Essays in public service co-production: navigating participatory and involvement pathways in education governance

This dissertation aims to contribute to the scholarly discourse on how citizen co-production matters for a wide variety of social outcomes and public values. Essay 1 revisits the conceptual evolution of co-production and how scholars have delineated it. We revisit its antecedents and drivers, more importantly, historicizing why the clashing paradigms in public administration and management matter in the discourse. The fallout and failure of New Public Management vis-à-vis the ascent of New Public Governance herald the advancement of collaborative and participatory approaches. Essay 2 responds to the need of coproduction to meaningfully with outcomesthath we can integrate in public service designs such as in the education sector. In this empirical work, we investigate the role of parental involvement in cultivating an environment which is conducive for learning, using the lens of school leadership. We find that specific dimensions of parental involvement, along with principal leadership, matter for the enhancing learning climate and educational inclusion. Essay 3 contextualizes parental co-production and how varieties of involvement with the school is associated with reading, mathematics and science scores. With parent-student pairs as our unit of observation, we find that the negative relationship of test scores with parental involvement indicate that academic performance is likely activating the parental involvement as a response to address learning challenges. Essay 4 investigates how parental involvement and engagement matters for educational retention in the case of India—the world’s largest education system fraught by challenges of quality, efficiency and equity. Our analytical strategy traces through a temporal mechanism by which parental involvement and engagement is associated with school outcomes, considering child, schooling and other social characteristics. We utilize the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), a unique longitudinal household survey which allowed us look at how the interaction of household-level and schooling characteristics may shape future educational outcomes