Public services, particularly in sparsely populated areas, are increasingly required to demonstrate their value-especially in terms of the public benefits they provide to local communities. In Scandinavia, local civil society organizations have long been overlooked as key partners in creating public value together with municipalities. Since 2010, Sweden has been experimenting with collaborative co-creation models that involve both municipal and third sector service providers. This article explores the specifics and reception of such models in rural areas of Finland and identifies the key lessons learned. It delves into the impact of legal frameworks and entrenched public sector norms on the success of these initiatives. The aim is to enhance the understanding of the prerequisites for applying this model among public and civil society actors. The article explores the spread of an innovative model for state-third sector partnerships used in Sweden among local governments in Finland. The study employed action-based research to generate and analyse data from four self-selected municipalities. The study reveals major facilitators and obstacles in spreading and adopting collaborative cross-sector models as they go beyond simple methodological or legal issues and require a shift in public sector logics and identities. The results suggest that resistance is more 'in the heads' of municipal managers and politicians and engrained in administrative traditions than in legal paragraphs or financial shortages.

Unprecedented numbers of unaccompanied minors entering Sweden in 2015, alongside other challenging social issues, have contributed to renegotiating collaborative forms of local governance in the country. This has resulted in an emergence of collaborative partnerships between civil society and public actors (Ideburna offentliga partnerskap or IOP), as real alternative to the market-based contracts and traditional state grants. This article addresses IOP from a collaborative governance perspective and questions if and how it may cope with a major and well known governance challenge, that of balancing the different roles and principles of public and civil society realms, so as to sustain an effective and legitimate cross-sectorial partnership. It asks, may and how an IOP enable civil society organisations a more active role in co-designing and co-implementing local welfare services with public sector actors without undermining their distinctiveness? The arguments are based on a case study of, at the time, the largest IOP in Sweden initiated for early reception of unaccompanied minors in Gothenburg city. The partnership is assessed against a normative theoretical framework of balanced state-third sector relations. The results suggest that IOPs, under certain conditions, may serve as 'spaces of hope' for more balanced power relations in local governance models.

The authors analysed an ongoing service culture change in a strategically selected case. They illustrate how sensemaking can help to engender cultural change and, specifically, what sensemaking formats, approaches and strategies can have a transformative impact on first-line managers' narrative. The article contributes to the literature with insights on leadership through sensemaking and how public bodies can act as 'intelligent organizations' to enhance service co-creation. In addition, the authors show how an action researcher can complement a middle manager in change leadership.

Building upon findings from a strategically selected case study of a pioneering Swedish municipality, Jönköping, a participant in a Horizon2020 project on co-creating public service innovations in Europe (CoSIE), this paper illustrates how local municipalities may take a systemic approach to creating necessary conditions for sustainable co-creation and assesses whether this illustrates an ongoing paradigmatic shift in service management and culture.  The strategic change management efforts in adapting a public sector organisation to a co-creation culture are assessed against a normative theoretical framework for such a transformative change (Finansdepartementet 2018; Torfing et al, 2016;). The study employs the concept of co-creation to highlight the paradigmatic shift in the approach to citizens as service end users from passive clients to active citizens with resources and capabilities to exert impact on service design, delivery and value creation. The article offers new insights into how a robust organisation may be moving towards a new public administration paradigm that accommodates co-creation, and especially how a new approach to management based on trust may be strategically implemented as key factor in facilitating systemic change (Torfing et al, 2016). Against the background of a significant shortage of studies exploring how conditions for such a transformative change are created at different system levels, the article examines a longitudinal real-time study and illustrates new management approaches, strategies and tools used. The study also contributes a normative framework to explore a shift to more trust-based steering and a more nuanced explanation of an ongoing managerial shift towards a ‘co-creation’ paradigm. It argues that achieving trust-based steering has major potential to facilitate co-creation culture but that a paradigmatic shift towards such a culture requires congruence in discourses and actions on different system levels and a major transformation of approaches, roles and relationship dynamics between senior and first-line management.

The article examines from a comparative perspective how Sweden and Germany reacted to the unprecedented increase in unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) in 2015. Concretely, it analyses on the basis of Windrum’s taxonomy of public-sector innovation what kinds of generic and context-specific policy instruments have been developed for this particularly vulnerable group and discusses whether and to what extent prevailing welfare-service organizational arrangements have changed in the two countries since 2015. By illustrating the reactions of two countries, the study shows that an unprecedented wave of refugees/asylum seekers can trigger both more incremental, adaptive and drastic transformative policy changes. The policy systems of both countries indicate not only some resilience, but also overburdened government capacity and more drastic changes that led to reduction of the legal rights of UASC.