’, ‘state-initiated’ coproductions (Watson 2014) which centre power relations and explicitly theorise how differences in empowerment outcomes occur.

This research project is also committed to this emergent academic endeavour which seeks to fill the gaps in coproduction literature by understanding and developing theoretical relationships between coproduction types and empowerment outcomes via empirical investigation. This means a state of art literature review which dissects the theoretical inferences within Osborne & Stoksch’s (2013) and Watson’s (2014) empowerment-oriented conceptualisations of coproduction. With these and other relevant theoretical inferences an integrative theoretical framework is formed and an operational conceptual model that draws from rich critical insights on state-society coproductions of urban greenspaces (Chapter 2). The result of this process is an explanatory, two-level theory, research structure which first tests how ‘enhanced coproductions’ (Osborne & Stroksch 2014, Stott-ESF 2018) occur and secondly whether this type of coproduction relates to empowerment outcomes. Additionally, the research tests whether an enhanced ‘civic-movement initiated’ case’ of coproduction relates to more empowerment outcomes than an enhanced ‘state-initiated case’ of coproduction (Watson 2014). This is achieved by using complementary mix of qualitative methods to compare the empirical cases for variations in the distribution and sequencing of citizen roles which correspond to enactments of either to more empowering strategic mode or less empowering mode of coproduction (Chapter 3).

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The case selection grounds the research in the context of two groups of food gardeners who collaborate with state actors in the coproduction of publicly-accessible edible urban greenspaces that fall within the political administration of La Reina, a suburban municipality in Santiago, Chile. These cases are specifically selected and justified as valid instances of enhanced coproductions representing either side of Watson’s two-part coproduction typology (Chapter 4). Then the results of a 5 month data collection processes are presented and analysed with a discussion of their relevance to the coproduction theory (Chapter 5). The results evidence that enhanced coproductions of edible urban greenspaces correlate with empowerment outcomes particularly for the actively participating citizen/community groups. Furthermore, the civic-movement initiated case correlates with more group and broader community/neighbourhood empowerment outcomes than the state-initiated case as theorised. The data rich processural analysis generates further understanding into the theoretical linkages between coproduction modes and the role of regular inter-group interactions which are later summarised in Chapter 6. Rarely included perspectives of non-coproducing local inhabitants

problematize coproductions of public greenspaces evidencing the ‘win-win-lose’ outcomes which demand further research into how inadvertent processes of enclosure can be prevented.

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Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework

This theoretical framework first identifies and organises a variety of theoretical assumptions formulated within distinct interpretations of the concept of coproduction as a means to address the research problem and questions. The result is an interdisciplinary theoretical framing which primarily combines interpretations from public management and administration journals with critical development and urban studies journals to understand and incorporate contrasting state-centric and civic movement-centric coproduction framings. The integrative framing focuses on the interaction between differences in the principal motivations and

organisational cultures of participating groups to explain for the differences in the roles and associated tasks which citizens get to enact. The focus on citizens’ roles in different phases and modes of coproduction represents a common ground which both disciplinary groups use to theorise the socio-political dimension of coproduction processes and its relation to empowerment. The general theoretical framework is then contextualised and oriented towards operationalization by attuning specifically to research on society-state coproductions of edible urban greenspace. From this empirical context, the theoretical assumptions contained within Watson’s (2014) two types of coproduction, state-initiated and civic movement-initiated, will be investigated in relation to empowerment processes and outcomes. The chapter concludes with an operational conceptual model that frames the research to integrate and generate further understanding between the identified theoretical inferences which primarily relate coproduction processes with empowerment outcomes.

2.1 Coproduction theory:

Co-production is an inevitable and ubiquitous feature of modern societies. It cannot not happen. The only question is how it is designed and practiced, what practices and processes get used, and therefore which producers play what roles (i.e., how power is allocated) and what products (i.e., knowledge, people, and socio-ecological arrangements) emerge as a result.

(Miller & Wyborn 2018: 7) Co-production can be understood as an exploratory space and a generative process that leads to different, and sometimes

unexpected, forms of knowledge, values, and social relations (Filipe, Renedo & Marston 2017: 1) According to Howlett et al. (2017: 487), co-production should be viewed ‘using an integrated lens if studies of coproduction are to advance’. Miller & Wyborn (2018) demonstrate the coexistence of multiple theoretical

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interpretations of coproduction from diverse disciplinary traditions that can be progressively synthesised according to the particular objectives of a research endeavour. I follow the advice of Healey (2012) to include the ‘origin narrative’ of this travelling concept and to trace what I consider to be its most relevant

movements, appropriations and adaptations for the objective of enhancing urban planning theory and practice in relation to society-state engagement. This has meant focusing on combining theoretical literature from public management and administration with critical urban and development studies journals which links coproduction with empowerment.

2.1.1 Ostrom’s transactional conceptualisation of coproduction:

Coproduction’s origin narrative arises from the context of USA during the period of 1970s recession where many Western governments made austerity cuts on public services and were pressured for public reform1 (Sorrentino et al. 2018). Parks et al. (1981) claim that coproduction was first conceived in a workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University in 1973 which innovatively reframed

citizens/clients as valuable contributors of public/private service delivery tasks in contrast to being passive receivers/consumers of services. A classic example of coproduction is public education which acknowledges that without the active participation and collaboration of schoolchildren and their parents/guardians, teachers are unable to provide quality educational services and public/common goods, such as education or health and policing, could not be realised nor sustained (Ostrom & Ostrom 1977).

