2. MARCO TEÓRICO
2.2 Evolución del automóvil
One of the fundamental questions for researchers and policy planners concerns the real potential of the partnership approach for addressing a given issue and how it can be assessed. More specifically, the questions could be the following:
• What are the expected outcomes of a partnership?
• Are there some special results impossible to achieve without partnership? • What constitutes a success or the failure of the partnership working?238 • What are the factors that contribute to the successful management of
partnership?239
• How far does the partnership bring additional benefits and how far they could have been achieved through traditional means?240
Much of the literature on rural development partnerships relates to the expected benefits from their working. Rural development partnerships are seen to provide the means for the preparation and implementation of development strategies by drawing on the necessary resources, both financial and human, including skills, expertise and understanding.241 Slee and Snowdon add that local partnership working can offer a variety of other benefits such as the development of a shared vision, a synergy through the actions and the pooling of
236 Wilson, A. and Charlton, K. (1997), page 39. 237 LEADER European Observatory (1997b). 238 Gray, B. and Wood, D. J. (1991b). 239 Wilson, A. and Charlton, K., (1997).
240 Bailey, N., Barker, A. and MacDonald, K. (1995). 241 Shortall, S. and Shucksmith, M. (1998a).
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resources and have the potential to introduce specific forms of ‘basic’ democracy by the involvement of the all socio-economic actors in the local area.242 They also argue that when assessing partnership working, it is necessary to base the analysis on a number of
performance indicators as markers to determine whether the aim and objectives have been reached. The performance indicators they propose include the number of projects
implemented and their economic outcomes such as the number of jobs created, the amount of funding mobilized, the feedback from the local community.
The LEADER Observatory suggests the assessment of the quality of partnership action as an instrument to rally the stakeholders, of dialogue and decision sharing and to implement local development on the basis of the legitimacy and ability of partnership action in the area. But the increasing practice of partnership has often raised some concerns about its implications for democracy and accountability.
Hutchinson argued that the reduction of power of public sector and the growing influence of private and community sectors have a potential to affect the democratic balance of an area, raising concerns about the nature and operation of partnership in terms of structure,
decision-making processes and legitimacy.243
Concerning the accountability towards the public which means ‘knowing who is answerable to whom’ at political and financial level, this may be difficult in a partnership where
representatives come from various origins and the decisions and implementation depend on a multitude of working groups. Indeed, they are seldom locally grown but arise from the public sector’s initiative.244
They may become advisory groups where the individual members constantly report to the organisations they represent: ‘…they appear to allow private and non-governmental sectors
to take what are really political decisions regarding resource allocation. Furthermore, partnership can give increased power to local elites, at the expenses of disadvantaged and excluded groups, for whom locally accountable, elected authorities have traditionally provided some sort of representation and protection. Therefore, issues of transparency and visibility are critical’.245
242 Slee, B. and Snowdon, P. (1997). 243 Hutchinson, J. (1994).
244 Wilcox, D. (1994).
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Yet, even if partnership building is a lengthy process to compromise with each other’s agendas and methods of working and to establish whether there are grounds upon to agree or disagree, it often needs to achieve results quickly because of structural factors in terms of financial and deadlines but also to give credit to its practice.246
Therefore, from the review of the literature emerges that there is not yet a consistent agreement over what should be considered or measured when looking at partnership outcomes, when it may constitute a success and that the investigation of outcomes should not uniquely focus on tangible outputs and thereby dismiss the importance of their process. But the investigation should consider the highly context-dependent where a description and discussion of the views and attitudes of those involved would provide an indicator on how to benchmark local partnership working as well as their success in rural development.247
‘For some, the sole criterion of a successful partnership operation is one that meets its stated
objectives and delivers beneficial outcomes to its ‘target audience’. For others, however this measure must be tempered by a consideration of the processes by which the aims of the partnership are met’.248 The true question therefore is whether the potential of partnership working should be approached in terms of outputs or processes but, in the light of the criteria used to assess partnerships, such a distinction does not seem to be made in the literature.
