Abstract
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Studies evidence that contemporary societies demand different, advanced public administration models; more specifically, citizens want to upgrade their role from being passive clients to being active, more demanding, influential, public service co-creators. Public services need to be renewed and digitized, and the way they are renewed, including related legislation and public policy, needs to be changed. Such a shift can be linked to the concept of New Public Governance (NPG), which stimulates the development of new forms of leadership to support collaborative public innovation, including co-initiation, co-design, and co-implementation with stakeholders, such as citizens, non-governmental organizations, private companies and interest groups.
Different stakeholder groups play different roles in relation to public services and have different perspectives in terms of which problems should be addressed (Bianchi et al., 2017), which services should be provided to address said problems and how to solve said problems co-creatively, making collaboration difficult (Bryson et al., 2015). Firstly, the politicians involved want public service users to feel the benefit of said services because public service users are voters. Secondly, public servants want to provide easily supported, efficient and effective public services. Thirdly, interest groups, including NGOs, want open, transparent public services. Finally, public service users want low administrative burden services, so they can easily and in a timely fashion benefit from them and better focus on their other endeavours, be they private or business.
Our objective was to ascertain citizens' attitudes and behavior regarding collaboration to better activate, affect, coordinate and guide service users towards common goals, and efficiently manage co-creation, using the Theory of Planned Behavior to detect and evaluate success indicators. We primarily focus on a project initiated by the Slovenian Ministry of Public Administration to develop a centralized digital platform for e-Authorization/e-Proxy (SI-CeP) that enables service users to authorize other legal and private persons to execute online and offline public service access on their behalf, with SI-CeP functioning as a one-stop-shop for authorization creation with regard to public and private sector service provision.
We found that well-managed, well-led and appropriately informed co-creation teams operating in friendly environments better develop successful solutions and innovations to mitigate different social problems through stakeholder observation, interview and survey. Gender was found to be insignificant in terms of determining attitudes and behavior. Our results evidence that the citizens of Slovenia are interested in co-creation and public good provision.
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