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The first part of this chapter introduces the different types of government contract currently in use in central and local government. It identifies the three broad types of contracting activity that will be the focus of the book: procurement, contracting out, and the Private Finance Initiative and other Public/Private Partnerships. The chapter also identifies some other types of government contracts (employment contracts, ‘internal’ contracts) and explains why they are not to be examined in detail in the book. In the second part of the chapter, some key sectors of government contracting activity are examined: defence, information technology, transport, health, housing, and social care. The aim is to give an overview of how government uses contracts and some of the problems to which they give rise.

Modern chambers rely to a major extent on government finance through contracts. Early relationships developed through municipal improvement and local partnerships. This expanded to cover various consultations processes on local and national committees; then provision of apprenticeships. Since the 1990s there has also been chamber leadership of local economic initiatives. Links became so close that after 1996 some chambers merged with government financed Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs). After these were abolished, chambers have worked with regional agencies, and after the 2010 election with Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs). In Ireland there has been important partnering of chambers with EU initiatives. The modern chamber of the last 20-30 years is different from any stage in the past. This creates major challenges for the future.

This chapter concludes that the chambers have shown remarkable durability by being adaptable to new needs, and diversifying their service bundle over time. However, the 1980s seem to have become something of a ‘clean break’ with the past. The causes for this are sought in product life cycles, shifts to a small firms economy, expansion of chamber territories to cover larger areas more thinly, but most important has been contracting and partnering with government. This has introduced far more instability than that in the economy, with changes arsing from changes in the party in power, administrative confusion, and ministerial caprice. For the future it is suggested that chambers need to re-emphasize their USP and develop stronger independent missions that maintain government links more on their own terms.

This chapter evaluates the outward-looking, multilevel neighbourhood-regeneration approach in Great Britain. It describes the Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) in England and the Community Planning Partnerships (CPPs) in Scotland, and proposes a hypothesis as to why the area-based initiatives (ABI) model has been unable to fundamentally challenge neighbourhood trajectories. The chapter explains that while the multilevel approach seems to signal a shift away from a simple focus on the internal problems of deprived neighbourhoods, it remains surprisingly disengaged from wider structural issues, such as the management of the regional economy.

When Kofi Annan was elected the first African to head the United Nations in 1997, he faced an organisation that was dysfunctional, had a reputation for being anti-business, and it had little to contribute to the onward march of globalisation. To address these problems, Annan forged a strong alliance with the corporate sector, launching the Global Compact in 2000. This programme encouraged transnational corporations to adopt universal norms of behaviour that had been established through various UN treaties. This programme also allowed Annan to harness the private sector to support his Millennial Development Goals, which was launched the same year. Through it, targets were set to deal with a range of social problems, thereby providing a novel way of coordinating global action between governments, international agencies, nongovernmental organisations, and the corporate sector. By the end of his term, Annan had created a new pathway to global governance, built around norms and measureable targets. The result was greater cooperation between members of the world’s community to solve social and environmental problems. Annan was motivated to establish these alternative programmes to compensate for the entrenched dysfunction within the UN General Assembly.

When Gro Brundtland was elected Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), she soon discovered that she headed an organisation that had lost its way. To revive its fortunes, Brundtland aggressively partnered with pharmaceutical companies to allow WHO to expand its health programmes, including achieving the Millennium Development Goals that address health. Brundtland’s success was largely due to her ability to quantify the economic costs of poor health, particularly in developing countries. This helped her to secure increased public and private funds to tackle problems like malaria and HIV/AIDS. Brundtland also launched a code to limit marketing of tobacco products to minors. Setting a new way to govern the global domain, this code allowed WHO to show that globalisation could be a force for good, by promulgating global norms to deal with a major health problem.

The focus in this chapter is on local roles and local-international partnerships in recovery from disaster in shattered societies. The chapter does not discount the roles that external actors can usefully play but rather, as Susan Allen writes in Chapter Eleven, to highlight the opportunities for local actors to intervene in their own societies. In addressing this question, Allen considers the case study of rebuilding Georgian–South Ossetian relationships so as to consider who in practice rebuilds shattered societies, how this rebuilding unfolds as an ongoing process, and how the skills and abilities that come to the foreground in the aftermath of traumatic evolve. In turn, the chapter examines the various actions that are part of rebuilding and the different ways people contribute to such a process. Third, considered are the varied actors, the partnerships, and finally the roles of individuals involved in rebuilding. Finally, even while acknowledging partnerships, the chapter also considers individual agency and the ways that a recognised or emergent leader can exercise what John Paul Lederach (2005) refers to as the ‘moral imagination’.

