Workshop Five: Multiparty governance, contracting and funding issues

1
Workshop Five Multiparty governance,
contracting and funding issues

• Presenter
• Wendy Larner
• Facilitator
• Wendy Reid

2
Headline Local Partnerships

• Involve multi-level collaborative arrangements
  that join up central government agencies, local
  institutions and community groups
• Shift from partnerships as localized initiatives
  to partnership working as a mandatory tool.
• Raising major theoretical, political and
  practical issues

3
Techniques of Partnership

• Neo-social techniques that create conditions
  that encourage people to act more relationally.
• Transferable governance, decision making and
  funding models
• Proliferation of web pages, funding guides, good
  practice guides
• Process evaluations
• The unwritten rules of partnership are being
  written down and brought to bear on the
  interactions and activities of the various
  participants.

4
Issues Arising

• Important continuities with competitive
  contractualism
• Public Finance Act 1989
• Transparency, efficiency and effectiveness
• Contracts for service
• Legally defined fund holding arrangements
• Specified Outputs

5
Political and Institutional Contexts

• Relational contracts seem most appropriate when
  clearly identified institutions come together.
• Ironically, the push for transparent structures
  and processes often comes from community
  organizations
• Continued calls for conventional contracts,
  particularly amongst Maori.

6
Risk Management

• Neo-social techniques open up policy making and
  service provision to a wider range of actors.
• They also allow for the management of risk in a
  context characterized by competing values and
  ways of working.
• How effective is relational contracting in
  achieving risk management?

7
Conclusions

• Major contradictions are emerging in the efforts
  to develop neo-social techniques.
• Tensions are being resolved through the
  development of new indicators to measure and
  evaluate collaboration and relationships
• Represents a move towards the specification and
  codification of certain behaviours
• Is this really different from the use of
  contracts to let managers manage and making them
  manage?

8
Discussion Questions

• Is it useful for a relational contract to be
  developed by the parties before they begin
  collaborative processes/projects?
• If it is useful to establish a relational
  contract what should be included? (visions,
  governance processes, protocols for working,
  resources required, relationships with
  community/iwi, branding and naming etc)
• What are the practical difficulties associated
  with relational contracts and multiparty funding?
  - what have we learned to date? - what are the
  next steps to improve things?