The Search for Policy Innovation in Urban Governance
| Published date | 01 April 2008 |
| Date | 01 April 2008 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0952076707086254 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
© Public Policy and Administration
SAGE Publications Ltd
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi
and Singapore
0952-0767
200804 23(2) 167–187
The Search for Policy
Innovation in Urban
Governance
Lessons from Community-led Regeneration Partnerships
Jon Coaffee and Iain Deas
University of Manchester, UK
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.
Keywords
community engagement, governance, local partnership, urban policy
DOI: 10.1177/0952076707086254
Jon Coaffee, Planning and Landscape Discipline, School of Environment and Development, University of
Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. [email: Jon.Coaffee@manchester.ac.uk]
Iain Deas, Planning and Landscape Discipline, School of Environment and Development, University of
Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. [email: Iain.Deas@manchester.ac.uk]
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Public Policy and Administration 23(2)
Introduction
Effecting better coordination across different branches of the state has long been a
priority for policy makers. Efforts to synchronize policy activity have included
attempts to encourage more effective joint working across central or local govern-
ment departments and their agencies, sometimes in relation to specific policy
initiatives (Coaffee, 2004; Department of Environment, Transport and the Region
[DETR], 2000a). They have also applied to vertical intergovernmental relation-
ships between Whitehall and local government (Valler and Betteley, 2001;
Wilson, 2003). And there have been efforts to develop more effective partnership
linkages extending beyond government, to embrace local communities and the
private sector.
Over the past 40 years urban policy has often served as a test bed for this over-
arching concern with dislodging the ‘silo mentality’ and transcending functional
departmental demarcation, sectoral division or horizontal separation. A succes-
sion of urban initiatives have sought to respond to multifaceted problems whose
relevance extends, often in complex ways, across historically separate areas of
policy making, or whose spatial manifestation sits incongruously alongside estab-
lished institutional geographies. For example, the spatial basis of some elements
of urban policy has partly been a response to the view that deprivation can be
considered a place-based phenomenon, which coexists with individual and house-
hold poverty (Buck, 2001). Equally, it has also reflected the view that by organiz-
ing policy on a targeted geographical basis, it is possible to innovate and
experiment in devising and delivering policy, for example by working across
established functional or sectoral divisions (Kleinman, 1999). This has resulted in
a succession of urban policy initiatives whose aim has been to promote coordina-
tion at different levels: at the national level, across Whitehall departments; at the
regional scale; across cities; or within particular areas of cities.1
These kinds of preoccupation – and the experience of the initiatives themselves
– have in turn informed agendas for the wider modernization of local governance.
It is possible to argue that efforts to reshape local governance constitute an attempt
at formal institutionalization of partnership working that draws in part upon what
is seen by some as the exemplary experience of ‘best practice’ in urban policy,
extending it – ‘rolling it out’ – to other areas of policy making. In this sense,
the experience of urban policy is potentially illuminating in that a now lengthy
history of experimentation in governance through urban initiatives can shed light
on broader and ongoing attempts to refashion ways of working, and restructure
local institutions.
In this article, we focus upon the New Deal for Communities (NDC) initiative,
the first of the major neighbourhood-focused urban initiatives to be launched
by the first Blair government. Through case studies of two of the 39 NDC
partnerships launched in 1998 and 1999, the article explores experiences of
inter-institutional collaboration and experimentation in the management of
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Coaffee and Deas: Community Regeneration Partnerships
regeneration, and considers the implications for wider efforts to improve urban
governance. As arguably the flagship urban initiative of the first Blair administra-
tion, and one of the better resourced regeneration programmes (anticipated to
receive in the order of £800m of earmarked funds from central government over
its lifespan, and £2bn of public resource in total), and with a lengthy timescale
relative to most urban initiatives (10 years), NDC provides a useful means of
considering the extent to which local governance has been remoulded to make the
formulation and delivery of regeneration more effective.
The first section provides a brief summary of the sequence of urban initiatives
aimed at inducing more effective coordination of policy and an outline of their
implications for the shape of the NDC partnerships. The second section details the
genesis of NDC and outlines the ways in which it was intended to contribute
to efforts to promote the more effective and innovative governance of urban
regeneration. The article then draws on case studies of Newcastle and Oldham to
highlight the lessons for ongoing attempts to reshape local governance.
The Search for Coordination in Urban Policy
One frequently identified characteristic of urban policy has been the tendency
for area-based initiatives (ABIs) to proliferate, in part because of the often
experimental nature of much of what constitutes targeted spatial policy, but also
because of what many critics have identified as a lack of coordination of different
branches of government. In the 1980s, various commentators bemoaned what was
likened, for example, to a ‘patchwork quilt of complexity and idiosyncrasy’ (Audit
Commission, 1989: 77) or an ‘alphabet soup of acronyms’ (Robson, 1988: 169).
By 2002, much of this disquiet remained, expressed, for instance, in concern about
‘partnership overload . . . additional bureaucracy and . . . a lack of integration
between initiatives dealing with the same problem or the same client group’
(Regional Co-ordination Unit, 2002: 1).
Periodic efforts to rationalize policy in response to the multiplication of initia-
tives has been one element of the wider effort to manage regeneration more
effectively. Another longstanding focus has been to induce better integration of
area-based urban regeneration policy with mainstream government business. At
the heart of this ‘mainstreaming’ agenda has been a desire to encourage public
agencies to utilize mainstream service budgets in ways that are in tune with (and
which supplement) resources directed through ABIs. The long-term aspiration is
that the latter can be phased-out as mainstream programmes begin to take on
the role in respect of disadvantaged areas currently fulfilled by targeted central
government regeneration policy. This is a philosophy that is central to many of the
policies that comprise the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal in
England (Social Exclusion Unit [SEU], 2001). Mainstreaming in this sense is a
complex, and for many an ill-defined, set of ideas which, according to the
Neighbourhood Renewal Unit (2003: 11), is linked to helping disadvantaged areas
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by changing policies to deploy more resources, redistributing or ‘bending’
resources, shaping services to make them increasingly accessible to local citizens,
or incorporating innovations and lessons from special initiatives into the practice
of service delivery.
However, just as successive attempts by governments to rationalize area-based
policy have proved ineffective, there is limited evidence to imply that main-
streaming has occurred to any significant extent since it featured prominently in
the Action for Cities initiative in the late 1980s – and much more in the way of
evidence to suggest that effecting mainstreaming is proving extremely problem-
atic (Entrust, 2003; House of Commons, 2003).2 Indeed, the reality, in the context
of strained local authority budgets, continues to be that mainstream local resources
are sometimes withdrawn from areas benefiting from the injection of central
government regeneration resource (Stewart and Howard, 2004).
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