In current policy success frameworks, government tends to be the protagonist or the hero and citizens the implicit recipients of success. In this paper, we address a gap in these frameworks by developing a heuristic that emphasises the contributions of citizens and clients to policy and implementation success stories. We extend ‘success for whom’ to instead ask: how success works, because of whom, and for whom? We are particularly interested in how citizens and clients contribute to successful implementation - i.e. the ‘work’ implied in co-production – and argue that where governments and citizens contribute to successful outcomes, citizen contributions to these outcomes should be appropriately recognised and valued. But implicit here is the need to explore when citizens co-produce policy success in contexts of government failure, which also raises the spectre of responsibilisation as outlined in citizen participation and co-production research. Where governments fail but citizens succeed, especially where citizens experience the work as excessive or burdensome, there can be implications for both equity and the sustainability of successful outcomes. Our heuristic addresses these issues by distinguishing citizen-produced, state-produced, and jointly produced success and whether it is the state or citizens and clients that benefit from that success.
