Partnership working is an increasingly central feature of all public services. It plays a pivotal role in the modernisation agenda, supported by financial incentives to bring potential partners together. In this book we explore the experience of partnerships in different policy fields, identifying the theoretical issues and the practical impediments to making partnership work. We concentrate primarily on the development of partnership working in England, although some chapters make use of comparative data from other countries. While acknowledging the importance of the private sector in partnerships, in this edited collection we focus mainly on the statutory, voluntary and community sectors as well as partnerships with service users.

In this Introduction, we outline the background to partnership working and the experience on which it can build. We then review key partnership initiatives in current policies and the wider context within which these policies must operate. We summarise the current debates about partnership and introduce the reader to the chapters that will follow and the main arguments that will be developed. Finally, in our conclusion, we review the implications of partnership for changing radically the current cultures of service provision and addressing the government’s social exclusion agenda.

Does partnership makes sense?

Superficially, partnership makes a lot of sense. At one level it is a rational response to divisions within and between government departments and local authorities, within and between professions, and between those who deliver services and those who use them. It is also a necessary response to the fragmentation of services that the introduction of markets into welfare brought with them. It has the potential to make the delivery of services more coherent and hence more effective. If each partner stands to gain from the additional resources that other partners bring, from pooling ideas, knowledge and financial resources, then partnership ‘adds value’ for each participant. It can generate ‘new insights or solutions’ and provide a ‘synergy’ that offers more than the sum of its parts (Mackintosh, 1993). This is reflected in its policies for modernising local government, in a range of policies to tackle social exclusion by making money available to targeted areas on the basis of partnership working, and in its approach to service quality.