Today there is an increased interest in user participation in development of public e-services, since it is expected to bring similar value as it has done in other types of systems development. Existing research, however, has shown that introducing user participation to public e-service development is associated with a number of challenges. In this paper we have explored three user participation schools, Participatory Design, User Centered Design and User Innovation, with regard to two challenges: a) businesses employees' current mandate and willingness to participate in public e-service development and b) business employees' ability to participate in public e-service development. Our interview results show that businesses employees do have mandate to participate and also want to do so. Moreover, business employees' ability to participate is high with respect to ICT knowledge but rather low with respect to knowledge regarding public authorities' business processes. In addition, their knowledge about laws and regulations that affect public authorities is limited. Altogether, this limits the possibilities to apply user participation schools, such as User Innovation, which rely on a high degree of user-responsibility in identifying problems and solutions.