This chapter reviews the forms of statistical information available across devolved levels of governance in the UK. The focus is not only on statistics from the devolved nations – Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – but also on statistics available for other levels where these is significant roles for devolved governance including city regions. Particular attention is paid to the regional / devolved nation Government Expenditure and Revenue Statistics (GERS) given both the salience of these in political argument and their significance in understanding the imbalance in the UK’s space economy. Data for sub-national geographies in England includes not only standard regions and local authorities but other forms including combinations of authorities and Local Economic Partnerships. Data about these levels is very useful for exploring variation within the nation which contains more than 80% of the UK's population.

This chapter considers modern school restructuring and reform. It gives some examples of programs aimed at high-risk students and looks at growing experiences with school restructuring designs. An important outcome for effective schools is the promotion of healthy lifestyles and the prevention of high-risk behaviors. Children who are engaged in school activities are much less likely to get into trouble with drugs, sex, and violence. Some programs aimed at high-risk students include Valued Youth Partnership, Cities-in-Schools (CIS), The School Transition Environment Project (STEP), The Quantum Opportunity Program (QOP), Liberty Partnerships, and Parents as Teachers (PAT).

This chapter examines the approach, targets, and achievements of the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal (NSNR) in England. It explores the question of how delivery can be better aligned with good theories and methodologies for closing in on target outcomes, principally those for closing gaps between deprived neighbourhoods and national averages. The chapter describes the changes in governance represented by innovations such as Local Strategic Partnerships and Local Area Agreements and discusses the lessons that can be learnt from the Health Action Zones.

This chapter evaluates how elected mayors face the competing pressures of both running a large public service bureaucracy that is a council and leading the local community. The tension between political responsibility for public services and a broader governing responsibility is clearly seen in the way in which mayors have formed their cabinet and allocated portfolios to cabinet members. Councillors inextricably linked their role in service provision to notions of government and representation. Local Strategic Partnerships is a formal, government-inspired institutional arrangement that is rule driven and codified and set within the broader institutional framework of the local council. Organisational leadership of the council can affect the quality of public services and the mayor's electoral chances. English mayors inhabit a system in which there are two dimensions to their positions and power.

Prevention rather than cure is the obvious, common-sense approach to dealing with any problem, and it is unsurprising that criminal justice policy has been driven by such an ideal. Shortly after entering government in 1997, New Labour embarked on what was seen by many commentators as a more holistic model of crime prevention than its predecessor Conservative government had utilised, with the establishment of Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships. This book examines government policy in the United Kingdom in relation to early intervention programmes that aim to support families and to prevent youth crime. It raises some important questions about prevention strategies, such as whether early intervention is symptomatic of a creeping criminalisation of social policy whereby a coercive approach is used to force so-called problem families and their children to engage with services; how local people themselves are engaged in crucial decisions about how to tackle crime and social problems; and how those most detached from the mainstream can be motivated to take advantage of support provided.

Governments vary over place and time in their enthusiasm for cracking down on anti-social behaviour (ASB). It is therefore reasonable to ask why they should take on this responsibility, and why they should do so now. This chapter examines the results of a study that combined empirical research in five areas with a review of policy and research literature. In order to determine the rationales offered by policy documents and by local officials for tackling ASB, key officials responsible for tackling ASB were interviewed. Policy documents in five Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships in England and Wales were also reviewed. Although the research was conducted in 2003/04, its findings are still relevant to contemporary debate about ASB. The study found, both in the policy and research literature and in officials' accounts of their work, four main rationales for tackling ASB: the quality of life rationale; the ‘broken windows’ rationale; the crime fighting or zero tolerance rationale; and the regeneration rationale.

Samantha N. Sheppard provides a broad and establishing consideration of how Perry functions in and across different media industries. Sheppard analyzes Perry’s different “practices,” “partnerships,” and “politics” as she explores some of the ways in which Perry maximizes his name recognition and brand across different platforms like theater, film, television, straight to DVD, and video on demand. While Perry’s brand has been instrumental in marketing his high volume of creative projects, other directors and writers now also seek an association with him so that they might leverage their own works. In this way, Sheppard theorizes that Perry has become a media platformonto himself. In complicating and destabilizing the assumption that a partnership with Perry will naturally lead to success, the chapter concludes with an analysis of the production and marketing of one of Perry’s affiliated projects, Tina Gordon Chism’s 2013 comedy Tyler Perry Presents Peeples.

This chapter provides a framework for thinking about community research partnerships with children. It begins by briefly reviewing the federal regulations governing research with children. It then defines community research partnerships and shows that there are practical, developmental, and moral reasons to encourage research partnerships with children, and that the status of children and adolescents as a “vulnerable population” provides additional support for community research partnerships. The chapter then turns to age considerations, how to define communities in research partnerships, and the form and content of potential research partnerships with children. Finally, it concludes with some recommendations for institutional review boards (IRBs) regarding research partnerships with children; much could be done to promote this important form of research.