From conception, coproduction has primarily been adopted and developed in public administration and management theoretical journals predominately by North American and Western European academics (Albrechts 2013, Bovaird 2007, Miller & Wyborn 2018, Joshi & Moore 2004, Watson 2014). Ostrom (1996: 1073) defined coproduction as ‘the process through which inputs used to provide a good or service are contributed by individuals who are not in the same organisation” and therefore, functionally, coproduction is “one way that synergy between what a government does and what citizens do can occur” (1996: 1079). Ostrom (1996: 1083) formulates an ideal coproduction process as an “equal partnership between

professionals and clients – not to consult them more or to get them to sit on boards, but to use their skills to deliver services, policies, plans or projects”. Thus, coproduction is framed as more collaborative and action-oriented than the dialogical forms of state-society engagement, such as communicative planning which distributes explicit attention to citizens’ involvement in governance decision making processes, typically consultations, which formulate public policy, services, and management goals (Watson 2014).

1_{Sorrentino et al. (2018) observe that coproduction lost popularity during the 1990s during the regime of new public}

management where public service provision became more market-oriented and customer-centered. Coproduction’s recent resurgence coincides with the global financial crisis and continued austerity regime.

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In contrast to more dialogical forms of society-state cooperation, Ostrom’s coproduction prioritises theoretically inferring positive outcomes in public service provision by means of organising the skill sets and experiences of public professionals and citizen-clients/consumers into differentiated, collaborative, and complementary roles. Together, their congruent (inter)actions jointly contribute to the actual execution and materialisation of public socio-spatial processes and outcomes, such as the regeneration and maintenance of public spaces. Thus, attention is drawn to the interaction of actors beyond citizen consultations and

formulation phases as far as full inclusion within every phase of a policy, or service cycle (Sicilia et al. 2015). According to Alford (2014), Ostrom’s strategy was twofold; first demonstrating that ordinary citizens are always coproducing or contributing to the quality of public services/goods, whether that is antagonistically or cooperatively, more or less actively or formally, second persuading public administrators and planners to enhance the value of citizen inputs by deliberately organising them into collaborative arrangements. This original formulation distinguishes co-production from concepts such as cooperation because competition and conflict can and do exist between groups who participate in the co-production of a good or service2_.

This (re)framing shifted attention towards how citizens and public agencies cooperate and share

responsibility, albeit unequally, in the provision/delivery of public services and stimulated substantial interest within public management theory on how service professionals and/or public officials/managers can play “an ‘enabling role’, so that the client actually performs the service”. (Bovaird 2007: 847). The general theoretical supposition is that when citizens play more active and intentional roles as co-producers, i.e. they partly produce the service they use via their inputs, public service provision will become higher quality (Radnor et al. 2014), more responsive to citizens’ lives (Mutton 2014), and more cost-effective (Ostrom & Ostrom 1977, Bovaird 2007). This motivates public service providers to shift from a ‘service-dominant’ approach (Osborne et al. 2013) to a ‘citizen-capability’ approach (Sen 1993).

To make such a shift, Ostrom (1996) adopts a rational choice perspective where collaborative state-society interactions are justified on the basis of cost-benefit analysis. For example, Ostrom’s ideal case for

infrastructure co-production in developing countries rationalises that public agency inputs are more cost-effective in constructing deep trenches and large pipelines along roads whereas local citizen inputs are more cost-effective in deciding, constructing, and maintaining feeder lines within their own residential

condominiums. Table 1 summarises Ostrom’s (1996: 1083) rational choice perspective for state-society coproductions whereby ‘each performs tasks the other cannot perform well’ and ‘has something the other

2_{The concept of co-production has been simplified to the ‘co-’ meaning the relationships between the producers and the}

‘production’ meaning the values which are collectively produced and/or reproduced, including a mixture of public, private, and group values, and the associated services and/or products which come out of the process (Alford 2014). This general abstraction has great affinity with Lefebvre’s (1991) concept of urban space; being the medium and product of social relations (see Wolf & Mahaffey 2016 for a synthesis).

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wants’. Small-scale projects, particularly constructions of physical infrastructure in public/common places (e.g. streets, shared housing), are theorised as more appropriate for successful coproduction outcomes. This is because social capital from local communities and/or neighbourhoods can be utilised and enhanced through the process of organising around service provision and management of common pool resources (Ostrom 1996). Furthermore, residents are assumed to have valuable local experiential knowledge, complementary to professional technical expertise, and the practical capabilities and time to efficiently construct and monitor the infrastructure (Ostrom 1996). Therefore, coproduction processes are shaped by “the nature of the good or service itself and on the incentives that encourage the active participation of others” (Ostrom 1996: 1073).

State Civil society

Principal agents Public officials/service professionals Active citizens/service users Complementary

Coproduction Roles

Public agencies have the resources to construct and connect large trunk lines and treatment plants

Residents have the skills to dig, maintain, and monitor smaller feeder lines

Knowledge transaction Professional, expert, technical knowledge Local, lay, experiential knowledge Trade-offs Paying public officials to work with

communities in the time-consuming process of negotiating local contracts

Intensive involvement in the initial design and continuing

maintenance, time and energy Short-term benefits

(outcomes)

Save costs by not having to extend expensive trunk lines nor maintain them

Gain a valued public service, empowered by making real decisions

Long-term benefits (outcomes)

Gain trust of citizen groups and learn to incorporate citizens assets into the delivery of better quality public services in the future

Residents enhance organizational capabilities and social capital (Putnam 1993) to increase the quality of services from multiple government agencies

Table 1 – Summary of Ostrom’s (1996: 1083) transactional approach of an ideal society-state co-production based-on the case of the design and implementation of two-part sanitation systems in marginalised urban areas in Brazil.

Drawing from the same ideal case, Ostrom (1996) rationalises that local citizens are incentivised to co-produce with the state as there are more benefits than trade-offs (see Table 1). Firstly, residents access state resources in the form of new infrastructure which they may not have received if they did not commit to construct and maintain the infrastructure (ibid). This is because costs are deemed too expensive for the state to be wholly accountable for (ibid). Furthermore, by deciding collectively on the layout and management of the public service/good, the local citizens become more empowered because they gain skills, enhance their organizational capabilities and increase their confidence to make demands and work with public institutions as equal partners in the future (ibid). Nonetheless, Ostrom (1996: 1080) reflects, “designing institutional

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arrangements that help successful coproductive strategies is far more daunting that demonstrating their theoretical existence”.

