Te Rā Whakamana: Co-production With Homeless People

08/07/2025

I’m back. Thank you for indulging me with the week off: I needed it. We all do, sometimes. This post takes up a challenge most reform papers avoid: what happens when implementation expertise shows up in people the system refuses to recognise? Drawing on a Dutch case where a homeless shelter has been self-managed by its residents for nearly 30 years, I argue that legitimacy doesn’t just live with ministers, agencies, or professionals. It lives in people, in relationships, and in the messy practice of trust. That’s where real delivery happens, and why too many of our reforms fail when they keep trying to retrofit control into systems that only work through shared authority.

In my last post, I argued that expertise isn’t confined to ministers, policy advisors, or central government agencies. I proposed that expertise is alive and thriving across the entire advisory system, encompassing iwi, hapū, local government, communities, industry, advocates, lobbyists, academics, and individuals and whānau with lived experience. I proposed that we shouldn’t treat it as a dysfunction, but rather a reality check.

Today, I push that idea a little further by asking: what happens when that expertise turns up in people the system isn’t ready to recognise? And what does it mean for policy in a country where implementation failure is too often written off as a technical glitch, not a structural exclusion?

To think this through, I want to turn to a case study that challenges our assumptions about who can hold implementation expertise. Hoppen, Brandsen, and Honingh (2025) offer empirical insights that help us think this through. They document a Dutch self-managed homeless shelter that’s quietly been operating for nearly 30 years.

Its model is radical in its simplicity: people experiencing homelessness are not just consulted but put in charge. Residents run the place. They manage rosters, decide who gets a bed, enforce rules, resolve conflict, and even determine who stays or leaves. There is no staff on-site outside of office hours. That means the governance and daily function of the service is held by people whom the formal system often treats as incapable.

And yet, it works.

This case demands our attention for three reasons.

First, it confirms what many frontline workers and navigators already know: implementation expertise lives in people, not just systems. But the system often struggles to see that. Lived, relational, and contextual expertise doesn’t appear in spreadsheets. It doesn’t travel easily up hierarchies. And it doesn’t come with credentials. Hoppen et al. demonstrate that, with the right structural fit, mutual commitment, and sustained support, deeply marginalised and underserved groups can effectively run complex services. Not just participate in them. Not just be subject to them. But run them.

Second, the study helps us challenge a persistent, corrosive trope: that homelessness is a “choice”. I hate that trope, but fine, let’s take it seriously for one moment. If homelessness is a choice, then the obligation on the system is to offer more and better choices: ones that carry consequences, dignity, and the possibility of ownership. And that’s precisely what this empirical work reveals: when people are given authority and autonomy over their own choices and environment, many respond with maturity, care, and commitment. Not all. But enough to show that the problem was never about choices or willingness, but the system’s refusal to let go of control.

Third, it collapses the myth that vulnerable people can’t be trusted with the machinery of service delivery. Here, we see people managing others’ safety, making difficult decisions, and holding themselves accountable. Not flawlessly, but thoughtfully. Often more thoughtfully than formal systems designed around rules and sanctions. What makes the model work isn’t perfection. It’s shared responsibility, relational authority, and collective deliberation.

What does this mean for implementation practice here? There’s a quiet challenge here for Aotearoa. For this kind of model to work locally, the people already holding institutional power must step back. In this case, social workers facilitated but did not control. They helped hold the culture, but they didn’t override it or lead the shaping of it. They voiced values, but left decisions to the group. And when things went wrong, they stayed. They kept showing up. Not to intervene, but to uphold the mana of the system they helped build. That’s not just professional discipline. That’s institutional humility. That’s the practical state in action.

And that’s what’s missing from too many of our delivery reforms. We talk about outcomes, co-design, and lived experience, but we rarely create the institutional conditions for those things to matter. We still treat trust as a proxy for control, and we still measure success by how closely the delivery system conforms to Pōneke’s expectations.

What this case shows is that meaningful implementation can also depend on a different logic: one that assumes expertise is dispersed, not centralised; that power should be shared, not hoarded; and that legitimacy is earned at the edge, not declared at the top.

In Aotearoa, where authority is plural by original design, these insights are not optional; they’re foundational. Legitimacy here’s not bestowed from the Cabinet table; it’s negotiated between the Crown and Māori, between the state and its citizens, between agencies and providers, between regulators and regulated parties, and between officials and communities.

For reasons that escape me, we continue to try to retrofit these plural realities into delivery models designed for command and control. That’s why they often fail*. Not because co-production is hard, but because our systems are still structured to resist it. Go back and listen to the whining about co-governance if you don’t believe me.

So, the question for those of us working in policy, commissioning, or implementation is no longer whether co-production is possible. It already is. It has been for decades. The real question is whether we’re willing to build systems that let it matter.

References

Hoppen, M., Brandsen, T., & Honingh, M. (2025). Conditions for involving vulnerable citizens in co-production: the importance of commitment. Public Management Review. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2025.2523953

*And where those systems don’t fail, because outcomes are achieved, trust is built, and people feel served, it’s usually because a frontline team has made it work despite the system, not because of it. Street-level bureaucrats, navigators, and care workers hold the line every day. They bend rigid rules, translate policy into something humane, and carry the relational burden the system won’t acknowledge. If we’re honest, it’s their discretion, courage, and care that keep the whole thing upright.