Focusing essentially on partnership as a process, Mackintosh suggests that the evaluation of partnerships should be considered on the basis of three criteria: 1) synergy to describe the creation of additional profits and an associated negotiations process to increase the returns to private stakeholders and to serve social ends; 2) transformation to describe the process whereby partner seeks to change or challenge the aims and operating cultures of other partners; 3)budget enlargement when most partnerships are very strongly held together by a financial contribution from a third party.249
Edwards acknowledges that measuring the achievements of partnership working in terms of economic development is highly difficult to achieve ‘given the tangled matrices of
governance within which partnership operate, the uncontrollable influence of external
246 Wilson, A. and Charlton, K. (1997). 247 Edwards, B. (2000).
248 Wilson, A. and Charlton, K. (1997), page 52.
249 Mackintosh, M. (1992) ‘Partnership Issues of Policy and Negotiation’, Local economy, Vol. 7(3), pp. 210-224.
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factors, and the lack of comparative data relating to a hypothetical non-partnership
alternative’... They claim that … ‘effective partnership working might be where communities are fully engaged in identifying problems and solutions, where there is a pooling of resources, where replication of activities is avoided, where consensual decision-making processes are instituted, and so on’.250 Moseley argues that an assessment of partnership working may consist of an investigation of the ‘net difference that the partnership approach makes
compared to the conventional development approach’.251
On the basis of the research of the working partnership, Wilson and Charlton suggest that, when attempting to measure the partnership performance, it is important to distinguish three elements: 1) Inputs – resources in terms of money, people, structures; 2) Outputs - the tangible products or services provided; 3) Outcomes – the more abstracts achievements of the partnership in term of improvement of employment prospects.252
They report however that it is becoming ‘progressively more difficult to assess each of these
elements as one moves from simple input measures to the broader impact of the work of the partnership’253 and that, while it is possible to measure short terms inputs and outputs, very little is known about long term outcomes. Finally, another important issue relevant to the understanding of partnership practice is that to describe those general results of plans and actions, both expected and resultant.254
4.6 Conclusions
In the last 20 years, bottom-up participative approaches, promoted by a wide range of policies at European, national and local levels, have become common practice in the preparation and implementation of rural development actions at local level with the aim of completing and reinforcing economic, territorial and integrated strategies. This has been attributed to the influence of European Union policies which emphasize the importance of partnerships in policy implementation.
Previously, partnerships were established mainly as a key term in the field of urban regeneration, local economic development and political administration for some time.
250 Edwards, B. (2000),page 2. 251 Moseley, M. J. (2002b).
252 Wilson, A. and Charlton, K. (1997).
253 Wilson, A. and Charlton, K. (1997), page 55. 254 Wilcox, D. (1994).
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Today, local actors wish to participate more actively in the design of strategies for their area as a reaction to the poor results attained by national policies only weakly linked to local conditions.
A review of the literature on partnership and how they work in practice indicated that no comprehensive theory and no universally accepted framework exist. Much of the existing literature on local partnerships in rural development has concentrated on this approach and their political consequences rather than how they work and what they potentially achieve in practice. Furthermore, it emerges that the term partnership does not have a consistent definition and that no truly typical partnership can be defined as it varies in terms of form, type, objective and scope.
Even if there is no a universally accepted definition of ‘local partnership’, in order to delimit the scope of the present research, I propose the following definition drawn from various definitions put in the literature: ‘a formal or informal arrangement which mobilises a coalition of diverse interests and resources and the commitment of a wide range of individuals and organization, to act as partners around shared objectives and a common agenda as a means to respond to a an issue or to realize specific outcomes’.
