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To examine and account for an innovative project bid and delivery partnership by a fire and rescue service in an area (Eastern European migrant integration) usually thought to be beyond its remit. An interpretation of the findings will be based on public value theory.

The study examines three sets of conditions: national and local political and economic environments facilitating the grant bid and its success; a history of safety and safeguarding work by a specific fire and rescue service that made the bid plausible and leadership of the FRS in constructing both bid (for funding) and turning that into a delivery partnership. Methods included a focused analysis of existing academic work and government reports, observation of partnership meetings, interviews and a focus group.

That the success of the funding bid and delivery of objectives can be explained in terms of national government funding decisions relating to migrant integration; the recognition both locally and nationally that the specific FRS had the capacity, because of previous innovative partnership work, to manage all aspects of a sub-regional partnership; the ability of the FRS to manage the delivery of partnership objectives over a two year period; that the project realised a range of public value outcomes. It generated a range of public value outcomes. Individual managers took risks and worked ‘beyond authority’ but the partnership that they built and maintained was the principal entrepreneurial agent.

The findings may have implications for the reconfiguration of sub-regional public service delivery.

The chapter is a study of a successful innovative, fire and rescue service led public sector partnership creating public value outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate public partners’ motives for seeking and/or accepting partnerships with third sector organisations.

The approach is to seek to identify and explain motives from different perspectives; as responses to government failure or voluntary failure, as related to governance structures, and/or as driven by resource dependencies. The empirical material was gathered through semi-structured interviews with public employees in Swedish municipalities. The aim of the interviews was to grasp the public partners’ motives for partnerships with third sector organisations. Each interview started with questions on the presence and forms of partnerships, thus creating a backdrop for the motives, both during the interview and as a map of the partnership landscape.

The most prominent motives for public engagement in partnerships with third sector organisations are related to democratic values, the need to solve concrete problems, and economic rationality. The motives vary with the type of partnership of which there is considerable variation in scale, content and contribution; the types of partnership vary with different policy fields and services. Different perspectives highlight different motives but none of them excludes other perspectives.

The main contribution of the paper is the empirically based findings of a multi-layered public–third sector partnership landscape where policy fields, forms and complex motives are intertwined.

The article considers the challenges involved in measuring the performance of local public service networks through an empirical analysis of Comprehensive Area Assessments (CAAs), a short-lived but pioneering attempt to gauge the effectiveness of local governments, health trusts, police and fire services in England.

Primary data about the implementation and impact of CAAs were gathered using a mixed method approach, including surveys of local public services, inspectorates and residents together with focus groups and semi-structured interviews in 12 case study areas.

CAAs encouraged agencies to strive to achieve better partnership working but did not provide sufficiently robust comparative data to enable managers to benchmark their performance against other areas or identify good practice elsewhere. Policy makers hoped that citizens would use CAAs to hold services to account but the process failed to attract media or public interest.

The logic of a more ‘joined-up’ approach to performance assessment of local partnerships is compelling. But in practice it is difficult to achieve because institutional arrangements at a national level mean that different sectors work within very different budget systems, professional networks and performance frameworks. Assessing the outcomes achieved by local partnerships also presents new challenges for inspection agencies and requires them to use new kinds of evidence.

This is the only attempt to date to evaluate CAAs and adds to an understanding of the challenges of assessing the performance of local public service partnerships. It highlights new questions for researchers and policy makers about the types of evidence needed to measure partnership performance and the extent to which the public may use the results.

This paper reviews the growth in partnership working in public services and the associated demand for new forms of leadership in the public sector which respond to the different and more complex relationships within UK public services. These new demands require public sector managers to develop new skills for managing across organisational boundaries and in environments with multiple social goals and multiple stakeholders. The paper moves on to review the development of a new leadership questionnaire, which aims to help leaders reflect on their own leadership style and how they can strengthen their leadership within these emerging partnership settings.

Purpose – The aim of this study is to examine the impact of co-operative governance structures on citizen participation in public service provision.Methodology – Using a multiple case study-approach, we analyse and compare five examples of co-operative public–citizen partnerships in Austria and Germany.Findings – The study clearly shows that co-operatives can be a tool for both, (1) the bottom-up self-organization of citizens (co-operative as ‘contested space’) and (2) the top-down organization to canalize citizen participation (co-operative as ‘invited space’). Co-operative public–citizen partnerships therefore represent a balancing act between dependency through public funding and autonomy through community-based decision making.Research implications and limitations – The chapter underlines the importance of context-sensitive qualitative research. Limitations might stem from the fact that municipal areas might differ in other countries than Germany and Austria, for example, due to legal prerequisites.Practical implications – If regional government representatives are supporting a bottom-up initiative, they are more inclined to provide crucial resources for the public–citizen partnership and tensions between different stakeholders involved are weakened.Social implications – Co-operative public–citizen partnerships might enhance participatory democracy and seem to strengthen solidarity and social cohesion on the neighbourhood level.Originality/value of chapter – In showing that co-operatives are a suitable governance structure for community organizations, which enhance democratic decision making and foster social innovation in public service delivery, we support the findings of other studies. The chapter suggests that in order to enhance our understanding of citizen participation, context-sensitive research that goes beyond merely descriptive governance analysis is needed, taking into account the historical trajectories of public–citizen partnerships.

