Object of intervention or stakeholder? Action research facing the obstacles of professional habits and public procedures in a drop-in centre for 18-25 year olds

The paper describes the entering of an idealistic action researcher into the field of paedagogical practice and social work done with – and to youngsters at risk of becoming criminals and/or drug abusers. The research project follows the coming to be of a drop-in center where the political vision for the drop-in center entails an extended co-operation with stakeholders in the local area and in the municipality, public as well as private. The overall fixpoint of the research project is co-creation and how it can (and maybe cannot) be facilitated in the crossfield of research and professional practice. The research project takes its point of departure in the assumption that co-creation is a possible methodological approach to making users voices heard in social interventions. Within the frames of this research project co-creation is defined as a process of collective creativity that leads to the creation of new concepts and strategies. Stakeholders sharing a wish, a vision or a problem takes part in a generative democratic dialogical proces. Co-creation is managed from within and the outcome is the result of the people involved in the process. Introducing co-creation in social work represents an attempt to develop a new type of participatory creative knowledge production leading to new or other types of social interventions. Developing intervention strategies hereby becomes a socio-epistemological process (Peschl & Fundneider, 2008) resembling the processes typically seen in design- and product innovation (Sanders & Stappers, 2008) or radical organizational innovation (Scharmer & Kaüfer, 2014). Taking co-creation processes into the world of social work however, envokes a number of questions. Basically; what is the problem and to whom? Who are the stakeholders and what is their motivation? How is power distributed and who decides what? Articulated or not these questions are crucial to the process but often ignored, considered secondary to measurable actions or even looked upon as disturbing the process. Furthermore the notion of co-creation builds on the idealistic presumption that the involved stakeholders are equal partners (Fenwick 2012), which in some cases is not entirely true. Preliminary findings indicate that the mindset required for co-creation to take place is not necessarily in tune with professional habits in social work nor with public governance. A gap between political vision and paedagogical day to day practice has appeared and calls for a discussion of the applicability of design thinking and radical innovation methodology in the field of social work. Leaving the question whether social workers and public servants are ready to look at young people as equal stakeholders in the development of social interventions?