Under New Labour, policies designed to help families reconcile paid work and family life have increasingly become part of the UK's family-policy terrain. These policies are usually analysed from the perspective of mothers. In this paper, however, we examine how fathers have been situated within these developments. We argue that, while there is evidence of increased optimism on the part of New Labour about fathers' capacity as care-givers, the policies to have emerged since 1998 are only minimally facilitative of opportunities for fathers to reconfigure their paid work and care patterns. We suggest that the reason for this has much to do with the economistic rationale under which the reconciling work and family-life agenda has emerged.

The extent of children's and young people's participation activities has increased considerably among statutory, voluntary and community sector organisations across the UK in recent years. The Children's Fund, a major government initiative launched in 2000, represents a systematic drive towards promoting children and young people's participation in planning, implementing and evaluating preventative services within all 149 local authority areas in England. Based on research carried out by the National Evaluation of the Children's Fund, this paper explores the experience of Children's Fund partnerships of engaging children and young people in strategic processes.

The drive to reduce child poverty is of particular interest in southern Europe, where public assistance to low-income families with children is often meagre or not available at all. The paper examines the effect of income transfers to families in Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal using a benefit-tax model. The distributional impact of actual programmes is shown to be weak, hence the scope for reform great. As an illustration, the European benefit-tax model EUROMOD is used to simulate universal child benefits equivalent to those in Britain, Denmark and Sweden. The anti-poverty effect of such benefits is found to be in proportion to their fiscal cost.

This paper is concerned with the extent to which the state offers potential for furthering farm women's status and rights. Using case studies of Australia and Northern Ireland, it examines the extent to which the state has intervened to address gender inequality in the agricultural sector. These two locations provide a particularly rich scope for analysis because while Australia has a long history of state feminism and an extensive legislative framework for pursing gender equity, this is not the case with Northern Ireland. At the same time, the restructuring of the state in Northern Ireland, following on from the Belfast Agreement of 1998 and the Northern Ireland Act of 1998, has generated new opportunities for state intervention regarding gender equality. Moreover, while gender is now for the first time being placed on the state agenda in Northern Ireland, gender reform is being wound back in Australia, as equity discourses are subsumed by the hegemonic discourses of neo-liberalism.

Central to the Blair government's economic and social policies has been the promotion of a more ‘knowledge-based economy’. However, some commentators have suggested that the knowledge economy stretches income distributions and polarises skilled and unskilled workers. Drawing on empirical data about the UK case to explore such claims, this paper concludes that there is a significant positive correlation between the extent to which a region's economy has become ‘knowledge based’ and its level of income inequality. It argues this finding has important policy relevant implications.

The issue of ‘joined up’ governance and partnership working (between statutory partners, between the state and the voluntary sector and between the state and the private sector) is one which currently occupies the attention of policy makers and academics across mixed-liberal welfare states such as the European Union, Nordic, Commonwealth and North American welfare regimes (Geddes and Benington, 2001; Considine and Lewis, 2003; Bradford, 2003; Ovretveit, 2003). Many of these states, the UK included, are attempting to tackle the issues of growing demands for services, the perceived ineffectiveness and inefficiency of governments in responding to welfare need and the ‘hollowing out’ of the state that is a feature of modern mixed-liberal welfare states, particularly those which are attempting to find a ‘Third Way’ between socialist bureaucracies and market-driven liberalism (Giddens, 1998). The policy response, both in the UK and internationally, has been to encourage ‘partnership’ working between the various arms of the state, and between the state and the private and voluntary sector, as well as emphasizing ‘partnership’ working between the state and local users and communities.

The reforms to children's services in the UK brought in by the Every Child Matters Green Paper and the subsequent Children Act 2004 represent the most significant change in this area of social policy since 1948. The policy approach has two distinguishing features – an ‘outcomes led’ approach rooted in the views of children and young people about what constitutes ‘wellbeing’ in their lives, and a partnership approach that recognises these outcomes can only be achieved through high levels of inter-agency and inter-professional working. This article suggests that the two features may be in tension, and that during the process of implementation there is a danger that user defined outcomes will be re-interpreted to fit in with other organisational and professional agendas. The analysis draws upon Rick Matland's framework for exploring the impact of conflict and ambiguity respectively upon the implementation process.

Mental health is a good example of a field where imperatives for partnership or collaborative working can be in tension with those for client confidentiality. Both imperatives have been reinforced by additional regulation in recent years, in response to major inquiries. Professionals face the dilemma that either sharing clients' or patients' information or not sharing it could lead to outcomes for which they might be blamed; any rule adopted risks one or other type of error. This article examines two cases from a larger interview-based study of how local organisations are trying practically to reconcile these competing pressures.

