The counterplan operates through a co-productive approach that allows co-created participation to overcome traditional administrative hurtles for conditioned incentives.

Beyond the issue of means-testing, critics’ key objection to PI relates to the practicalities of administratively enforcing conduct conditions. If participation is defined ambiguously, monitoring may become ‘practically unworkable’ and PI may become a form of UBI by default. Conversely, if participation is narrowly defined and strictly enforced, a PI will ‘in practice bear a close resemblance to a workfare program’ (De Wispelaere and Stirton, Reference De Wispelaere and Stirton2007: 526). Pérez-Muñoz argues that this ‘rule section problem’ generates two sources of arbitrariness: the danger that the criteria of participation will be defined to the disadvantage of ‘those who depend most on this redistributive programme’ and that the procedure for determining criteria will be ‘non-transparent’ (Pérez-Muñoz, Reference Pérez-Muñoz2016: 181). Below, we explore how a co-productive approach based on co-creating participation options at the local level might ameliorate this challenge.

Towards co-production and co-creation

Activation is conventionally implemented through neoliberal paternalistic frameworks that treat claimants as passive, if not deviant, ‘policy subjects’ who must be ‘resubjectificated’ (Whitworth and Carter, Reference Whitworth and Carter2014: 110) through case management and targeted sanctions. In this disciplinary context, claimants have few opportunities ‘to exercise agency or shape the content of services’ (Lindsay et al., Reference Lindsay, Pearson, Batty, Cullen and Eadson2019: 650). Concepts of co-production and co-creation – often used synonymously with co-production – by contrast emphasise the importance of affirming citizens’ agency in creating public value from the programmes they participate in. Following Verschuere et al. (Reference Verschuere, Brandsen and Pestoff2012), Lindsay et al. define co-production as ‘the mix of activities that both public service agents and citizens contribute to the provision of public services’ (2018: 574), although in more normative terms co-production encompasses an approach whereby outcomes are seen as co-created with citizens’ active participation and where the contributions they make are ‘substantial’ (Loeffler and Timm-Arnold, Reference Loeffler and Timm-Arnold2020: 117). Extending this idea, Osborne et al. (Reference Osborne, Radnor and Strokosch2016: 644) argue that public services should be understood as ‘holistic and dynamic’ eco-systems whereby value is co-created within networks of delivery organisations, service users, their families, and communities. That is, value co-creation depends not just on the interactions between service users and frontline professionals but also on contributions from the wider social systems in which they are embedded.

From a public administration perspective, treating citizens as ‘huge untapped resources’ (Nabatchi et al., Reference Nabatchi, Sancino and Sicilia2017: 770) is often defended pragmatically as enhancing service quality and efficiency, allowing problems to be understood in more nuanced ways ‘than professionals acting alone’ (Fung, Reference Fung2015: 517) and increasing service use by promoting a sense of trust and ownership among users (Fledderus et al., Reference Fledderus, Brandsen and Honingh2014). However, from a capabilities perspective, the most important rationale is that co-production values citizen ‘voice, choice and empowerment’ (Lindsay et al., Reference Lindsay, Pearson, Cullen and Eadson2018: 583), recognising their agency as ‘doers’ and ‘judges’ who actively shape the institutions and policies that impact their lives. Here, co-production normatively mirrors the ‘all-affected’ principle of democratic legitimacy, that the voices of those affected by relationships of power should be heard ‘and have an actual influence on’ (Brandsen, Reference Brandsen, Loeffler and Bovarid2021) the nature of political institutions.

Whether co-production is compatible with the ‘legal compulsion’ (Alford, Reference Alford2016: 686) welfare conditionality entails is much debated (cf. Larsen and Caswell, Reference Larsen and Caswell2020). If participation occurs under the threat of sanctions, any sense that it denotes a form of empowerment seems contradictory. The co-created, capability-oriented PI we propose moves away from enforcing participation through sanctions in favour of an enabling approach that relies on appealing to claimants’ intrinsic motivations through the quality of participation options available. As discussed below, seeds of this approach are already evident in the reforms to Dutch social assistance under the 2015 Participation Act and subsequent ‘trust experiments’ (Muffels et al., Reference Muffels, Gielens, Vos, Muffels and Gielens2019), as well as in recent experiments with co-creating employability services in Scotland (Lindsay et al., Reference Lindsay, Pearson, Cullen and Eadson2018) and Denmark (Larsen and Caswell, Reference Larsen and Caswell2020).

