Backward to Build Forward: A Critical Review of Public Value Co-Creation’s Evolution

Abstract

As it has become an older concept that government alone can create value for public, the new theory that is getting its roots deeper these days says that public value is co-created by several stakeholders collectively, containing public itself. This study tries to present the existing literature on this emerging topic of Public Value CO-creation in shape of a detailed literature review. This may help the scholars interested in doing research on this topic by giving them a comprehensive recapitulation of the area and it may be helpful for policy makers in gaining insights from the ongoing work in different fields through this concept. As public value co-creation has emerged from the basic Value Co-creation (VCC) concept, which has been explored to a very large extent that in a few years it produced hundreds of studies carrying out this topic in both theory and practice. But focus of this study was specifically “Public Value Co-creation” so studies were selected through detailed screening only containing this very topic and articles excluding only VCC. After selection of database a detailed content analysis was done. There were some frequently used theoretical frameworks used as a background of PVCC. And there were some studies on public sector services. All are presented in this SLR and based on current trends in the area, some future directions are also provided by this study.