Effective partnership working needs trust and user engagement

Third Sector Research Centre has published a new research report covering recent work looking at third sector partnership working. The research is based on five case studies of organisations involved in public service delivery in different policy fields, including housing, welfare, and employment services. These were preceded by a period of scoping research with national interviewees. The case studies were very diverse, and this paper synthesises the main findings across the cases in four logical sections: meanings of partnership; structures, drivers and barriers; processes and organisational change, and impacts of partnership.

A first conclusion is that it is very difficult to isolate either pure forms of partnership or partnership logics that are being pursued by individual organisations to the exclusion of other options. Reality is much messier and more complex. There is scepticism about the extent to which relational contracting can flower in the public sector, given that there is a ‘control-fixation’ by politicians at national Parliament, Assembly and more local levels. This is often reinforced by performance management regimes.

They note that while there is theoretically no necessary conflict between competition and collaboration, in practice partnerships have tended to work more effectively when they are underpinned by voluntary trust based relationships rather than by imposed or mandated partnership forms or by competitive arrangements that undermine trust. A third recurring theme was the importance attached by some actors to cultural barriers to change, reflecting the adage that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’.

In several of the cases respondents talked about the power of cultures and the importance of culture clashes either within an organisation, or between partners or potential partners. This was particularly apparent in cross sector partnerships (e.g. between third sector organisations and private sector in Work Programme supply chains, where culture was partly a label for differences in size, professionalism and level of bureaucracy).

A fourth and surprisingly prevalent theme across the case studies was the general exclusion of user voices from setting partnership objectives or monitoring their impact. This suggests that despite the increasing emphasis on service outcomes, third sector partnerships in the UK have continued to be largely driven by managerial (often financial) pressures, rather than by the expressed needs of beneficiaries. The lack of evidence of user voice and user benefits from partnerships can be linked to the ‘extraordinary’ lack of evidence around outcomes. Only in the housing case were there quantified financial benefits within the business cases for partnerships. Even where such targets were set it proved difficult to trace these through over more than a few years after implementation.

More specifically in the Work Programme and the public sector providers of employment services they can no longer supply public management information about clients and their geographical origin (since October 2011) – this will in future greatly reduce the level of granularity which is achievable for defining, pursuing and evaluating achievement of outcomes in employment services. An approach to third sector partnerships whereby each case must be judged on its merits and which recognised multiple criteria in deciding where partnerships are justified and where they will hold back cost-effective public services, is one which demands powerful analytical tools, good data and patience in waiting until a proper evidence base can be built up, indicating the appropriate way forward. This will not be popular with politicians or policy makers – whether in Whitehall, Assemblies or Town Hall. However, the alternative is myopic insistence on one-dimensional solutions.

An even greater challenge will be to explain this ‘messy’ world to those stakeholders who are increasingly demanding accountability for decisions on who produces what – service users, their carers, their communities and the media who see themselves as the new guardians of public governance. We are likely to need a new language which allows the real pros and cons of partnership to be spelt out more clearly in the future than the simplistic mantras of ‘Joined-up services’ and ‘economies of scale’ which have dominated over the past decade.

For the full report, see Partnership Working - Research report 88