Research, part of a special feature on The Coproduction of Conflicts in Environmental Sustainability: Concepts, Methods, and Ethics

INTRODUCTION

Solid waste is one of the major challenges faced by rapidly urbanizing low- and middle-income countries. In India, the provision of solid waste management services is the responsibility of the local government (Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change 2016). In response, participatory approaches such as co-production have emerged as viable strategies to enhance service delivery. Earlier studies have shown that services can be provided more efficiently by enlisting the support of the service recipients (Pestoff and Brandsen 2009). This joint production of public services by the state as well as the citizens is termed co-production (Mitlin 2008). It is defined as “a process through which inputs from individuals who are not “in” the same organization are transformed into goods and services” (Ostrom 1996:1073). Citizens contribute by supplying resources, support, and even knowledge for the delivery of services (Meijer and van der Krabben 2018). The focus on knowledge especially is important as it can contribute to improving the capabilities of the actors in coproducing the service (Watson 2014).

Earlier empirical studies on co-production in solid waste management reveal its cultural drivers (Ben-Ari 1990), reliance on public officials and co-production thinking (Landi and Russo 2022), effectiveness as a community-based alternative to top-down regulation (Lu and Sidortsov 2019), and influence of volunteer commitment and peer pressure on household waste sorting (Xu et al. 2016). However, these studies largely depoliticize co-production, overlooking stakeholder conflicts and power dynamics (Turnhout et al. 2020). Such conflicts arise because of differences in values, knowledge, and preferences of stakeholders, uneven distribution of resources, status, and power, as well as divergent expectations (Scolobig and Gallacher 2021). Recent work examines how non-state actors navigate these challenges beyond formal governance. For instance, post-flood interventions in Wayanad, Kerala resulted in contextualized contingency planning (Koshy et al. 2022) and discretionary action by street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) optimized water supply, albeit without addressing systemic inequalities (Subramanyam 2024). In this paper we examine how a collaborative initiative called CANALPY navigates political and social tensions to enable participatory waste governance in Alappuzha. By integrating theories of power (Galbraith 1983) with co-production literature, this study contributes to the growing scholarship on co-production in waste management. Apart from advancing debates on sustainability governance, this study provides lessons for designing more inclusive, resilient social-ecological interventions.

Context setting: solid waste management campaign in Alappuzha, Kerala

Kerala, a densely populated state in India, lies between the Arabian Sea in the west and the Western Ghats in the east. Known for its high literacy (94% according to Census of India 2011), political engagement (Isaac 1985), and environmental consciousness (Isaac and Gopakumar 2016), Kerala’s governance framework is characterized by a highly decentralized system, where local self-governments (LSGs) are mandated to play an important role in public service delivery. In 1996, the Left Democratic Front (LDF) government launched the “People’s Campaign for Decentralized Planning,” granting local governments discretionary control over 35–40% of the state’s development funds (Heller et al. 2007). This initiative enhanced the autonomy of LSGs and institutionalized citizen participation in planning and budgeting (Isaac and Harilal 1997, Isaac 2001, Isaac and Heller 2003). As a result, urban local bodies such as municipalities are responsible for planning and implementing service delivery mechanisms, often in collaboration with both formal and informal actors.

Urban local bodies in Kerala operate under the Kerala Municipalities Act, 1994, and the Solid Waste Management Rules, 2000. Until 2012, waste was managed through landfills, but widespread protests at 13 landfill sites prompted a shift to decentralized waste management (Ganesan 2017). The Alappuzha municipality pioneered the Nirmala Bhavanam, Nirmala Nagaram (NBNN; Clean Home, Clean City) campaign, an innovative model now recognized for its replicability across Kerala (Ganesan 2017). Its key feature was source segregation, enabling climate-friendly, affordable waste treatment that supports a circular economy and creates green jobs. The biodegradable part of the waste stream was to be treated either in the community aerobic bins provided by the municipality, or through in-home composting units or biogas plants. The non-biodegradable part was to be collected by the municipality. This idea of co-production of solid waste management services was also hailed as a participatory model with participation of households through the activity of segregation and contributing to the payment of plastic waste collection.

Alappuzha town located in the west coast of Kerala with a population of 24,0991 (Census of India 2011; Fig. 1) was chosen as the site for a collaborative project by the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (hereafter IIT Bombay) and Kerala Institute of Local Administration (hereafter KILA) called the CANALPY initiative Surveys conducted as part of the CANALPY revealed that the NBNN campaign had minimal impact on solid waste management (Narayanan et al. 2018). CANALPY included research staff from IIT Bombay and interns drawn from the local community. Despite the CANALPY initiative developing knowledge products and sharing insights with the municipal council, their application to sanitation interventions faced socio-political, institutional, and capacity-related barriers (Pillai and Narayanan 2022).

