Abstract:

The co-production of public services is crucial to building a people-centered social governance community. This study proposes a framework of multi-agent collaborative governance (MCG) in co-production and takes the “Village FA” in R County as a case study to explore the impact of MCG on co-production. The research reveals that “Village FA” represents a co-production model involving the participation of society, government, and market actors, which stems from the public's self-organizing behavior. MCG enhances the effectiveness of co-production through mechanisms of social incubation, market facilitation, agenda absorption, and administrative empowerment. Co-production under MCG is the result of interactions among multiple levels of action stages with distinct phase characteristics, thus the application of these mechanisms necessitates consideration of their adaptability. This study contributes by integrating co-production theory with collaborative governance theory, thereby expanding the theoretical framework of co-production. Furthermore, it provides an empirical illustration of the mechanisms and institutionalization process of co-production in Chinese context.

Key words: co-production, multi-agent collaborative governance, IAD framework, social governance community, village FA