Strategy, Partnership and Contingency

Abstract

Cultural theory provides a good contextual analysis of governance, but it does not detail the relationships between networks, public and private organisations and policy strategy. Cultural theory usefully identifies the social changes that contextualise change in government, but the relationship between organisational complexity and policy outcomes is not addressed. As the Ostroms (1997) argue, cultural theory currently provides a broad framework for analysis as opposed to a way of effectively dealing with specific policy problems. In contrast, a contingency model is employed in this chapter to establish a model for analysing the patterning of different economic development and urban regeneration partnerships. The model places emphasis on the importance of interorganisational relationships and the external and internal contingencies (Kouzmin and Jarman, 1989) that shape partnerships and influence strategy making. The chapter begins with a brief overview of extant urban theories and reviews major disagreements about the roles and characteristics of policy networks.