These challenges led to the conceptualization of the Nirmala Bhavanam Nirmala Nagaram 2.0 (NBNN 2.0) campaign by CANALPY and the municipality. The NBNN 2.0 strategy included two activities (Fig. 2): (1) a situational assessment of the different waste types generated in households and management practices (particularly segregation) employed by the residents, and (2) the formation of participatory platforms called clusters, where councillors, resource persons such as Junior Health Inspectors disseminated responsible waste practices to the residents. The aim was to ultimately foster service co-production by encouraging dialogue and deliberation between residents and state representatives regarding shared challenges in waste management. The situation assessment survey was conducted by women’s self-help groups called Kudumbashree. Kudumbashree, introduced in 1998 as a women-oriented poverty eradication mission in Kerala, has its origin in the success of the “urban basic services for the poor” adopted in the Alappuzha municipality (Devika 2016). The survey results indicate the types of waste generated in the households (such as plastic, paper, biodegradable wet waste, etc.) and the practices adopted by the residents for its treatment and disposal, such as household composting/community composting of organic wastes and collection/segregation of inorganic wastes. Haritha Karma Sena is a team of Kudumbashree women who have been assigned the responsibility of collecting, transporting, and processing waste materials in association with local governments.

Theoretical foundation

The original foundational idea of the participation of actors other than the state in the production of services was by Ostrom (Ostrom et al. 1978). This concept sought to involve the public “in the execution of public policy as well as its formulation” (Whitaker 1980:241). The output of this co-production process can be both “services” or “products” (Alford 2014) and hence takes two forms: knowledge co-production and service co-production. In Science and Technology Studies (STS), Jasanoff extended the idea of knowledge coproduction to describe the mutual shaping of knowledge and social order, recognizing that knowledge both arises from and influences social structures (Jasanoff 2004). However, in the present study, co-production is used in a practical rather than analytical sense, referring to the deliberate involvement of non-scientific actors in the creation of both scientific knowledge and service provision (Van Kerkhoff and Lebel 2015).

The process of service co-production refers to the practice of segregating, storing, and disposing of waste by either depositing it in municipal bins or composting it. This process may lead to socio-environmental changes that may empower or disempower communities, necessitating an examination of power relations among actors. The inherent nature of politics in the co-production process involves how power is allocated between actors and the results that emerge from it (Lepenies et al. 2018). A depoliticized understanding of the coproduction process reinforces already prevailing unequal social and power relations (Turnhout et al. 2020). In their more recent writings, Turnhout and colleagues (e.g., Maas et al. 2022) elaborate on differentiated responsibilities in science-policy interfaces, thus offering critical insights into the need for deconstructing the existing coproduction arrangements (Jagganathan et al. 2023). These discussions prompt a rethinking of earlier claims and highlight the importance of unpacking power dynamics to understand stakeholder motivations in engaging in the coproduction process. Literature identifies motivations for co-production, including material incentives, social rewards, expressive satisfaction, intrinsic benefits, and legal compliance (Alford 2002). Other factors include salience, which refers to citizens’ perceiving a topic as important enough to consider active engagement and weighing the investment of effort. “Personal salience” depends on the individual’s perception of how the service affects him/herself, family, or friends; “social salience” is the perceived importance of the issue to one’s neighborhood, community, or even society at large (Pestoff 2009). Other motivations include ease of participation, self-efficacy (perceived competence), and external efficacy (belief in government responsiveness; Van Eijk and Steen 2016).

Analyzing power dynamics shaping the campaign’s execution requires studying the relations of power that influence actor behavior (Dahl 1957). Power, as a multifaceted concept, is generally defined as the capacity of individuals or groups to enact their will, shaping their social circumstances and outcomes (Barnett and Duvall 2004). It is inherently relational; an actor's power exists only in relation to others. Weber highlights this relationality, describing power as “the probability that one actor within a social relationship will carry out their will despite resistance” (Weber 1978:53). Furthermore, power is not an independent entity; it is embedded within social relations but can be wielded through the possession or threat of resources, aligning with Weberian and Dahlian perspectives of compulsory power (Ahrne 1994, Barnett and Duvall 2004). It is further consistent with Galbraith’s conceptualization of condign power, which secures desired behavior through emotional, financial, or physical threats (Galbraith 1983). The other two instruments of power proposed by Galbraith are compensatory power, which influences actors by offering symbolic, financial, or material rewards; and conditioned power, which persuades actors to engage in desired behaviors through education, cultural norms, peer influence, or advertising.