Under the Netherland’s decentralised model, municipal governments – who are responsible for disbursing national social assistance (SA) payments – enjoy autonomy to adjust how national social security policies are implemented. While benefit levels are nationally ‘set in stone’ by indexing payments to minimum wages (Groot et al., Reference Groot, Muffels and Verlaat2019: 282), municipalities retain the power to determine participation requirements. Hence while the Participation Act enshrined stronger participation obligations, each municipality was responsible for determining what these requirements would be and how strictly they would be enforced (Groot et al., Reference Groot, Muffels and Verlaat2019). Many municipalities pursued a workfarist orientation based on strict monitoring and sanctions. However, discouraged by the low success rates of this approach, several experimented with new ways of implementing SA through ‘trust experiments’. While retaining a core commitment to the expectation that all claimants should undertake socially useful activities, these municipalities opted to rely on intrinsic motivations to encourage participation.

Participation was interpreted broadly to encompass a wider range of contributions including education and volunteering. Advisors in welfare offices eschewed close monitoring in favour of trusting citizens not to misuse SA, and offering demand-oriented opportunities on the basis that building trust through the creation of participation opportunities ‘is likely to be more effective in the longer run’ (Muffels et al., Reference Muffels, Gielens, Vos, Muffels and Gielens2019: 115). Accordingly, reintegration/participation plans were designed around claimants’ own beliefs about which forms of participation were important. That is, participation criteria were co-created at the street-level rather than bureaucratically determined, and ‘reciprocity was assumed’ (Muffels, Reference Muffels, Laenen, Meuleman, Otto, Roosma and van Lancker2021: 155) rather than enforced. This did not render Dutch SA a form of UBI because eligibility remained restricted by conditions of ‘circumstance’ (i.e. means-testing) and ‘category’ (without social insurance) (see Clasen and Clegg, Reference Clasen, Clegg, Clasen and Siegel2007).

Related experiments in co-creating participation plans with SA recipients have been pursued in municipalities in Scotland and Denmark. In Scotland, under the ‘Making it Work’ (MiW) program, councils in five local government areas partnered with third-sector organisations to develop employment support services for lone parent families based around principles of co-production. Like the Dutch ‘trust experiments’, the programme was based ‘on a model of voluntary participation’ (Lindsay et al., Reference Lindsay, Pearson, Cullen and Eadson2018: 576): it depended on the quality and range of employability as well as on the training activities made available, rather than the extrinsic threat of sanctions. Participant choice and control over individual action plans were the guiding principles of frontline delivery, while the lead provider organisations were embedded within area-based networks to support information sharing, signposting and greater responsiveness to participants’ needs. Again, there was an underlying belief/trust that citizens would be intrinsically motivated to participate if they considered opportunities meaningful and worthwhile.

In Denmark, following a 2016 budget reform giving municipalities greater freedom to design how activation services were delivered, six municipalities moved towards an implementation model based on co-creation rather than the status-quo of the overall service goal being ‘defined in advance’ as employment (Larsen and Caswell, Reference Larsen and Caswell2020: 16). In contrast to the employment services’ traditional ‘goal steering logic’ focused on measuring activity through frequent meetings and progressions to employment: greater leeway was given to staff and citizens ‘for genuine negotiation of which actions to take’ (Larsen and Caswell, Reference Larsen and Caswell2020: 16), recognising claimants’ own knowledge as being of immense importance to co-creating successful outcomes.

The Dutch ‘trust experiments’, and related co-production initiatives in Scotland and Denmark, illustrate alternative ways of targeting social security that do not rely on strict conditionality and sanctions. In effect, they constitute an enabling rather than demanding approach to ‘activating’ participation, and the existing evaluation literature on these initiatives, while limited, indicates their potential for promoting participation while enhancing wellbeing (Dayson et al., Reference Dayson, Pearson and Sanderson2017; Muffels, Reference Muffels, Laenen, Meuleman, Otto, Roosma and van Lancker2021).Footnote 3

While these examples are encouraging, they also reveal some limitations in realising the proposal developed in this article. One limitation is that, given their employment orientation, they do not go far enough on the ecological side. An eco-social policy orientation would, however, affirm a broader reconceptualisation of participation that recognises the value of re-productive and ecological labour and provides opportunities for people to engage in activities that help to sustain people, the environment and the democratic polis rather than reducing reciprocity to only participating in employment, work experience or training. A fuller eco-social direction is found in Swaton’s (Reference Swaton2018) Ecological Transition Income proposal, which envisages a ‘paradigm of co-construction and active partnership’ between groups of engaged citizens, local governments, and non-government organisations in drawing up lists of activities required in the community that recipients could choose to undertake. Likewise, Stamm et al. (Reference Stamm, Matthies, Hirvilammi and Närhi2020) highlight how potential for volunteering/participating in ‘eco-social initiatives’ – small-scale cooperative initiatives, that integrate social and environmental goals – can be actively enabled by income supports and social inclusion policies. Developing this point, Dukelow (Reference Dukelow2021) offers the example of Ireland’s community employment programme, which enables income support recipients to undertake work embedded in community organisations and focussed on social rather than economic contributions.