Coproduzione: uno strumento di riforma in tempi di austerity?

Rethinking the current settings of governance (especially horizontal) is urged by today’s economic and political crisis. Actually, the participative praxis is not just burdensome and costly, but seems to be based more on the citizenship of entitlement rather than contribution. This paper will introduce and discuss a governance solution, co-production, mostly neglected in Italian policy studies, brought back and developed in the user involvement debate which has garnered attention in the UK, the US, other English-speaking and some European, especially Northern, countries. According to Ostrom (1996), co-production is a process through which part of the inputs used to produce a good or a service, but also a policy, are not contributed by the supposed providers (i.e. public officials), but by the (at least potential) receivers. Restarting from co-production can be a way to reinstate the productivity of participation issue, to restore a factually bottom-up perspective and to overcome two misleading contrapositions: the one between governance and government, and the one between inclusive governance and NPM.