The Midas Touch: Towards Developing Rural Public Value with the Co-Creation of Constructing Unconstructed Services Center and Empowering Disempowered Women

Background and Purpose: Co-creation is an effective way to mobilize citizens' active participation and create a pattern of shared public value. However, under the dilemma of rural community hollowing out and service fragmentation, how can “weak co-producers” create public value and boost the endogenous power through co-creation turns into a dilemma.

This study helps to fill the gap by focusing on the evolution mechanism and action logic of co-creation in rural fields, exploring the narratives and interaction between empowered women and grassroots service center, in order to provide practical suggestions for rural community with insufficient endogenous power and public values.

Methods: SPS case study method and semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect qualitative data, taking the "FR Women Empowerment Project" as the key case, which is a successful co-creation case in rural place. 20 women participated in the empowerment project, the head of service center, and 6 social workers were selected as the respondents for this study. Interviews elicited participants’ life history narratives from Giddens’ “life politics” perspective, including how women suffer, why they participate in the project, and what they gain, with a particular focus on their co-creation activity. It also focuses on the empowering strategies of service center, and explores how can it mobilize co-creation. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and coded thematically using NVivo qualitative software, guided by the principles of inductive approach to qualitative analysis.

Findings: The study found service center, women and communities reached value consensus during the preparatory period. During the implementation period, values were co-created in collective actions. Women become participants through co-design and co-implement of service. While service center embeds in the rural public service system relying on the participation of women, form a two-way empowering co-creation mechanism. Finally, the actions of co-producers are unified in value recognition, which achieves the values of empowerment, satisfaction, cost saving, service quality and efficiency, and expands the spillover values like co-creation motivation and ability, public spirit, etc.

How can the co-creation mechanism be realized? This study uses the "life politics" perspective to discuss the action logic of women and service center. During co-creation, trust building, confidence construction, self-identity, dynamic power, and dialogue democracy mechanisms were formed, which not only reflects women's life strategy of using reflexivity to embed in the external environment but also presents a path for grassroots service center to gain resources and policy influence. It reveals the "Midas touch" effect of co-creation in rural areas.

Conclusion and Implications: The finding reveals the importance of cultivating co-creators in rural place and provide valid paths. First, social work should take its professional advantages to empower rural citizens, stimulate the motivation and ability of the public to participate, to form a virtuous cycle of co-creation. Second, by focusing on women's life decisions and individual narratives, social work can connect the co-creation with female empowerment. Third, social work should strengthen the dominant position of residents, and cooperate with social forces to actively embed in the rural public service system, so as to improve social governance.