Delineating partnerships from other forms of collaboration in regional development planning

ABSTRACT

The idea of an all-encompassing partnership has vindicated all sorts of collaboration models to be articulated as partnerships although not occurring as ones, leaving practitioners and politicians of regional development planning with suboptimal ways of collaborating. Reviewing the partnership literature depicts similar difficulties in delineating partnerships from other collaboration models causing diversified messages about partnerships. In an attempt to invigorate the partnership literature by delineating partnerships from other forms of collaboration and thus progress the work and output of regional planning and development, this paper defines a partnership to be a promise of a promise denoting other collaborative models such as network, cluster and governance-partnership as a promise only. Based on qualitative interviews, discursive analyses and strategic documents, the comparative case analysis of two Danish regional development agencies shows how one remained as a governance-partnership while the other turned into a partnership by continuously creating possibilities for the groups of actors involved. This transformation from a promise only into a promise of a promise displays how to delineate partnerships from other forms of collaboration such as networks, clusters and governance-partnerships.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The fact, that one of Fimreite and Lægreid’s dimensions covers involuntary – which is diametrically opposite to the hallmark of ‘voluntary commitment’ – exemplify the diversified messages of the partnership literature.

2. Partnership can act as a structural coupling by getting functional systems into ultra-cyclical productive interferences with each other so that quantities of possibilities are generated for the involved systems (Andersen 2006, 184–185).

3. Paradoxical communication seems self-contradictory when the incompatible statements are based on unlike logical levels.

4. Partnership can be described as a remarkable and restless machine of possibilities but, rather than being a ‘machine for the realisation of possibilities’, it is a ‘machine for the production of possibilities’ (Andersen 2006, 184). The former machine is applied as an instrument to realize a predefined solution on a problem, while the latter is applied to produce a consistent solution on a problem.

5. Regional growth is composed of the inherent discursive values of competiveness and interregional equality. Together with the discursive value of regional balance, these discursive values frame the communication of Growth Forum North Jutland (Wilgaard Larsen 2011a, 61).

6. There are no regional balance-regulations applied to the Growth Forum North Jutland Fund, allocated by Region North Jutland, which justify the 63% – rather than for example 51% which resembles the percentage of the population living in rural areas or transitional areas between rural and urban – of the EU-structural funds.

7. Shared regional leadership is characterized as a collaborative process which has to be understood in the context of the dynamic interplay of relations and linkages at the regional level. Nested in mutual trust, the ability to lead implies that the tensions between conflict and order and between self-organizations and institutionalization are put to good use (Sotarauta, Horlings, and Liddle 2012, 5, 7).