Galbraith’s notion of three forms of power is useful in analyzing stakeholder participation (Reed 2008). Similarly, Hong (2020) explains how both conditioned power and compensatory power are helpful in addressing power relations among stakeholders in environmental decision-making processes. Integrating co-producer motivations with Galbraith’s instruments of power offers a framework for analyzing the mechanisms through which actors exercise influence in co-production campaigns. Facilitators’ knowledge, for instance, can shape negotiations and decisions within the framework of conditioned power. Toffler (1990) underscores the amplifying role of knowledge, positioning it as the most potent form of power and a fundamental ingredient in force and wealth. The mobilization of knowledge across organizational domains is thus crucial for exercising power. Figure 3 shows the analytical framework, which charts this relationship between knowledge, power, and the interests/incentives of the stakeholders.

METHODOLOGY

We utilize a qualitative case study, an empirical method that “investigates a contemporary phenomenon or case in depth in its own real-world context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context may not be clearly evident” (Yin 2014:2). The study is based on multiple rounds of fieldwork conducted at Alappuzha Municipality, aligned with different phases of the campaign: the first round was conducted in November 2021, and the second in January 2022. This study is a part of the thesis of the first author who examined the CANALPY initiative by adopting an embedded case study approach. An embedded case study employs sub-units in order to describe or understand the whole (Yin 2014). This specific study examines the role of CANAPLY as a platform in the co-production process through an analysis of the NBNN 2.0 campaign.

Fieldwork concentrated on seven wards out of 50 included in the campaign’s first phase, comprising four urban center wards and three peripheral wards. The primary method used was in-depth, semi-structured interviews and participant observation. In-depth interviews are one of the most important sources of case study evidence (Yin 2014). The respondents for the interviews included the municipality chairperson, councillors, health inspectors, Kudumbashree members, and residents. Except for residents, the rest of the respondents were selected from the list of stakeholders directly involved in the campaign. This was to gather their insights on decision making and implementation. Residents (co-producers) were selected based on data from the situation assessment survey, ensuring representation of individuals practicing different waste management methods. Random selection was used within this purposive frame to capture diverse approaches to waste segregation and treatment. The interview was held telephonically, and questions were framed to understand the varied interests and motives to participate in the campaign. Further, the paper analyzes three official municipality meetings and 10 cluster meetings held at the ward level. Participant observations were supplemented by pamphlets and notices distributed as part of the campaign.

The data collected are corroborated with information from secondary sources such as survey results from previous studies and information from the situation assessment conducted as part of the campaign. It is important to note that the survey preceded the fieldwork for this study. Moreover, the CANALPY members interviewed for this paper did not overlap with those who prepared the questionnaire for the survey. The interview and participant observation data was transcribed and analyzed by thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006). Themes emerged from the research questions and from the analytical framework developed for the research. The analysis explores participant demographics, the nature of their involvement, stakeholder roles, and motivations. Details of the data collected are presented in Table 1.

RESULTS

Strategic execution of NBNN 2.0: leveraging low-hanging fruit for political buy-in

The NBNN 2.0 campaign had two key activities: a preliminary survey and cluster meetings. The preliminary situational assessment was conducted by the municipality, with CANALPY designing the questionnaire and Kudumbashree volunteers administering it to understand the current status of solid waste management practices. Survey results presented in Figure 4 indicated that the majority of the residents admitted to disposing of the waste on land around their premises. A small minority of residents segregated their waste and used different waste management methods to treat the biodegradable fraction of the waste.

One of the conflicts that had arisen earlier during CANALPY’s work was the expectation of swift results by the elected representatives (Pillai and Narayanan 2022). The absence of immediate and tangible impact led to waning interest and, ultimately, withdrawal of political support. To address this, CANALPY strategically restructured the campaign to leverage “low-hanging fruit,” achievable and, more importantly, familiar interventions that aligned with the political interests of the elected representatives. The campaign’s success was thus determined by the achievement of two specific criteria: (1) all households adopting at least one of three waste segregation methods, i.e., kitchen bins (bio-bins) distributed by councillors, biogas plants, or community composting units; and (2) households handing over plastic waste to Haritha Karma Sena through a user-fee model. These were chosen because they proved to be politically and logistically viable during NBNN 1.