The scope of the participation of civil society organizations (CSOs) in providing public services as well as the models and formats of implementing State–CSO partnerships have varied both in sectorial terms and from a historical perspective. The discussion on State–CSO partnerships in service delivery has recently produced many studies, especially related to public management reform agenda, although many ideas based on public governance have appeared in recent years within the Brazilian context. This study features a historical analysis of the State–CSO partnerships in three different areas: AIDS, social assistance, and culture, and seeks to identify the main characteristics of each management model (bureaucratic, managerial, and new public governance), based on an analysis of sectorial norms produced by the federal government to regulate these relationships.

This paper aims to investigate the influence of public-private partnerships (PPPs) on social and economic conditions in Kazakhstan and Russia from a public economics perspective, namely, through the lens of a market failure and PPPs’ negative externalities.

Drawing on the concept of a market failure and using the externalities perspective, the paper investigates whether partnerships are instrumental in solving market problems, which is illustrated by the evidence from ongoing PPP projects in Kazakhstan and Russia.

Results show that citizens face expansion of monopolistic trends in the service provision and decreased availability of public services. Additionally, the government support to partnerships recreates a negative externality in the form of a higher risk premium on loan interest rates that banks use to finance PPPs. The partnerships’ impact on sustainable development often appears detrimental, as they significantly intensify the struggle between sub-national governments for increased transfers from the national budget.

The government agencies must incorporate the appraisal of the PPP externalities and their effects on the society in the decision-making regarding the PPP formation.

The authors suggest that, although government is interested in PPPs’ positive externalities, in reality many negative externalities may offset the positive spillover effects. As a result, the partnerships’ contributions to economic and social sustainability remain controversial. Extending the value-for-money concept to incorporate the assessment of PPP externalities might significantly enhance the partnership conceptualisation by more comprehensive and accurate assessment of PPPs’ economic and social value.

Public–Private Partnerships (PPPs) continue to gain increased attention from the Nigerian government. However, since PPP adoption in the country not all have attained expected outcomes. The purpose of this chapter is to explore PPP implementation practices and implications on contractual expectations of partner organizations. A qualitative approach using data collected from 23 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders involved in a Road Partnership and in a Transport Partnership in Nigeria was employed. Documentary evidence was also collected. The institutional nature of the PPP environment; bureaucratic practices in government institutions; disruptive actions of external actors and ineffective mitigation of project risks were main challenges faced in the implementation of the Road and Transport Partnerships. This study is based on the opinions and experiences of key stakeholders on PPP implementation practices in Nigeria, and this is most appropriate to elicit data richness. Partner organizations involved in infrastructure PPPs have the obligation to ensure that they are effectively implemented. If partnerships are poorly implemented, there is no reason to expect that the partnership objectives will be achieved, and this is likely to have a negative impact on the collaborative nature of partnership working in fulfilling the contractual obligations. This study is imperative to provide an understanding of challenges inherent in achieving partnership implementation goals in a developing economy. Findings will inform practices within the PPP policy area in the Nigerian context.

Partnerships have become more prevalent in the delivery of public services, particularly in relation to non‐traditional sectors such as culture, arts and leisure. This paper presents a synthesis of research on partnerships and their relevance to local museums in the light of recent government policy. The relevance of partnerships to this sector is explored through a case study of four local authorities in Northern Ireland that partnered to form a regional museum service. Qualitative interviews revealed that despite the small scale of the partnership, a number of benefits have been delivered and that the partnership mechanism can work for organisations with little in the way of resources. Much of the success of the case study partnership can be attributed to the skills and leadership of the appointed member of staff. Further research is recommended to map the type, scope and purpose of museum partnerships in order to develop a typology for this sector and to evaluate current government policy.

There are two connected purposes: to reflect on the widespread current use and abuse of the term “public‐private partnership”, and to present a case study of an unusual joint venture associating a public and a private enterprise in delivering a multi‐utility service in the Canberra region of Australia.

The article combines the case study method with a review of relevant discourse about PPPs.

On the case study evidence presented, the article concludes that this joint venture comes much closer to being a genuine public‐private partnership than many arrangements loosely described as PPPs today.

The article invites the practitioner/academic community to think more precisely about the factors that need to be considered before it is appropriate to claim that a PPP exists.

The joint venture that is the subject of this case study has not previously been analysed in this way. The article suggests that it has value in serving as a model for the development of better thinking about PPPs.