Co-production of health- and welfare services between local governments and voluntary organizations in Norway and Germany

The object of this project is co-production between governmental bodies and voluntary organizations within elderly care and drug care. The project will clarify the scope of such co-production; variations in co-production practices and policy discourses; implications for the involved actors including the end users of services; and finally what the potentials and limitations are for the further development of governmental-voluntary collaboration in welfare service production. Such clarifications are much needed due to an increased policy attention and resource allocation towards co-production following increased pressure on welfare systems, while at the same time the empirical knowledge on the scope, characteristics and consequences of co-production is inadequate, and theoretical understanding of the implications of institutional context for co-production is lacking. The project will start with an analysis of existing literature and combine perspectives from institutional theory and existing co-production research to develop a conceptual and theoretical foundation for the project. With a main focus on Norway, we will approach the research questions empirically on both the practice- and the discourse-level by analyzing quantitative and qualitative data from local government actors, voluntary actors, and service users (register data, survey data, personal interviews, policy documents and media content). To contrast and validate the findings in Norway, and to improve the theoretical understanding of the implications of institutional context for co-production, we will compare them with a similar study in Germany. Finally, we will synthesize the insights from the theoretical and empirical investigations and perform general analyses identifying the framing conditions for different types of co-production between governmental bodies and voluntary organizations.