The second activity was cluster meetings, which are participatory forums where councillors reached out to the residents to encourage the adoption of responsible waste management practices. The formation of participatory structures for citizen engagement within local policy making plays a crucial role in the success of co-production (Chaebo and Medeiros 2017, Alonso et al. 2019). The clusters, however, were not only designed for one-way information dissemination. According to a CANALPY team member, “Cluster meetings were supposed to be opportunities for residents to flag their concerns regarding waste management in their wards to their councillors.”

The councillors divided each ward into clusters of 50 households, and participation in meetings was ensured through messaging in WhatsApp groups and personal calls from councillors or cluster coordinators. In the words of 35-year-old Rajesh, a cluster coordinator, “We pass on the information about the meetings and other campaign activities through the WhatsApp group, we circulate the awareness videos about the waste segregation from different parts of the state, it helps to educate the cluster members.”

Examining cluster-level meetings and stakeholder engagement

The organizational structure of the campaign details the different stakeholders who were involved in the campaign (Fig. 5). Table 2 details the roles and responsibilities of the formal and informal actors involved in the campaign. Cluster-level meetings were organized by designated coordinators and facilitated by resource persons from the municipality, such as Junior Health Inspectors. Cluster meetings were intended to be an inclusive platform for deliberation irrespective of caste, class, and gender.

However, an analysis of the meetings showed abysmal attendance levels with limited representation from men. A majority of the participants consisted of self-employed Kudumbashree women and party-affiliated men. Kudumbashree’s organizational skills, accountability, and accessibility make them ideal participants for any program or activity, prompting councillors to rely on them for populating cluster meetings. Williams et al. (2015) highlight that the selection of Kudumbashree participants in government programs often reflects entrenched clientelistic relationships, wherein state actors leverage these networks to sustain political influence. Further, interviews revealed that Kudumbashree members perceive engagement in municipal activities as a means of social mobility and, in some instances, a pathway to political advancement. Their participation, therefore, does not necessarily indicate an intrinsic commitment to environmental concerns or sustainable waste management; rather, it appears to be primarily driven by external rewards, political visibility, and perceived social capital.

These external rewards were identified as primary motivators for other stakeholders involved in the process as well. Cluster coordinators, tasked with organizing cluster-level meetings, are selected by councillors from accessible individuals such as the party cadre. They have strong political ambitions and view their role as an opportunity to establish political credibility. However, their, as well as Kudumbashree members’ participation is largely passive with no substantial contribution to subsequent deliberations or discussions. This reveals a pattern wherein attendance in these meetings is part of their everyday transactions with local politics. It clearly shows that participation is limited to those who already cooperate with various municipality activities and is ineffective in generating public demand for the campaign.

Although initially designed to be inclusive spaces for deliberations between residents and powerful actors such as elected representatives, clusters were relegated to being performative spaces with very narrow impact, if any. In the absence of participation by the target residents, it becomes imperative to understand the underlying drivers of the process of co-production. To understand the same, we sought to explore diverse stakeholder interests and power dynamics affecting co-production behavior.

Power dynamics shape stakeholder interests in NBNN 2.0

Understanding factors that drove co-production will require an examination of the interests of diverse stakeholders and the power dynamics that shaped their participation. Residents, the primary stakeholders in the process, had diverse motivations for engaging in waste segregation. The preliminary situation analysis survey showed that some of the residents were already involved in the segregation of waste. Although the majority claimed to engage in co-production for personal and social salience, some admitted that participation was not always voluntary. External pressures such as coercion from councillors and fear of sanctions played a role in shaping their behavior.

Although councillors’ primary motivation for leading the campaign was their political aspirations, many elected representatives reported that their experiences in NBNN 1 inspired their participation in NBNN 2.0. Similarly, officials who took an interest in the campaign were either associated with waste management campaigns in other parts of Kerala or were generally committed to Kerala’s decentralization campaign. Others participated in the campaign in order to ensure a good service record. As elaborated in above, other stakeholders engaged with the campaign primarily for broader political and electoral opportunities.

The councillors strategically employed condign power, compensatory, and conditioned power to influence residents and other stakeholders. On the one hand, they used their authority to mandate compliance through coercion, often warning residents about penalties or loss of municipal services if waste segregation norms were not followed; on the other, they reinforced desirable behavior by acknowledging compliant households in ward meetings and distributing subsidized bio-bins. Further, through the dissemination of educational videos, WhatsApp campaigns, and strategic messaging, conditioned power was wielded to create a perception that “responsible citizens” segregate their waste.

