Abstract
The British Labour government has developed a policy for regeneration. This policy is characterized by active utilisation of partnership organisations in which the public sector, private sector, and voluntary and community sector participate. In fact, these organisations have been playing a key role in the decision-making process for public service provision in local areas. This paper examines how institutional governance by partnership organisations, in particular, Local Strategic Partnership (LSP), works. Further, it insists that the governance structure of the LSP is very effective in tackling social exclusion. However, a group of researchers has called this type of governance 'New corporatism'. Underlying this interpretation is that the decision-making process is similar to corporatism, which binds the representatives of different interest groups into a process of collective decision-making bypassing legislative bodies and their members, that is, local councils and councilors. Many scholars have pointed out that such governance structure is at risk of undermining the legitimacy of representative democracy, because representatives from various sectors are not elected by voters. This paper demonstrates how governments deal with this issue, and how the process differs from existing corporatism.