The idealism of Ostrom’s conceptualisation has been significantly problematized by the subsequent

dominance of a market-oriented New Public Management regime in many Western countries (Head & Alford 2015). Corporations and companies have become key partners in public service/good provision as a

consequence of a sustained period of neoliberalization where accompanying policies substantially privatised public service providers and/or outsourced (externally contracted) particular service tasks that were

previously publicly controlled (Sorrentino et al. 2018). The consequent proliferation of ‘public-private partnerships’ complicates the designing institutional arrangements for state-society coproductive strategies because the private sector’s primary objectives and incentives for collaboration are distinctly profit-orientated (Bovaird 2007, Head & Alford 2015). These changes have generated serious concerns that coproduction becomes a New Public Management tool for states to deresponsibilise from public service provision, burden citizens with promote citizen ‘responsibility without power’, and facilitate less accountable private companies to acquire public resources (Peck & Tickell 2002: 386, Head & Alford 2015, Sorrentino et al. 2018).

With this change in political-economic context, public administration/management scholars have had to rework the concept of coproduction in an effort to realistically hold onto collaborative and synergistic potential of inter-group and inter-organisational relations in public service/goods delivery (Joshi & Moore 2004, Boyle & Harris 2009). The main strategy has been to protectively refine the concept with more specific parameters. For example, Boyle & Harris (2009: 11) re-define co-production as “delivering public services in an equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals, people using services, their families and their neighbours” so they “become far more effective agents of change”. Coproduction is constrained to an appropriate the smaller-scale neighbourhood level while extending its causal efficacy to benefit indirect users within the locality, i.e. thus cementing its public orientation (Boyle & Harris 2009). Furthermore, Joshi & Moore (2004) specify that “equal and reciprocal relationships” mean “regular long-term relationship[s] between state agencies and organised citizen groups where both make substantial resource contributions” (Joshi & Moore 2004: 40). These parameters seek to ensure accountability and prevent reductions in state inputs and citizens substituting public responsibilities. The addition of sustained, regular interactions is inferred as a vital relational requirement for successful coproductions because they are theorised as valid measures and makers of trust between groups (Joshi & Moore 2004, Sicilia et al. 2015).

Despite the refinements of what an ethical version of coproduction should be and which specifications should ensure coproduction is less inclined to facilitate neoliberalisation and be captured by private interests, critical scholars argue that the socio-political dimension is still heavily under theorised (Mitlin 2008, Brownhill

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& Parker 2010, Albrechts 2013, Watson 2014). Is it realistic to expect that equal relations can exist while there are significant power asymmetries in terms of access to resources and decision-making processes between the state and citizen groups? How do power relations configure in coproduction processes?

2.1.2 Watson’s power-centred conceptualisation of coproduction:

In contrast to the seminal formulations of coproduction, which assumed a top-down dynamic of the state designing coproduction for citizens, reflective of a hierarchical institutional culture, Watson (2014) offers a perspective more oriented to the political empowerment of civic or social movements which is sceptical that citizen groups can ever become equal partners with state agencies in coproduction processes.

Watson’s (2014) critical review of coproduction cases analyses that the primary objectives of ‘state-initiated coproductions’ (SICs) are to cut service costs and increase efficiency via voluntary work from citizens as a means to ‘get more from less’ in response to austere neoliberal expansion into the public sphere (Peck, Theodore and Brenner 2009). They key concern is the relative ease from which the original, apolitical

conceptualisations of coproduction can be co-opted and appropriated to instrumentally serve the most valued ideological priorities of a ruling political party and/or powerful institution. Aware of this potentiality,

Watson’s invites academics to upgrade coproduction theory from collaborative idealism into the ‘post-collaborative era’ (see Brownhill & Parker 2010) of contemporary planning by integrating conceptualisations with the significant power asymmetries which exist in society-state coproductions and significantly structure the form and outcomes of coproduction processes.

To facilitate this theoretical upgrading, Waston (2014) presents a two-part typology of coproduction. Structurally, Watson’s typology is a dialectical opposition whereby the category of SICs contrasts with ideal ‘bottom-up’ or ‘civic movement-initiated coproductions’ (CMICs) whereby “civic movements, usually with supporting NGOs, initiate processes of self-managed environmental improvement and approach the state to engage in a partnership” (Realising Just Cities 2018). The former is predominately abstracted from and therefore most relevant to global North contexts of Western liberal democracies with strong public

institutions and highly industrialised and financialized capital-rich economies. The latter frames coproduction primarily as a “political strategy used by citizen groups and social movement organisations to “enable individual members and their associations to secure effective relations with state institutions that address both immediate basic needs and enable them to negotiate for greater benefits” (Mitlin 2008: 339, quoted from Watson 2014: 66). A pro-poor, poverty-alleviation framing is consistent with the cases that Watson draws from, which is typical of much global South theorised research, such as Southern urbanism (see Pieterse 2011, Parnells & Robinson 2012, Schindler 2017) which prioritises understanding how marginalised groups (can better) engage with the state to secure material and political gains (Watson 2014). Thus, coproduction is

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“positioned as a form of ‘social inclusion’: a means to incorporate ‘hard to reach’ or ‘excluded’ communities into existing power structures” (Bell & Pahl 2018: 110).

A crucial distinction with Watson’s (2014) conceptualisation of coproduction and that of earlier public administration/management interpretations is that power inequalities between participating groups are of central theoretical importance. For example, bottom-up coproductions are conceived as explicitly political and mostly based upon agonistic partnerships meaning that possibilities for volatility and unpredictability are accepted, if not even expected, in the process of strategic spatial planning and delivery (Watson 2014, Albrechts 2013). Such political theorisations are justified by the assumption that multiple power asymmetries exist between smaller-scale, self-financed citizen groups and larger-scale, publicly-financed administrations which historically have little experience nor motivation to relinquish and directly share decision-making power with civil society in matters of urban environmental governance (Albrechts 2013).