Although powerful actors like councillors used different instruments of power to encourage specific behavior, the CANALPY team exercised conditioned power to persuade the chairperson and councillors. To ensure the political buy-in of councillors, apart from leveraging “low-hanging fruit,” CANALPY devised a media campaign that employed newspapers and social media for outreach and publicity, which gave limelight to the chairperson and councillors, who thus remained the face of the campaign. This visibility and subsequent political mileage incentivized the political elite to lead the campaign. Ultimately, different actors deployed distinct instruments of power to facilitate co-production: elected representatives and bureaucrats used condign power whereas CANALPY employed conditioned power to foster citizen engagement in service co-production.

DISCUSSION

Although the original intention of this study was to examine the conflicts arising in the design of a co-production campaign, through the course of the work, we have unpacked how power dynamics and stakeholder motivations shape the process of coproduction. The findings demonstrate how CANALPY circumvented the conflicts that emerged during the campaign by leveraging their learnings from previous collaborative efforts with the municipality. The main conflict was in designing the campaign in a manner that meets the expectations of the elected representatives. Interviews revealed that a majority of councillors viewed the campaign as an opportunity to consolidate their political influence rather than a means to improve waste management. It was thus crucial to leverage this interest to ensure the success of the campaign. Naturally, the elected representatives became the most powerful drivers of the co-production process, and findings illustrate how they employed different types of approaches (Fig. 6) to induce coproduction.

A central theme emerging from the empirical findings is the role of power in shaping participation in co-production. Councillors and the chairperson, as key political actors, leveraged different forms of power, condign, compensatory, and conditioned power (Galbraith 1983), to ensure compliance with waste segregation practices. The presence of powerful actors in the campaign process, however, raised concerns about potential conflicts around the varied interests they represented. Engaging with influential actors such as elected representatives shaped the behavior of other stakeholders, often reinforcing existing power dynamics. This dynamic may result in political leaders who have access to opportunities and influence abusing their power and eventually impeding the process of coproduction (Siame and Watson 2022). Although CANALPY imagined cluster-level meetings as invited spaces wherein co-production transfers some power from state actors to lay actors, thus giving them a legitimate voice (Bovaird 2007), inadvertently, they also reproduced existing power differentials in society as the relationship between different stakeholders continued to function within traditional power dynamics.

Although the campaign has demystified how power operates through actors to drive it forward, it then becomes crucial to deliberately shift power by envisioning new spaces for participation that extend beyond performative spaces such as cluster meetings. Creating platforms where individuals can collaborate, reflect, and act at their own pace, akin to the concept of management councils as described by Gutberlet (2015), is essential for the redistribution of power and the emergence of meaningful participation. This highlights the importance of developing strategies that consider local specificities and structural factors such as the heterogeneity of the community while ensuring space for dialogue and negotiation (Pestoff 2009, Turnhout et al. 2020).

Additionally, facilitating community capacity-building activities through adequate investment in training public officials will lead to the fostering of an institutional culture that is receptive to the process of co-production (Steiner et al. 2022). Our study shows how municipal officials, political representatives, and intermediaries negotiate power and incentives to sustain waste segregation, reinforcing that co-production is deeply embedded in existing governance structures. Insights from recent studies by Koshy (2022, 2024) and Subramanyam (2024) also highlight how governance adapts through informal mechanisms and discretionary actions. Koshy’s work on actor ecosystems and blurred organizational boundaries in post-disaster governance aligns with our findings on CANALPY’s role in Kerala’s decentralized system. Subramanyam’s study on discretionary governance in Tamil Nadu underscores the influence of non-state actors and frontline workers in shaping service delivery beyond formal mandates.

Another critical factor that contributed to the design of the campaign was the preliminary information about the status of waste management. This formed the basis on which the CANALPY team and the chairperson convinced other stakeholders to participate in the co-production process. The strategic alignment of this information with the interests of political stakeholders facilitated the expansion of co-production. This is in line with earlier findings, which indicate that aligning the sustainability experiments with government expectations is instrumental in securing support and ensuring long-term sustainability (Wang et al 2024). Our analysis also highlights the central role of political actors to give teeth to coproduction, aligning with findings from Shanghai where local governments incentivize participation of residents and share resources to sustain and scale initiatives (Arantes et al. 2020). However, unlike this case of government-led collaboration, our work paints a contrasting picture of an NGO-initiated partnership.

