Tackling social exclusion in the European Union? The limits to the new orthodoxy of local partnership

This article is based on recent transnational research on partnership-based initiatives to promote local development and regeneration and combat socia l exclusion in the EU. The increasing reliance on partnership as the basis for local policy initiatives is first situated in the context of contempora ry debates about social exclusion. The main part of the article then draws on the literatures on local governance and urban regime theory to examine t hree issues critical to the impact of the 'new orthodoxy' of local partners hip: the capacity of partnerships as interorganizational forms of local gov ernance; their inclusiveness; and the extent of outcomes which can be attri buted to partnership as a distinctive mode of local governance. On all thre e issues, the evidence points to the limited claims that can be made for mo st local partnerships as 'inclusion coalitions' capable of effectively tack ling social exclusion, and suggests that structural features of the current ly dominant version of partnership entrench a model of elite rather than in clusive governance. Local partnership is associated with weak rather than s trong discourses of social exclusion and inclusion, and its significance li es as much as anything in the way in which the practice of partnership tend s to foreclose the sphere of debate and action, excluding more radical opti ons.