Another crucial distinction is that community empowerment is an explicitly theorised outcome for

coproduction processes as compensation for citizens and community groups taking on larger shares of public responsibility from the state (Watson 2014). With more responsibility, comes more power. Watson

formulates community empowerment multiply as collectively gaining (1) access to state resources and (2) decision-making processes, such as designing, planning, and managing of spatial development/interventions, to ensure the realisation of a longer-term, more visionary form of empowerment where (3) civic/community groups inhabiting a shared territory become increasingly autonomous, i.e. self-organised/reliant. Within this, there are two key theoretical assumptions: strategic state partnerships are a tool for community empowerment and the more that communities decide on the public/common processes which affect their lives, the more empowered they become in the sense of increasing autonomy.

State-initiated (top-down) Coproduction type Civic movement-initiated (bottom-up) Service cost-effectiveness, increase

political legitimacy and benefit from social capital

Primary Objectives & Outcomes

Community empowerment (access to state resources, citizen control over political processes, territorial autonomy) More vertical and hierarchical with

marked divisions of labour

Primary Organisational

Culture

More horizontal, e.g. open assemblies and consensus decision making

Hierarchical state agencies in direct

contact with service end-user Inter-group Structure Civic movement usually in alliance with NGOs negotiating with state agencies Expert, scientific, technical _{available knowledge Local, community, experiential}Most valued and

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Watson’s typology maintains the distinction between which group initiates as the principal ontological difference and causal factor in determining the form and outcome of coproductions, despite also acknowledging that the operation of power can vary after initiation, e.g. a bottom-up coproduction can become state-led and hierarchical. In other words, coproduction processes are conceptualised as path dependent processes where differences in the organisational culture of the initiating group, summarised in Table 2, are have sufficient causal efficacy to be a theoretically-valid typology (Waston 2014). Therefore, Watson theorises that more community empowerment is caused by CMICs because the initiating group maintains its comparatively horizontal organisational culture throughout the process. This enables

communities to directly participate in empowering decision-making processes as they access state resources and work towards territorial autonomy.

Although Watson’s perspective foregrounds power and combats previous state-centric framings with the objective of achieving community empowerment, the ideal civic-movement, bottom-up alternative can also be problematized and generates further questions. For example, acknowledging the presence of power asymmetries, why would a powerful state change its hierarchical organisational culture to match that of the more horizontal civic initiators? Is it more likely, that Watson’s typology represents two contrasting and generalised state and civic movement perspectives that co-exist in tension during coproduction processes? Is citizen control and autonomy the end goal of empowerment for all communities? Which decision-making processes and state resources equate to empowerment and how can they operationalized when investigating coproductions?

2.1.3 Operationalizing coproduction with empowerment outcomes:

Since Watson’s power-centred perspective, public administration/management scholars have reworked coproduction, granting more theoretical attention to its socio-political dimension via increasing interest in New Public Governance and Social Innovation (Pestoff 2012, Voorberg et al. 2015, Sicilia et al. 2015, Jo & Nabatchi 2016, Nesti 2018, Sorrentino et al. 2018). This means theorising that ‘inherent tensions’ exist between groups involved in coproduction activities (Jo & Nabatchi 2016: 1102) and integrating the goal of empowerment for marginalised citizens and communities, which before sat on the periphery of coproduction theory (Pestoff 2012, Osborne & Stroksch 2013, Jo & Nabatchi 2016, Sicilia et al. 2015, Sorrentino et al. 2018, Nesti 2018, Bussu & Gallanti 2018).

Osborne & Stoksch (2013) provide a practical solution to the puzzle of operationalizing empowerment within coproduction processes. Only ‘enhanced coproduction’ can cause better quality public services/goods and citizen/user empowerment because that is when citizens are “involved in both the formulation and the development of the strategic (design, governance, plan) and operational (implement, manage, maintain)

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modes of coproduction (Osborne & Stoksch 2013: 537, Scott & ESF 2018). This means going beyond the

‘tokenistic levels’ of Arnstein’s (1969) ladder of citizen participation (inform, consult, placate) to instances of citizen power where deliberative or direct democracy is practiced in partnership with public officials, citizens are delegated power and attain near full citizen control (Stott-ESF 2018). This strategic-operational

perspective facilitates a more detailed understanding and the imagining of a ‘coproduction continuum’ where more responsibilities and powers are distributed to citizens by evidence of their occupation of different roles and associated tasks within various phases or moments of coproduction (Stott-ESF 2018).

Another contribution to the operationalization of empowerment within coproduction processes is Voorberg et al.’s (2015: 1334) “systematic review of 122 articles and books (1987-2013) of co-creation/co-production with citizens in public innovations”. Concerned that the concepts may only serve as a public sector reform strategy to deal with political legitimacy deficits and austerity budgets, the review sought empirical evidence for the positively theorised citizen outcomes (Voorberg et al. 2015). They found that most studies focused on factors which influence co-production/co-creation processes “while hardly any attention is paid to the outcomes” (ibid: 1334). In response, Voorbeg et al. proposed a typology which attunes to relational differences in power and responsibilities between co-producers by identifying the different roles and

associated activities that citizens enacted in different cases of coproduction. This meant empowerment could be theorised as an outcome of a coproduction process by observing whether citizens enact more or less roles empowering roles and associated activities.

Citizen role and degree of

political empowerment Description and example Co-designer

Higher empowerment

Public organizations invite citizens to decide the content and process of service delivery. For example, the deciding design and maintenance of outdoor recreation in a park (Wipf, Ohl, and Groenveld (2009). (Co-)initiator

Higher empowerment

Citizens initiate and formulate a publicly-valued service and the government follow the initiative and enter into a collaborative arrangement. For example, citizens restored a monument then government reopened as a historic centre with a co-management agreement (Rossi 2004).

