Significance and Problem of Partnership Policy in England : Focusing on the relationship between Governments and Voluntary Sector

Abstract

New Labour's agenda to tackle the social exclusion and focusing on the active citizenship, set up variety of partnership scheme between public sector and voluntary & community sector (VCS). This means the transformation of governance model from the Conservative Party Era. This paper shows the Compact which is the agreement between the public sector and VCS, and Local Strategic Partnership (LSP) as the strategic level of partnership scheme in each local area. Local Compacts have been produced almost all the area in England. Idea of the Compact is rather idealistic but actually it has a lot of problem in its effectiveness and implementation especially in funding relations. For this reason new scheme is under consideration to advance the partnership agenda forward. LSP is a partnership of partnerships in the local area which is introduced to combine the individual partnerships and to decrease transaction and monitoring costs of partnership governance. Generally speaking, LSP has two roles. One is the core self governing function in the area and the other is service or policy delivery role which has been set by the central government. For this reason, LSP has to make difficult choice between national and local priority. It is said that there is a tendency of regulatory states or too much steering role of central government especially in the first Blair Administration. But this governance model gradually changing towards two ways. One is steering weight is moving from central government to local governments and the other way is transformation from government control to self-governing of partnership organization including VCS. We could say that governing model seems reconstructing in England recently.