Managing co-design in public services

Abstract

Currently, there is overwhelming evidence ʹ manifested in several programs and public policies on health, educaion or housing ʹof the efforts to solve the emerging problems of our socieies. But the current soluions come mostly from structures, models and processes that were designed to meet the needs of the last century. Today, poliical, economic, technological and cultural phenomena are intertwined forcing public management, as we knew it, to change (RamírezrAlujas, 2012). But if there is an area where the renewal of service designs has not had the expected relevance, it is precisely the public sector. Consequently, in Spain, we are sill trying to do the same things expecing different results. We coninue to operate on the basis of paradigms that are no longer sustained in pracice: in many public organizaions there is sill some hope that through incremental logic they can successfully face new realiies. In short, governments and their administraive bodies coninue to do the wrong thing efficiently (RamírezrAlujas, 2012; Graells I Costa and Ramilo Araujo, 2014; Criado, 2016b), as the last economic crisis has bluntly exposed. As in France (Philippe et al., 1999), Spanish public service organizaions (PSOs) have tradiionally existed in a relaively stable environment, usually characterized by gradual change at a small scale and gradual development, without major changes in the way they designed their services. However, the current joint pressure of smaller budgets, due to the last crisis, and greater poliical and economic uncertainty in the public service contexts have taken their toll. Convenional certainies of the public everyday operaions are no …