(co-)implementer

Lower empowerment

Citizens voluntarily agree to perform some implementation tasks of a public service that in the past were carried out by government. For example, citizens separate types of rubbish or compost park leaves to assist in waste management (Benari 1990).

Table 3. Co-creation/co-production typology: differentiated by the citizens’ role and associated differences in political (decision-making) empowerment. Adapted from Voorberg et al. (2015)

Table 3 illustrates the three main citizen roles that Voorberg et al.’s (2015) systematic review identified. Higher levels of political empowerment are ascribed to citizens as co-designers and initiators because the roles include the enaction of strategic decision-making power whereas solely implementing is understood not to. The review also analysed a pattern whereby a publicly-valued citizen initiatives negotiate a collaborative

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arrangement with public agencies to access state resources while retaining decision making power in a co-management/governance arrangement (Voorberg et al. 2015). This finding corresponds with Watson’s typology, whereby the initiating group has a structuring effect on the type of roles that citizens enact with access to strategic power sharing tasks being more likely when the good/service was initiated by citizens. A final socio-political reworking of coproduction is the distinguishing between three levels or socio-spatial scales of coproduction (individualist, group, collective) which theoretically correspond with three levels of empowerment outcomes by means of the distribution or ‘scope’ of benefits (Bussu & Gallanti 2018, Nabatchi et al. 2017, Bovaird et al. 2015, Brudney & England 1983). Collective co-production is expected to ‘translate into programmes that benefit the whole community rather than particular groups of users only’ (Nabatchi et al. 2017). Individualist coproduction is theorised as direct user empowerment via choice expansion as they personalises their service experience for self-benefit. With individualist coproductions, Nabatchi et al. (2017: 349) analyse an elevated risk that overall service quality may decline for those who are not in a position to “capitalise on the new level of agency and independence on offer”. This would “exacerbate class-based power asymmetries”, (re)empowering some while disempowering others (ibid: 349). The meso ‘group’ level is conceived as having intermediate degrees of co-production benefits (Bovaird et al. 2015) whose hybridity provides valuable research opportunities to understand “how individual and collective co-production levels blend and relate” (Chaebo & Medeiros 2017: 620).

Informed by the New Public Governance framework, collective action is theorised and prioritised as a means to achieve broader community empowerment outcomes and better quality services societally (Pestoff 2014, Sorrentino et al. 2018). According to Pestoff (2014: 6) the reason for this collective preference is that it “promotes greater transparency and accountability than ‘consumer’ choice and individual coproduction” because citizen groups interact and decide together rather than having separated and individuated relations with the state. Furthermore, Pestoff (2014) ascribes smaller groups with more efficacies to organise collectively particularly when they are narrow, well defined groups with similar needs and value priorities. Therefore, parental group managing and maintaining their children’s local neighbourhood childcare with public financial support is theorised to collectively organise more effectively than a larger group with broad, amorphous and diverse needs who manage and maintain a public greenspace. This is because smaller groups “can easily monitor each other’s behaviour and contribution to a common project” addressing deviations from agreements and preventing divisive freeriding (ibid: 7).

A smaller citizen group size is also theorised to facilitate more frequent face-to-face interactions both internally and with public authorities (Pestoff 2014) which is a relational requirement for the development of more trusting and durable bonds (Joshi & Moore 2004). “By contrast, a large heterogeneous group that never meets face-to-face will have major problems in agreeing to cooperate for a collective goal. That does not

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mean it is impossible, but clearly less likely and less sustainable” (Pestoff 2014: 10). Such reasoning indicates that socio-spatial factors of group size and qualitative relational proximity (shared needs and value priorities), are also theoretically significant in coproduction processes and outcomes. Therefore, they are worthy of consideration in combination with Watson’s socio-temporal theoretical contribution which gives theoretical primacy to the qualities of the group which initiates a direct, state-society coproduction sequence.

In summary, this section has discussed different conceptualisations and associated typologies of coproduction that most directly relate to empowerment processes and outcomes. This has meant focusing on the concept of ‘enhanced coproduction’ where more empowerment is theorised for citizen actors because they are involved in both the strategic (govern, design, plan) and operational (manage, implement, maintain) modes of coproduction processes (Osborne & Stoksch 2013). Within enhanced coproductions Watson’s (2014) two types of coproduction can be identified to promote understanding and awareness of the power dynamics between and within citizen and state groups. Due to their hierarchical organisational culture and top-down decision-making process, Watson (2014) theorises that SICs cause less ‘community empowerment’ outcomes than CMIC types. Finally, the ‘individualist’, ‘group’, and broader ‘collective’ levels/scales of coproduction and empowerment (Nabatchi et al. 2017, Bovaird et al. 2015, Brudney & England 1983) provide an analytical lens to generate understanding on the dynamics and relations between the coproduction types and

empowerment (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Visualisation of the different types of coproduction and empowerment and how they relate to each other

2.2 Contextualising coproduction theory: Public urban greenspaces:

This part synthesises findings from academic literature which have researched state-society engagement in publicly-accessible urban greenspace to contextualise coproduction and aggregate more situated theoretical

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considerations into the framework. With there being few cases of co-productive urban food growing, considerations are extended to urban parks, however this part mainly draws on research on urban farms, and community (food) gardens3. These cases of urban greening are majorly situated in EuroAmerican inner city areas “such as New York City, where land is scarce, real estate values are high, and more or less informal garden projects have been viewed as forms of resistance to urban development and capitalist urban growth” (Marche 2015: 3). The cases are primarily limited to the contexts of North American cities and a handful of European cities all analysed as undergoing neoliberal urbanism (Peck, Theodore & Brenner 2009). Arguably, this still has some relevance to Santiago due to its own long-term experience with neoliberalisation since the Pinochet dictatorship (see Calvet & Broto 2016, Poduje & Galetovic 2006, Harvey 2005) and its prolonged experience of postcoloniality reflected in the continual adoption and adaptation of Western urban planning theory and practices.

