International Journal of Health Policy and Management

International Journal of Health Policy and Management

Coproduction in Community Mental Health Implementation: Resisting Reindividualization; Comment on “Routes of Well-Being, Spiritual Harmony and Recovery in Mental Health: The Community as a Policy-Maker”

Document Type : Commentary

Author
Rodrigo Rojas-Andrade
School of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Santiago, Chile
10.34172/ijhpm.10261
Abstract
Agudelo-Hernández and Giraldo-Álvarez show how coproduction can move communities from consultation to the authorship of mental health policy. I argue that this achievement is fragile at a stage coproduction rarely reaches: implementation. Implementation science includes substantial multilevel, contextual, participatory, and systems-oriented traditions, yet at particular operational points it can still carry a default grammar of individual core functions, provider-to-recipient delivery, and individual outcomes that quietly re-translates a relationally conceived policy into an individual intervention. I call this failure mode reindividualization during implementation and locate it in an underexamined question: who decides which functions are essential enough to preserve? Using the Riohacha pathway, I examine three points where reindividualization can occur or be resisted: the function, the agent, and the outcome. I then address the objection that this approach dissolves fidelity and argue that coproduction must extend to the intervention’s theory of change itself.
Keywords
Implementation Science
Coproduction
Community Mental Health
Theory of Change
Indigenous Health
Colombia
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International Journal of Health Policy and Management
Volume 15, Issue 1
2026
Pages 1-4

  • Received Date 13 August 2026
  • Revised Date 28 September 2026
  • Accepted Date 30 September 2026
  • First Published Date 12 October 2026
  • Published Date 01 December 2026