Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Partnership working seems to be everywhere, but there’s still a distinct shortage of evidence to help distinguish the real successes from the passing fads, the over-hyped claims and the downright bogus, says Tony Bovaird
For several decades all public sector organisations have had to pretend to work in partnership. Some have done it brilliantly well, winning prizes and, more importantly, major public funding. Others have been miserable failures, ending in acrimony and public ignominy (and not just in the ICT field). Public sector partnerships have reached the stage where they appear to be everywhere – so there is a danger that everyone suspects they don’t really mean anything any more.
So what’s to be done about this? One potential approach is to focus on evidence-based policy and management, so that the claims and counter claims made about partnership working are subjected to rigorous analysis from a range of perspectives, to separate out genuine potential from over-hyped claims.
This is the thinking behind the University of Birmingham’s creation of the UK's first independent Centre for Public Sector Partnerships (CPSP), which is intended to develop into the leading source of evidence-based research and advice for governments, the corporate sector, the voluntary sector and academics on issues of partnership working. (Yes, I did include academics and partnership working in the same sentence – well, this initiative is looking to the future, not the past).
Of course, the phrase “evidence-based” comes with baggage. After all, what the evidence suggests about many government policies – and many management fads – is that they are not based on evidence. And the confidence we can place in the current evidence in relation to many of the big questions in partnership working is limited.
So let’s starts from the stance that cross-sector partnerships, although increasingly common in delivering everything from catering to road building, are sometimes less than they seem, often poorly designed and managed, and frequently lack proper public governance. This means that the real potential of partnerships, illustrated by those that have delivered major quality of life improvements in areas such as community safety and social care, has often been misunderstood or ignored.
There is crying need for a rigorous approach that builds up enough evidence to throw light on the most controversial issues, reassure critics and give guidance on how real partnerships can be forged. This will involve, for example, assessing the balance between government arguments that public-private partnerships introduce entrepreneurship and business values to the public sector, and the common concern that they may simply represent the gradual privatisation of public services.
The task is to tease out the lessons from both the good and the awful examples of partnership working in recent years, and to provide a chance for each sector to learn from emerging successful practices.
In particular, several themes have been highlighted: What distinguishes genuine partnership working from the “partnership claiming” that is rife in the public sector? And how can genuine partnership working be supported and developed? A sub-set of these questions is, of course, what might be done to stop bogus partnerships confusing the image of partnership working and wasting the time of those who get ensnared in them? For example, should there be a minimum level of resource sharing or budget pooling necessary, before any group of organisations can label itself a public sector partnership?
Another key issue is how to bring public, private and third sector representatives together more closely in the policy development process, so that the notoriously self-contained corridors of Whitehall are better connected to town halls, to corporate expertise and to the co-production potential of service users and their communities. We need to explore how the weak policy networks currently in place can be imaginatively redesigned to allow a more vigorous interaction between the key players and brush away the layers of pretence and hype which have continually misled policy-making in this field.
Readers of Public Servant can play a part in this process. The centre invites your views on these issues and, in particular, to add to the evidence available by providing case studies that illustrate both the strengths and limitations of partnership working and throw light on what drives improvement in public sector partnerships. Secondly, we want to encourage interested readers to register with us for future seminars and policy forums, where research findings will be presented and debated in the spirit of advancing our understanding of real partnership – and driving out the bogus.
Professor Tony Bovaird is interim director of the Centre for Public Sector Partnerships, Birmingham University |