One underlying concern that all the articles shared with the co-production of urban green space between public agencies and citizens is that of the state substituting (rather than complementing) its public

responsibilities and budget allocations with citizen/community volunteerism. This expression of ‘roll-back neoliberal politics’ (Rosol 2012) is illustrated by Perkins (2013) in Milwaukee, who observed the extension of austere, market-oriented, and neoliberal policies into the county parks where unionised paid workers lost employment from budget cuts. Only the most privileged neighbourhoods have sufficient surplus social capital to maintain and/or “rescue” their most cherished parks while many others deteriorate and blame is

mistakenly distributed to underprivileged local residents analysed as lacking the skills, knowledge, and resources to sustain green space (Perkins 2013).

Social justice considerations are built upon by Miller (2016) who found that the participation of citizen in urban greening decision-making was unequal with residents from lower socio-economic groups being unable to attend the meetings. This caused more privileged citizens with green values to be the sole co-governors and thereby support public green projects and decide on their co-management arrangements with the

municipality. With next to regulation in a commodified housing market, Miller (2016) highlighted the majority concerns of displacement by non-participating neighbours who prioritised stability in housing over public projects to clean and ‘green’ neighbourhoods in NYC, which may eventually price them out of their homes4.

3_{Most urban agriculture and food growing articles were dedicated to evidencing their numerous positive effects of the}

practice, many also referred to entrepreneurial cases in private land, and most community garden articles were researched as autonomous alternative, self-managed places where state interactions were not included.

4_{For example, new community gardens were attributed to increasing adjacent property values in New York as much as}

9.4% 5 years after initiation (Voicu and Been 2008) and in Barcelona, “the percentage of residents holding a bachelor’s degree or higher increased by nearly 28% on average around a local park against only a 7.59% increase for the district as a whole over a period of 10 years” (BCNUEJ 2018, Anguelovski et al. 2017).

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Such concerns align to Heynen et al’s (2006) recommendation to approach urban greening and gardening by thinking about who is creating what kinds of socio-natural configurations for whom.

The concern and anticipation of displacement from urban green (growth) projects, has stimulated the conceptualisation of green (Gould and Lewis 2012, 2016), environmental (Pearssall 2010, Checker 2011, Pearsall & Anguelovski 2016), and ecological (Dooling 2009, Quastel 2009) gentrification which all conceive that ‘spatial fixes’ in the form of green initiatives are made in correspondence with sustainability

agendas/discourses to boost real estate values and replace marginalised groups of lower socio-economic status, unable to afford increased rents, with the more educated and capital-rich ‘new urban middle class’ (Walker 2016). Much of the literature adopts a long-term political-economic analysis asserting that the recent integration and institutionalisation of community gardens and urban agriculture into municipal planning is merely a temporary tool to keep ‘land warm’ during times of economic crises, where property values fall (Quastel 2009, Walker 2016). Following this analysis, the growing of food on vacant plots maintains a sense of land scarcity, which is a crucial strategy to kick start favourable property value speculation once again (Quastel 2009, Walker 2016).

Such findings and framings generate warranted distrust and scepticism towards the more recent involvement of the municipality in co-funding and co-managing community-initiated gardens or creating new ones. Thus, the relatively recent institutionalisation of community gardens is critically analysed as instrumental to

municipal efforts to remodel neighbourhoods through “a “smart growth” agenda of walkable, green neighbourhoods and sustainable urbanism, an agenda characteristic of environment gentrification” (Marche 2015: 4, Quastel 2009, Checker 2011, Mees & Stone 2012, Tretter 2013). Acknowledging that even radical manifestations of urban food growing can accidentally serve neoliberal interests (McClintock 2014) and be co-opted (Tornaghi 2016), consensus is growing among critically-reflective scholars, that urban agriculture’s nature is inherently contradictory because it can be both, often simultaneously, neoliberal (contributing to community displacement and enclosure of the commons) and reformist or radical (creating community empowerment and post-neoliberal alternatives).

Such conclusions have generated investigations into what makes municipal-citizen and/or NGO-community co-productions of edible urban green space more or less enhancing of neoliberalisation/gentrification, and citizen/community empowerment so that they remain or become “just green enough” (Curran & Hamilton 2010: 1027, Eizenberg 2012, Marche 2015). One answer arises from Eizenberg’s study and the context of 59 civic movement-initiated community gardens being purchased by the New York Restoration Project (NYRP) as a means to expropriate valued green space from market pressures of real-estate developers and the Giuliani administration’s intention to auction the gardens to the free market. Eizenberg (2012: 769) found that the

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NYRP envisioned beautiful green spaces and hired professional designers to redesign the gardens which meant that in many cases “the community remains alienated from the space, which was not produced by them and according to their needs and vision, and now requires a paid member of staff to regularly maintain it (similarly to urban parks)”. Furthermore, “the centralised management of these community spaces by NYRP makes their ongoing existence overly dependent on the organisation’s funding” meaning less community autonomy (Eizenberg 2012: 769).

These explanations correspond with the logical reasoning within Watson’s co-production typology because citizen/community participation in the decision-making, in this instance, the (re-)designing, is theorised as integral to community empowerment because it ensures a degree of citizen control and sustains a collective sense of belonging and identity with the greenspace. Marche (2015) extends on Eizenberg’s findings by first identifying then researching two cases that exemplify a discursive dichotomy of top-down greening initiatives (enhancing gentrification) and bottom-up community-building initiatives (resisting gentrification) in San Francisco. The top-down greening initiative challenges Watson’s framework because two residents with relative socio-economic privilege, “professional in the creative sector with cosmopolitan background”, claimed ownership of public space via beautification (aesthetic greening) and upheld a vertical organisation whereby “two people make decisions and everyone else is invited to volunteer” (Marche 2015: 6). This evidences that exclusive power dynamics exist even within citizen groups and that there is more fluidity in the organisational cultures of citizen groups and/or civic movement-initiatives that, like the state, can also organise hierarchically thereby limiting empowerment outcomes.

