ABSTRACT
Today co-production appears to be at the crossroads between different public administration regimes, each with a different focus on when, where, why and how citizens can and should participate in the design and delivery of public services. This chapter introduces the concept of public administration regimes and briefly presents four of them; i.e., traditional public administration, New Public Management (NPM), New Public Governance (NPG) and a Communitarian regime. Both a Communitarian regime and NPG require a high degree of citizen participation in the provision of social services, but they are found at opposite ends of a continuum ranging from individual to collective service provision. NPM places heavy emphasis on competition and consumer choice, leaving it to the market to provide a guarantee of service quality, rather than the activities or training of professional service providers or negotiations. NPM assumes that better quality providers will attract more customers than inferior products or services.
