Introduction

Partnership has emerged as a central theme in ‘Third Way’ politics, rhetoric and policies. It exemplifies the drive to move beyond the old politics of organising public services, in which choices were made between state control and market anarchy. This juxtaposition (Old Left = statism; New Right = market individualism) is a characteristic feature of Third Way analysis and argument (for example, Blair, 1998; Giddens, 1998). Partnership embodies the ‘between and beyond’ spirit of the Third Way, being neither a state bureaucratic system nor a market place of contending interests. As such, it expresses the nonideological, non-dogmatic orientation of the Third Way, moving beyond the ‘old’ ideological commitments to the market or the state. Partnership exemplifies the pursuit of pragmatic solutions to policy problems. It promises to restore a collaborative and integrative orientation to a world of public services battered by the ideological, fiscal and organisational assaults of the New Right.

Partnership has the advantage – in terms of political rhetoric, at least – of being relatively non-specific. While this lack of specificity may be a source of concern to policy analysts, it has some distinctive political benefits. Like ‘community’, partnership is a word of obvious virtue (what sensible person would choose conflict over collaboration?). It is unspecific about the dimensions, axes or composition of particular ‘partnerships’; partnerships can exist between sectors, between organisations, between government departments, between central and local government, between local government and local communities, and between state and citizen (at least). Despite their wide variations in organisational and social relationships, processes and arrangements, partnerships provide a key, overarching and unifying imagery of this Third Way approach to governing.

The proliferation of partnerships in both political rhetoric and policy initiatives gives rise to a number of analytical challenges. Four main lines of inquiry have developed around the place of partnerships in social and public policy. The first concerns the challenge of defining, mapping and conceptualising partnerships in the coordination of public services (see Chapter Two). The second is the problem of evaluating partnership as a form of coordinating or delivering services (see Chapter Four; Glendinning, 2002). A third line of inquiry (to which most of this book is addressed) focuses more specifically on current political discourse and examines whether, and to what extent, there is a distinctive New Labour/Third Way role for partnerships in the reform of public services.