Engaging with previous scholarship that foregrounds the political implications of co-production (Lepenies et al. 2018, Turnhout et al. 2020) showed the need for unpacking structural dynamics in power-laden institutional contexts. However, that can risk overdetermining the agency of local actors. Although it is true that power asymmetries between actors exist as in many other cases of service coproduction (for example, Chatterjee and Kundu 2022), contingent strategies and improvisations, such as the use of scientific knowledge and contextual translation by CANALPY to further service coproduction, can partially subvert dominant power structures even within constrained political environments. This is in line with earlier findings from the literature where such platforms act as arenas for inclusion of diverse knowledge systems and voices by “gate-keeping” or controlling the participants, their roles, and the scope of their involvement (Jagannathan et al. 2023). This highlights the operation of conditioned power, provocatively conceptualized as the power exercised by the powerful in a social order so as to satisfy their interests by letting others think that those ends are also theirs (Caporaso and Levine 1992). In other cases, in NGO-led initiatives such as this, government support emerges only after an initiative stabilizes, with the role of the government shifting to offering significant political and financial support (Wang et al. 2024). Here, we explicitly document how the NGO strategically garners this support through persuasion and knowledge, leveraging the instrument of conditioned power.

One of the limitations of this work is the inadequate engagement with the motivation of the co-producers. The theoretical section dwelt on the motivations for co-production, such as material incentives, social rewards, expressive satisfaction, salience, and self, as well as external efficacy. The focus on power dynamics and stakeholder engagement has limited the discussion to the interests of political and bureaucratic representatives. Although empirical results indicate that some residents engaged in segregation because of personal or social salience, coercion from councillors, and fear of sanctions, this study has not sufficiently unpacked the key drivers of their behavior. This highlights a gap in distinguishing between voluntary and externally influenced participation and calls for further research to examine the nuances of co-producers’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.

CONCLUSION

Solid waste management faces significant challenges in developing countries because of a lack of resources and complex power dynamics among decision makers and other stakeholders. This study highlighted the potential of co-production in addressing these challenges by promoting collaboration between citizens and the state. Our analysis of the NBNN 2.0 campaign in Alappuzha reveals that although co-production is often framed as a means to enhance participatory governance, it is deeply embedded in existing power hierarchies. CANALPY’s use of conditioned power helped align political motivations but failed to dismantle entrenched power differentials, as seen in the ineffective cluster-level meetings. This study thus highlights how epistemological convergence both reinforces and subverts existing power structures.

The findings have significant implications for the governance of social-ecological systems, especially for similar contexts from the Global South, it holds valuable lessons on power dynamics, governance-NGO interactions, and formal-informal collaborations for service provision. First, they illustrate that the sustainability of co-production initiatives depends on technical feasibility as well as the ability of the collaborative initiative to understand the political and institutional contexts in which they operate. This will aid the non-government organizations in playing a crucial role in bridging governance gaps by translating knowledge into action and facilitating engagement between political and civic actors. Second, the findings suggest that fostering genuine citizen engagement requires moving beyond invited spaces of participation (such as cluster meetings) to more transformative modes of deliberation that allow for contestation and negotiation. The strategic approach employed by CANALPY of employing conditioned power to align the motivations and interests of political stakeholders was crucial in navigating the conflicts and ensuring the success of the campaign. Nevertheless, the failure of the cluster-level meetings shows that this conditioned power does little to dismantle the entrenched power differentials. Finally, the study highlights the need for sustained institutional support and capacity-building mechanisms to ensure the longevity and equity of co-production processes. The sustainability of the process of coproduction is thus incumbent upon strong institutional support, community capacity building, and continual engagement of all stakeholders. These insights can be valuable for designing, scaling up, and institutionalizing co-production efforts in other regional and urban contexts, leading to effective and, more importantly, equitable service delivery.

Being attentive to the ways in which scientific and societal discourses are intertwining and interpreted is important if transformative change is to occur. The intersection of governance, NGOs, and informal collaborations provides opportunities for reshaping service provision and sustainability practices, especially in the resource-constrained Global South. Designing participatory governance structures that enable marginalized voices to shape decision making and integrating informal community networks with formal governance institutions can enhance service delivery resilience and sustainability. However, it must be approached critically because, in practice, these participatory arrangements may obscure structural inequalities and shift responsibility to citizens without corresponding authority. By recognizing these interdependencies and acknowledging their constraints and uneven burdens, future co-production initiatives can more effectively harness local knowledge, foster equitable participation, and develop adaptive governance frameworks that enhance long-term resilience.

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