Although Elinor Ostrom’s principles for collaborative group working could promote effective and equitable collaborative endeavours among diverse actors/stakeholders, they are largely untested in public service design and delivery. This article demonstrates how Ostrom’s principles could help to mitigate the potential for co-creating dis/value and instead support all involved to co-create systemic public value. The authors develop Ostrom’s work by proposing: an original, systemically-informed re-classification of Ostrom’s principles; that co-creation endeavours can be reconceptualized as a novel way of creating a ‘common pool resource’ and; that failure to adequately address the potential to co-create dis/value can lead to ‘tragedies of co-design’.

IMPACT

This article provides a way to promote more effective and equitable collaboration in the design and delivery of public services. Increasingly public services are designed with service users, but it is common for these provider?user endeavours to perform sub-optimally and/or to have negative outcomes. The authors offer a set of principles and a novel framework for applying them that have been designed to: firstly, mitigate the potential for sub-optimal and/or negative performance and, secondly, promote more positive processes and outcomes for provider?user collaborations. Improving provider?user collaboration in this way will ultimately lead to better design and delivery of public services.