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Sustainable energy has been on the political agenda in Denmark for decades. This chapter will highlight how wind turbine production quite unforeseen became a great success in Denmark before the turn of the Millennium. An integrative public leadership approach using a mix of supportive institutional designs and instruments, combined with an unexpected bottom-up pressure for alternatives to nuclear power, promoted ways for wind turbine innovation and production in the 1970s. After the turn of the Millennium, being a huge financial success creating many new jobs and export has it developed into a cluster based on huge investments and professionalised developers. The comprehensive transition of wind turbine production in Denmark, from small scale to large scale, has however provided a counterproductive decrease in community commitment for local renewable energy production.

Denmark is known internationally as a climate frontrunner and not only due to wind turbine production and planning. The status is obtained by polycentric governance applied in cooperative-owned energy systems. The Danish response to climate change is a concerted effort of a plethora of public and private actors, providing a crucial momentum and robustness in climate politics not at least generated from a genuine civic society involvement. ‘The Danish Energy Model’; a withhold strategic effort to combine ambitious renewable energy goals, energy efficiency targets and political support of technical and industrial development has for four decades, succeeded in providing high levels of cheap energy supply, while partly reducing fossil fuel dependency at the same time.

In this concluding chapter, the editors provide an overall assessment of contemporary Danish public governance based on the main findings in the preceding chapters of the edited volume. Surveying the Danish governance responses to contemporary mega-challenges, the chapter reflects on policy implications and contemplate the future of both research and practice related to public administration, politics and governance in Denmark. The chapter argues that recent public governance reforms have turned the Danish welfare state into a mix of a neo-Weberian state and an enabling state, which deploys its considerable resources to create economic growth for the benefit of the large majority of Danes, to satisfy the needs of citizens and businesses and to develop collaborative solutions to complex problems. While the chapter concludes that this modified version of the well-known universal welfare state is largely apt for meeting the mega-challenges of the twenty-first century, recent reforms seeking to enhance job-seeking incentives for the unemployed and to integrate immigrants have resulted in new forms of marginalisation of weaker societal groups. Moreover, evolving problems such as climate change, an ageing population and digital citizen privacy will require further public governance reforms in the years to come.

In the twenty-first century, societies around the world are facing a wide range of daunting global mega-challenges: poverty, unemployment, income inequality, unequal distribution of political power, ageing populations, uncontrolled migration, segregated urbanisation, increasing greenhouse gas emissions and a massive decrease in biodiversity. In recent years, politicians, journalists and academic observers have singled out the Nordic countries, Denmark in particular, as model societies of trusting and happy people that have handled many of these challenges with remarkable effectiveness. And yet others warn against ‘becoming Denmark,’ painting a picture of a dysfunctional, socialist nightmare with high taxes, low job motivation and a general lack of private initiative. In this introductory chapter, the editors cut through the noise of the international debate and set the scene for the nuanced analyses presented here of contemporary public governance in Demark and its capacity to tackle some of the most pressing problems of our time. Specifically, the chapter discusses various conceptualisations of the Danish welfare state, delineates some of its most important historical and structural traits and outlines the main empirical features of contemporary Danish public governance. Finally, it outlines the structure of the book and briefly introduces each of its subsequent chapters.

This paper aims to develop a model that supports public organisations in making informed strategic decisions as to which public services are most suitable to be improved through co-creation. Thus, it first identifies the features that make public services (un)suitable for co-creation and then applies this knowledge to develop a multi-criteria decision support model for the assessment of their co-creation readiness.

The decision support model is the result of design science research. While its structure is determined by a qualitative multi-criteria decision analysis, its substance builds on a content analysis of Web of Science papers and over a dozen empirical case studies.

The model is comprised of 13 criteria clustered into two groups: service readiness criteria from the perspective of service users and service readiness criteria from the perspective of a public organisation.

The model attributes rely on a limited number of empirical cases and references from the literature review. The model was tested by only one public organisation on four of its services.

The paper shifts the research focus from organisational properties and capacity, as the key co-creation drivers and barriers, to features of public services as additional factors that affect the prospect of co-creation. Thus, it makes a pioneering step towards the conceptualisation of the idea of “service readiness for co-creation” and the development of a practical instrument that supports co-creation in the public sector.