Going beyond this dichotomy, Marche (2015:8) evidences a hybrid other, coined ‘missionary reformist’ whereby the municipality’s contractor in a redevelopment initiative applied a participatory service-providing model as the neighbourhood underwent top-down remodelling and infrastructural connecting to the city centre. This model materialised into calendar of activities and “three full-time staff working with community leaders and organisations to increase their capacity to service residents and increase resident involvement in existing programs” (ibid). Marche (2015) analysed that community ownership and high participation were achieved due to residents’ engagement in the master planning (strategic mode), enabling self-identification of valuable and enjoyable collective activities, and also due to pre-existing community bonds. Simultaneously, the garden project also had top-down elements where knowledge and skills were handed down from non-local staff to non-local participants in the form of entertaining educational and healthy-living workshops.

Although enjoyment and socialisation were high in this hybrid case, self-organising around community-defined issues was not occurring. Marche (2015: 10) concludes that “differences in outcomes are not only a question of top-down versus bottom-up, but the type of decision-making process and how the citizens are

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engaged, e.g. a service-provider-to-client relation, on the one hand and community-empowerment, on the other”. Marche (215) analysed the community-empowerment case as symbolically resisting gentrification rather than accompanying or facilitating the process because decisions are made communally to build a collective identity and ensure all residents have a say on how their nearby spaces change. Responding to persistent loss of civic and economic empowerment since the Great Depression they reinforce their community ties with small-scale and collective practices to improve their quality of life (ibid).

Summarising, the literature situated in greenspace coproductions evidences theoretical resonance with the more general literature on coproduction and empowerment. Where citizen and community participation was limited to the (co-)maintenance and even the consumption of pre-designed social and educational

experiences, collective empowerment was limited. The primary motivations of the state agencies were

analysed as cutting service-delivery costs and seeking political legitimacy for sustainable green growth agendas from residents predominately located in or locating to gentrifying neighbourhoods. Concern was expressed whether citizens have sufficient ecological, organisational, and technological skills, knowledge and resources to substitute the work of public professionals. This motivated the analysis that SICs are undertaken as an inter-city marketing strategy to authenticate green sustainable city branding because they do not explicitly facilitate citizen control, nor include a broad socio-economic and cultural representation of citizens in strategic activities. Thus, opportunities for sustainable socio-political transitions are greatly reduced and more radical visions of urban commoning, decommodifying food and advancing solidarity economies are deemed outside the interests of municipal actors.

Agreeing with Albrechts (2013: 49) statement that coproduction is a relatively “radical approach to spatial planning that requires significant shifts in power relations” if both civic movement and state goals are to be realised, this research prioritises understanding how groups do or do not find ways to share power and balance the desires of being self-organised (autonomous) and strategically collaborative (interdependent) (Mitlin 2008).

2.3 An operational conceptual model

The operational conceptual model or explanatory schema frames the research to integrate and generate further understanding between the identified theoretical inferences which relate coproduction processes with empowerment outcomes (see Figure 2). This responds to multiple calls for explanatory research on

coproduction processes (Jo & Nabatchi 2016, Voorberg et al. 2015, Sorrentino et al. 2018). More specifically, this means conceptualising then analysing the theoretical inferences of ‘enhanced coproductions’ (Osborne & Stoksch 2013) with Watson’s (2014) two-part co-production typology for individual group and broader

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community collective empowerment outcomes in the context of publicly-accessible edible greenspaces. The structure of the model, visualised in figure 2 below, is an adaptation from Goertz’s (2006) who advocates an explanatory two-level theory structure with systematic and basic levels of theory and basic level outcomes. This structures the research design into a linear causal chain, although further research is likely to

demonstrate feedback loops and co-constitutional relationships between certain independent and dependent variables (Goertz & Mahoney 2005).

Figure 2: Conceptual model with relationships between key concepts at two levels of theory and basic outcomes

Systematic level of theory:

The ‘systematic level’ is the combination of three factors or a “conjuncture of necessary causes” (Goertz & Mahoney 2005: 501) that explain the occurrence of an enhanced society-state co-production of publicly accessible edible urban greenspaces (see Figure 2, red section). A combination of interrelated state, citizen, and socio-spatial factors were chosen based on their frequency in the literature (see table 2, red section). Voorberg et al’s (2015) review acknowledged a ‘supportive political environment’ as the most frequent

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primary factor for state-society co-productions. This factor is operationalised by evidence of policy and practices on sustainable urban planning and citizen participation requirements which may detail specific citizen roles. Territories and/or public officials that are trained and/or are experienced in sharing decision-making power and collaborating with citizens are also more likely to engage in enhanced coproductions. Available green space and/or vacant plots were identified as a key factor in the review on urban agriculture and community food gardening (Quastel 2009, McClintock 2014, Walker 2016, Tornaghi 2016). The

suburban and peri-urban location of the research cases is theorised as have less locational real estate pressure than inner city meaning more possibilities for greenspace interventions which are not profitable. The final second level variable, ‘desirable characteristics for collaborations’ arises from insights detailed in the theoretical framework of what both citizens, community groups, intermediary NGOs and public agencies may lack and therefore want from others they decide to collaborate with. These characteristics include social capital, environmental knowledge, resources and capacities (see Figure 2, red section).

