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 article 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 the analysis are that co-created innovations are mostly initiated by nongovernmental
actors. The study uses a qualitative approach and is based on
original survey data from our own research, conducted mainly within the LIPSE
research project.