A key characteristic of the English and Welsh system of care provision is that the supply function is divided between two types of organisation: the National Health Service (NHS) and local authorities. These inter-organisational and the related inter-professional divides have long been recognised as problematic from a user and carer viewpoint; and various policy changes have attempted to address them. This paper draws on three different research projects to describe practical experiences of user and carer involvement in this context (a) the Evaluation of the 1999 Health Act Section 31 flexibilities encouraging more effective service delivery partnerships between the NHS and local authorities in England; (b) a Baseline Study of Partnership Working and Flexibilities Use in Wales; and (c) the Evaluation of the NHS Changing Workforce Programme, which implemented new ways of working to improve patient care across health and social care in England. In synthesising the studies' findings, the paper also begins to explore relationships between involvement effectiveness and different types of NHS–local authority partnership as they seek to introduce change and deliver more effective services.

The increasing emphasis on community participation across the globe is well-documented. In the UK, it has been a central theme in neighbourhood renewal policy, where communities are expected to engage not only at neighbourhood level but also to take their place alongside public and private sector players in local strategic partnerships at city- or district-wide levels. Engaging communities beyond the neighbourhood poses particular challenges for the voluntary and community sector infrastructure. This article draws on an evaluation of the UK government's Community Participation Programmes to identify the challenges of scaling up to these levels and how these can be addressed.

Drawing on extensive research, the article proposes a diagnostic tool for assessing official schemes to encourage participation and discusses remedial measures that might be taken to tackle problems. According to the CLEAR framework, people participate when they can: when they have the resources necessary to make their argument. People participate when they feel part of something: they like to participate because it is central to their sense of identity. They participate when they are enabled to do so by an infrastructure of civic networks and organisations. People participate when they are directly asked for their opinion. Finally, people participate when they experience the system they are seeking to influence as responsive.

Whilst there is ample literature on the governance and management of partnerships in welfare, particularly within mixed-economy states, much of it has focused on the governance and organisational capacity issues. This paper draws on that body of literature and evidence from health and social care partnerships, and attempts to develop the theoretical and empirical work in the area to address the issue of citizens' social rights, asking whether collaborative governance and partnerships between agencies are the solution to promoting citizens' social participation, or another state-driven method of indirectly enhancing social exclusion.

The establishment of partnerships has been a central feature of British social welfare policy since 1997 when the New Labour government came to power. Although the academic attention given to partnership working since then has grown considerably, there have been few attempts to link conceptual models of partnerships with existing forms. This paper addresses this gap and finds that, while there are links between actual and model partnerships, there is little evidence that actual partnerships have been designed or structured to meet their particular tasks.

Rod Rhodes (1997) Understanding Governance: Policy Networks, Governance, Reflexivity and Accountability, Open University Press 1997.

Gerry Stoker (1998) ‘Governance as theory: five propositions’, International Journal of Social Sciences 50, 1, 17–28.

Helen Sullivan and Chris Skelcher (2002) Working across Boundaries: Collaboration in Public Services, Palgrave.

Janet Newman, Marion Barnes, Helen Sullivan, and A. Knops (2004) ‘Public participation and collaborative governance’, Journal of Social Policy 33, 203–223.

From a term used largely within political science in the mid-1990s, ‘governance’ has become a key conceptual and analytical convention adopted by social policy, largely because of its usefulness in examining questions that are key to the discipline: citizenship; welfare rights and responsibilities; accountability; legitimacy and partnership working. Clarence and Painter (1998) have constructed a useful characterisation of public policy, identifying a shift in emphasis from hierarchies, to markets and now to collaboration. Networks, ‘joined up’ governance and partnership working are now central in both policy practice and analysis. These processes are not new, but New Labour have clearly expanded and accelerated them. For New Labour, collaborative working is now perceived as central in their response to key policy challenges: improving public services, tackling social exclusion and revitalising local democracy. These processes are now evident at all levels of policy making from supranational organisations such as the European Union down to neighbourhood-based initiatives. It appears that we are moving from the closed, unitary system of government of the Westminster model to a more open, decentralised system of governance. Our conceptions of citizenship have accordingly shifted, from one based on representation to one based on active participation, particularly within local communities. Governance is an issue which concerns all levels of government and citizen participation, from international-level World Bank concerns about commitment to efficiency and accountable government, to highly devolved localised urban regeneration partnerships.

www.interactweb.org.uk

An alliance of practitioners, researchers, writers and policy makers committed to putting effective deliberative, participatory and co-operative approaches at the heart of debate, decision making and action in the UK. The website contains a list of publications on participation and partnership, case studies, discussion papers and information about current initiatives.