ABSTRACT

Welfare states develop active labour market policies to encourage labour market participation. Increasingly, these policies aim to involve various service delivery actors and are characterised by a greater emphasis on the co-production of services in close collaboration with users. In the municipality of Nijmegen, such co-produced re-employment services were developed in the summer of 2011. So-called 'work corporations' aimed at re-employing social assistance recipients by offering work, guidance and education and were entirely run by the beneficiaries under the supervision of and with the support of professionals. These work corporations provide an interesting case of co-production, particularly in relation to trust. The chapter describes the experiences of participants, relying on several sources of data, such as repeated questionnaires, interviews with participants, project leaders and policy makers. Finally, co-production was found to be more likely to foster affection-based trust than cognition-based trust.