Co-production is an increasingly popular framework for knowledge generation, evaluation
and decision making. Despite its potential to open up decisions and practices to the input of
others, co-production regularly falls short of its transformative ambitions. Through
documentary analysis, we investigate the meaning and dynamics ...
Co-production is an increasingly popular framework for knowledge generation, evaluation
and decision making. Despite its potential to open up decisions and practices to the input of
others, co-production regularly falls short of its transformative ambitions. Through
documentary analysis, we investigate the meaning and dynamics of co-production as it
stretches beyond the local into global research and technology spaces. We find that in the
case of global gene drive, the meaning of co-production is extended in novel ways and
underpinned by new possibilities for meaningful transformation. At the same time, we also
identify a simultaneous resurfacing of reductive framings of collaboration. In the paper we
present ‘slippage’ as a useful heuristic in helping to understand why co-production fails. We
argue that if co-production in these new spaces is to achieve its transformative ambitions,
there is a need to engage with new and entrenched knowledge hierarchies that contribute to
this slippage.