Innovation in Public Service Delivery: Civic Participation in Slovakia

Abstract

Participation as such is connected with political, social and civic dimensions. Through participation, citizens can directly or indirectly help to make the public process become more transparent and more efficient. It allows citizens “to see" into a decision-making process, to understand it, as well as contribute and be able to control it. In practice, civic participation has various forms; it includes both formal civic associations and informal groups of citizens that develop activities in order to solve local problems. In this paper we focus on civic participation in the innovation in the provision of public services, i.e. co-creation. Our objective is to map the best practices of co-creation in social innovations at the local government level in Slovakia. The main findings of our analysis are that co-created innovations are mostly initiated by non-governmental actors. Our study uses a qualitative approach and is based on original survey data from our own research, conducted mainly within the LIPSE research project.