‘Partnerships are sometimes compared to a ‘black box’: input and outputs are visible, but the
mechanism enabling the transformation from input to output are not. Inputs to the black box include the local actors who accept to participate in the exercise: the public programmes which partnerships can use to various degrees, and the government funding made available for operations and possibly projects. The outputs or the ‘value added’ or partnerships, consists of the numbers of jobs created, people referred to job vacancies, business start-ups, and people going back to school’.255
Relating the outputs to inputs is quite difficult. Parameters as the degree of utilization of the various sources, the distribution of responsibility and the role of the various local actors in the implementation of the development strategies are unknown as the external factors which may influence the outcome of the partnerships. Therefore, it is also difficult to assess their efficiency and to draw comparisons with other government instruments.
An examination of the origins, the context, the mechanisms and processes involved in the practice of local partnership as well as the outcomes expected emerge from the review of
255 OECD (2001b) Local Partnerships for Better Governance. Paris: OECD Publications, page 18.
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the literature to be relevant to the understanding of the practice of partnership. These include the examination of the economy and society, the decreasing role of the nation-state and traditional machineries of government at central and local level, the fragmentation of public action and the growing of the stakeholder society. Any investigation concerned with understanding how partnerships work is likely to draw upon a variety of issues in terms of mobilization, participation, role, organization and resources, as well as issue of time and power.
While the tendency may be to emphasise the outputs and the strategic aims to reach them it is the process, which sets out why a partnership has been initiated and which identifies the hoped benefits which will be achieved by working together. The identification of
inappropriate or unrealistic outputs may lead to a failure of the partnership if these cannot be delivered.
The main characteristics of the governance context that help to identify the need to work in partnership are decentralisation, the role of local authorities and the distribution of power. In order to embrace the complexity of partnership working, one way of examining the practice of partnership is to explore its development process divided between its formation and practice.
The literature review undertaken indicated that evaluations and studies of partnerships have primarily been focused on their organizational and administrative aspects.
Finally, although the existence of European Union guidance might imply that rural
partnerships across member states will exhibit many similar characteristics, their structure and functioning are framed by different national contexts.256
Some of the following considerations seem to be important issues and concern for the fieldwork research:
1. Local partnerships are sometimes a response to the need to getting additional funding from various sources;
2. Local partnerships are seldom locally grown but arise from the public sector. They are essentially advisory groups which individual members constantly report to the
organization they represent;
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3. Local partnerships are generally set by organisations that are traditionally strong in the region. As a result, they tend to be conservative and slow and to support safe rather than adventurous initiatives;
4. Most partners deliver isolated projects rather than integrated programmes.257 Concerning the impact of partnerships, most of the reviews emphasise the partnerships’ development process rather than the projects that they carried out. Even if there is a rich evidence that new firms and jobs have been established, the causal connections were often unclear. Instead, the development processes that have been brought about via the
introduction of bottom-up perspectives, the endogenous character and the involving of actors from different sectors to get engaged the local community seem in the literature reviewed a more visible and a more significant issue in terms of partnership approach. Thus, due to the nature of the subject studied, which is context-dependent and pragmatic, I made the decision to study the field following a qualitative rather than a quantitative approach and to use case studies to have at the light of the issues raised in the previous chapters. Going on from these key issues arising from the literature review and recalling the research aims set out in Chapter 1 we may now state the four following fundamental
questions at the basis of the fieldwork research of this dissertation:
1. What conclusions do we draw about the emergence and the composition of local partnerships?
2. What are the key characteristics of the LAGs’ working mechanisms employed to address rural development?
3. What considerations do we draw about the outcomes and performance deriving from the LAGs working in rural development?
4. What is the added value of the LAGs that flows from the bottom-up and partnership approach to local development process of the areas they serve compared to the more conventional governance approaches?
The exploration of those questions and some tentative answers to them will provide the substance of the present thesis. The methodology which has been selected and the
empirical investigation to collect and investigate the evidence derived from the case studies
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focusing on the process of local partnership in rural development is examined and discussed in the following chapters.
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