ABSTRACT
Leadership of the co-production process is about meaning making, persuasion and negotiation between regular and citizen co-producers in a context of unequal power relationships. Leading co-production is therefore a shared responsibility where citizens and paid staff aim to combine the skills, resources and authority of one another to accomplish a particular task. Leadership theory offers an insightful perspective on the actual mechanisms through which co-production is enacted. A critical relational perspective encourages us to perceive leadership as distributed and collective, rather than residing with individuals, shaping and being shaped by context and having shared sense of purpose and respect for desired outcomes. The chapter argues that two concepts dominate the theory in use by public administration scholars, namely transactional and transformational concepts of leading. It suggests that leadership in co-production is best explored from a critical relational perspective on leadership, which draws on distributed leadership theory.
