The Search for Policy Innovation in Urban Governance

Abstract

Contemporary innovation in local governance in England is, in part, trying to formalize partnership working, drawing on the supposedly exemplary experience of urban policy. The latter has a long history of efforts to promote more effective intergovernmental coordination, vertically between neighbourhood, local authority, regional and central government levels as well as horizontally across agencies, and diagonally with civil society. The reality, as this article demonstrates through the experience of New Labour's flagship New Deal for Communities initiative, is much more complex, even in the case of ostensibly more successful partnerships. In this article we evaluate two partnership case studies — one seen as successful and the other as problematic — in order to highlight the importance of inter- and intra-partnership governance and the potentially damaging concentration of partnership efforts upon meeting spending and outcome targets at the expense of a focus on more challenging issues such as community engagement and the development of creative and innovative solutions to complex problems. This analysis calls into question the practical viability of formalizing and promoting more joined-up governance, reiterating the longstanding difficulty policy makers have encountered in achieving more coordinated policy actions.