Basic level of theory:

The basic level is the core of the empirical investigation where cases of enhanced coproduction are expected to relate positively to empowerment outcomes due to trust being built from long-term relationships where the state and citizen groups contributed substantial resources in the coproduction of an edible urban

greenspace. Furthermore, the basic level distinguishes between the key concepts of CMICs and SICs because they are theorized to have differential impacts on empowerment outcomes (Watson 2014). SICs are

ontologically defined and operationalized by more vertical organisational culture with top-down/hierarchical decision-making and less citizen control (see Figure 2 two, yellow section). Conversely, CMICs are defined by more horizontal organisational structure, bottom-up/collective decision-making and more citizen/community control.

To operationalize the concept of enhanced coproduction it is ontologically defined by the distinct roles and/or activities which were found to be distributed unevenly amongst public and citizen co-producers who can enact multiple roles, such as designing and maintaining, during different moments in the process (see Figure 2, yellow section). Citizens groups must be involved in at least one strategic and one operational mode to stand as a valid case of enhanced coproduction (Osborne & Stoksch 2013, Stott-ESF 2018). The roles and the associated empirically observable activities derive from Voorberg et al.’s (see Table 3) citizen role typology with the addition of co-managing and co-maintaining which derive from their frequency in the previously reviewed empirical cases of urban greenspace co-production. The focus on roles and associated tasks as ontological attributes of coproduction is justified by their correspondence in accessing or not accessing decision-making and allocation of public resources, which are intimately bound to Watson’s (2014)

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conceptualisation of community empowerment.

Basic level outcomes:

The basic-level outcomes, or dependent variables, are empowerment outcomes which are theorised as being caused by or positively correlating with processes of enhanced coproduction (see Figure 2, green section). The research conceptualises and operationalizes empowerment outcomes in two ways. Firstly, Watson’s (2014) conceptualisation of community empowerment is foregrounded where local community or citizen groups access state resources and political decision-making to increase their territorial autonomy or community control over public/common goods and services. In the context of an edible greenspace this means deciding on its governance, design, management and maintenance and gaining material and financial resources such as earth, water, seeds, plants, tools, money, and paid technical expertise.

The other way is distinguishing between the individual, group, and collective elements of empowerment (Bussu & Gallanti 2018, Nabatchi et al. 2017, Bovaird et al. 2015) to understand how they interrelate and differentiate by coproduction type. The basic level theorises that civic-movement initiated coproductions will relate more positively with the basic empowerment outcomes because its horizontal organisational culture with collective decision-making means more citizen/community control over the process and therefore a wider, more appropriate spread of benefits to inhabitants of the locality.

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Chapter 3: Research Question & Methodology

This chapter begins with the research question and sub-questions informed and structured by the theoretical literature review and framework from the previous chapter. Then the strategic mixture of qualitative methods are detailed and justified as a necessary and complementary combination to answer the research question.

3.1 Research Question & Sub-questions:

The central research question stems from the introductory problem statements which then directed the engagement with literature and the formulation of the theoretical framework. State-society coproduction processes, especially enhanced coproductions, are theorised as inclusive, empowering and mutually-beneficial (Ostrom 1996, Bovaird 2007, Osborne & Stoksch 2013, Sorrentino et al. 2018, Stott-ESF 2018). Yet

empirical research which tests and analyses the theoretical inferences that relate coproduction process to empowerment outcomes is lacking (Jo & Nabatchi 2016, Voorberg et al. 2015, Sorrentino et al. 2018). In other words, there is a lot more theory than there is evidence.

Furthermore, there are contrasting conceptualisations of co-production from distant disciplinary fields which either gravitate towards ‘state-centric’, public-service-delivery framings (primarily emanating from the global North) or ‘civic movement-centric’, pro-poor and community empowerment framings (primarily emanating from the global South). There is yet to be research which integrates both socio-political framings and investigates their theoretical relevance for an empirical, comparative analysis of both a ‘state-initiated’ and a ‘civic movement-initiated’ case coproduction (Watson 2014). The result is an innovative research approach which foregrounds the power relations and analyses how coproduction types relate to empowerment outcomes. The research is grounded in the context of two groups of food gardeners who collaborate with state actors in the coproduction of publicly-accessible edible urban greenspaces that fall within the political administration of La Reina, a suburban municipality in Santiago, Chile.

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How do different types of enhanced coproductions, civic movement-initiated

and state-initiated, relate to empowerment outcomes in the context of

coproducing edible urban greenspaces?

Sub-questions:

Three sub-questions were formulated from the literature in the theoretical framework to comprehensively answer the central research question. Therefore, each sub-question is followed by an explanation of its purpose and the particular theoretical inferences it employees.

A. How do empowerment outcomes relate with cases of sustained, regular interaction between municipal and citizen actors where citizen actors participate in both the strategic and operational modes of the coproduction of publicly-accessible edible urban greenspace?

This sub-question is needed to address the first part of the research question which assumes that enhanced coproductions relate with empowerment outcomes. Enhanced coproductions are theorised to have

empowerment outcomes for citizens and/or communities because they are involved in the formulation and development of both the operational and strategic modes of coproduction (Osborne & Stoksch 2013). Access to strategic decision-making assumes more access to state resources and greater citizen/community control over the good being coproduced (Stott-ESF 2018). This sub-question gives explicit analytical attention to citizen participation in the two modes to test these theoretical inferences and generate further understanding on the relationships between the two modes.

Additionally, the theoretical role of sustained, regular interaction in enhanced coproduction can be tested. Joshi & Moore (2004) theorise that long-term relationships with sustained, regular interactions play a vital role in building trust which enables citizen/community groups to become more equal partners by accessing strategic modes and sharing decision making power.

B. How do citizen roles and associated activities vary between the state-initiated and civic movement-initiated cases of enhanced coproductions?

This sub-question is needed as a means to operationalize the socio-political dimensions of coproduction and empowerment theory and identify them in the field. By applying and adding to Voorberg et al’s (2015) sequential citizen roll typology (initiate, design, implement) a processural understanding is gained via analyses

Testing and developing theoretical relationships between enhanced coproduction types and empowerment outcomes from the contexts of two edible urban greenspaces in La Reina, Santiago de Chile