Introduction

Partnership working, as the opening chapter argued, aims not only to promote ‘joined-up government’, but to reduce bureaucratic and professional power, promoting decentralisation and participation from the private, voluntary and community sectors as well as individual citizens. This chapter focuses on the challenges inherent in partnership working with communities and service users, and on questions of power and power imbalances in partnerships for regeneration. It discusses some of the practical steps that need to be taken to strengthen partnership working in policy making, service delivery, consultation and training.

Despite the rhetoric of official support for community participation in partnerships for regeneration and development, both in Britain and beyond, the reality has been problematic. ‘Partnership’ as a term has a positive resonance and implies a measure of equality or at least balance and reciprocity between partners. But partnerships for regeneration – like any other type of partnership including marriage – are by no means necessarily equal (Hastings et al, 1996; Mayo, 1997a). And they can, and all too often do, become increasingly unequal as time goes by and partners settle back into role. The most powerful partners are in a position to determine the time frames and set the agendas, too often failing to provide communities with the resources to challenge these, let alone to develop their own agendas to meet social as well as economic needs based on their own definition of need (Taylor, 1997). Despite mission statement commitments to the contrary, regeneration partnerships can have the effect of actually reinforcing the unequal distribution of social capital (Taylor, 2000a). Thus, power imbalances apply to the relations between partners – from the public, private, voluntary and community sectors. However they can also apply to relations within the sectors engaged in partnerships – between one grouping within a community and another, between representatives and those they are supposed to be representing, between majority groups and minority interests, between those with the most extensive networks and those with the least extensive. Regeneration partnerships impact upon these power imbalances in varying ways.

This chapter will first unpack different definitions and perspectives on power and empowerment.