The Manchester Briefing on COVID-19: International lessons for local and national government recovery and renewal, Issue 48

This month’s Manchester Briefing discusses co-production as a strategic method for the design and delivery of societal resilience. Building on TMB Issue 33 we detail the opportunities, principles, and techniques of successful co-production. Co-production is a popular approach to service design and delivery and has been found to exist in all sectors of public services including education, agriculture, health, local governance, and information technology among others (Khine et al., 2021). At its simplest, it involves working with others to design and deliver strategies with the aim of achieving a collective outcome, in our case, to build societal resilience.

Some examples of co-production activities include:

• working with small businesses to improve supply chain resilience and collaborate to implement new sector standards that lead to more resilient supply
• collaborate with voluntary sector organisations to develop new processes that encourage disaster volunteers to work through existing charities and official structures
• conducting workshops with communities to think through how their community group can integrate with resilience partnerships and then implement those for preparedness and response activities
• facilitating training and mentorship opportunities to equip participants with necessary skills to support in the co-production process