Co-Creation Domesticated: How Municipality Employees Recontextualize and Operationalize Principles of CoCreation in the Pursuit of Green Transition

Abstract

Notions of co-creation and co-production have recently gained importance within several governance areas, suggesting new relations between public authorities and citizens. However, whereas the overall principles of co-creation are relatively well established, the ways in which these principles are realized (or not) in specific fields of practices remain to be studied. This does not at least apply to initiatives towards green transition and climate change mitigation, to which this article is devoted. The current article presents a case study
of a 3-year long green transition project, based on a co-operation between four municipalities or municipality associated actors in Denmark and Sweden. The case provides an opportunity to study how ideas and principles of co-creation as a general policy paradigm are domesticated when they meet the local experiences of a municipality initiated green transition project. To put the study of domestication at work in a discourse approach, the notions of recontextualization and operationalization are employed (Fairclough 2005). Empirically, the article analyzes representations of the co-creation process made by municipality employees, who met in a series of workshops in order to exchange experiences and develop a common framework.