Conclusions: Moving beyond building sandcastles … long-term sociotechnical infrastructure for social justice

This concluding chapter summaries the book’s central premise, drawing from conceptual and empirical contributions of our collective experiences and reflection of enacting social innovation through co-creation. Throughout the volume we have explored current thinking and practices around co-creation and co-production. We have emphasised in particular the turn towards more asset-based and relational ways of thinking in the framing of individuals and communities as having their own assets, goals and means of change. This is allied to the need to be brought together in various combinations to form the sorts of mutuality envisaged by proponents of co-creation and co-production in policy and practice. In this final chapter we now turn to considering the transition needed from the current focus on pilot projects and interventions or experiments in co-creation, which almost always begin with a plan and end in what is an apparently concrete and impactful solution. The problem with these short-term investments, as many have come to realise, is that although we learn from them, we can rarely sustain or scale beyond the original resourcing. Or to put it another way - a world where pilots run aground, trailblazers burnout and pathfinders get lost.