Valuing Participation: Beyond a Simple Choice Between Payment and Volunteering?
In this blog, Dawn Brown, Head of Programme at the Scottish Co-Production Network explores the challenge of “How to recognise people’s contribution in co-production while staying true to the values that make participation meaningful?”
Across the Scottish Co-production Network, this is a conversation that comes up again and again. Whether we are working with communities, people with lived and living experience, volunteers, public services or community and voluntary sector organisations, there is a common question:
“Should people be paid for their participation?”
On the face of it, the answer might seem straightforward. If someone contributes their time, expertise and experience, surely, they should be paid? Yet anyone involved in co-production knows that the reality is far more nuanced than that.
Payment might help remove barriers, value expertise and possibly share power more fairly. At the same time, volunteering can create opportunities for independence, challenge, solidarity and civic action that might be harder to maintain when participation becomes a paid transaction.
Perhaps the most important lesson emerging from practice across Scotland is that this is rarely an either/or choice. Instead, we need to think carefully about how we value participation, who gets to decide, and collaboratively agree which approach best supports meaningful involvement in each context.
Why this conversation matters…
Co-production is built on the belief that people who are directly affected by decisions bring valuable knowledge and expertise. Lived and living experience is not an optional extra. It is essential if we want services, policies and systems to reflect the realities of people's lives.
Traditionally, however, institutions have often relied on people to contribute their experiences for free while professionals are paid for theirs. This has created an imbalance which many organisations are now seeking to address.
Scottish practice has increasingly recognised that participation involves real work. People prepare for meetings, travel, share personal experience, provide feedback on documents, sit on advisory groups and help shape and make decisions. These contributions require time, energy and emotional labour. Research commissioned by the Scottish Human Rights Commission in 2021 highlights the importance of recognising these contributions and considering payment, vouchers or other forms of reward as ways of valuing lived and living experience expertise.
At the same time, the same research notes that payment raises a range of practical and ethical questions, including impacts on benefits, taxation, employment status and the nature of participation itself.
This is why many organisations find themselves navigating a delicate balance when tackling this complicated and emotive issue.
In the next piece, Dawn will explore why payments - and recognition as a whole - is such an important part of co-production.
Interested in learning more? Sign up to attend a SCN Learning Lab Webinar on 22nd September 2026.
