Co-production in Practice: Responding to Change with Collaboration 

6 November 2025

Communities Working Together Winter Seminar Series | 6 November 2025 Dr Frank Reilly 

Our first Winter Seminar of the 2025–26 series brought together over twenty people from across Argyll and Bute for a rich and at times challenging conversation with Dr Frank Reilly — researcher, consultant, and newly minted PhD in co-production — on what co-production actually is, where it came from, and why it so often falls short in practice. 

Frank’s central argument was deceptively simple: co-production is not a product or a process with a defined end point. It is a relationship — and relationships, once broken, are not easily rebuilt. 

A slippery concept 

One of the session’s most useful contributions was Frank’s willingness to sit with the genuine difficulty of defining co-production. The academic literature, he noted, describes it variously as “a slippery concept” and “like nailing pudding to the wall.” The words people tend to use to describe it — partnership, collaboration, equality — are meaningful, but they don’t necessarily point to the same thing in practice. Theoretically, co-production has been part of Scotland’s policy landscape since at least the early 1990s, shaped first by the excitement around devolution and civic engagement, and then — after 2008 — increasingly by austerity, as a mechanism for managing service cuts rather than genuinely sharing power. 

This distinction, Frank argued, matters enormously. When co-production is used to deliver a predetermined outcome — to get a bill through parliament, to justify a service reduction — it spends social capital without replenishing it. He used the example of the National Care Service bill, where communities and professionals engaged at length in what they were told was a co-production process, only to find their contributions had not meaningfully shaped the outcome. Trust, once spent in that way, is difficult to recover. 

What genuine co-production requires 

Drawing on the work of Nobel Prize-winning political economist Elinor Ostrom, Frank argued that trust, reciprocity and autonomy are the foundational conditions for co-production — not useful add-ons to a well-designed process, but its essential preconditions. Ostrom’s research on how communities manage shared resources showed that what makes these arrangements work is not a set of rules imposed from outside, but norms developed in response to local conditions, with genuine authority delegated to those closest to the resource. 

The implication for public services, in Frank’s view, is significant. It is not enough to invite people into a process; the process has to be honest about the limits of their influence, respectful of the social capital they are contributing, and designed to sustain relationships beyond the delivery of any single product or outcome. If it doesn’t, he suggested, we should resist calling it co-production at all. 

The conversation in Argyll and Bute 

The discussion that followed was wide-ranging. Participants reflected on the tension between the long-term investment that co-production requires and the short-term pressures that currently dominate public sector decision-making — a tension that feels particularly acute in the face of budget cuts facing health and social care in Argyll and Bute. The discussion surfaced a tension that many in the room recognised: that investing preventatively would save more in the long run, yet the systems we work within are structured around balancing this year’s budget rather than borrowing from the future. Frank’s response was direct — the framing of the question is wrong, and until we change it, co-production cannot do what it is capable of doing. 

What stood out was Frank’s observation that something genuinely different is happening in Argyll and Bute — a degree of flexibility, relationship and willingness to work across boundaries that he described as rare and worth protecting. The social capital that makes that possible, he suggested, is finite. It is exactly the kind of foundation that Communities Working Together exists to tend to and build upon.