Partnership working is becoming an increasingly common approach for addressing local and regional needs. By combining the resources and expertise of local stakeholders, partnerships can generate innovative policies and solutions. To succeed, they must encourage participation, build trust, and develop local capabilities, all whilst navigating a dynamic governance landscape where roles and responsibilities are continually shifting. Understanding the mechanisms and processes underlying partnership success and failure remains formative. It is also vital to support transformative change.
This fellowship will critically examine the role of regional and local partnerships as innovative governance approaches for solving local needs and national challenges. It will draw on current ideas on challenge-oriented innovation policy, which have emerged at the interface between mission-oriented policy and innovation and transition studies. It will test these ideas and create practical knowledge about what works and why.
Objectives
The project has two goals:
1. To examine the rise of multi-actor partnerships at multiple scales to understand how they help create, or hold back, the creation of more effective multilevel governance in the UK.
2. To understand what conditions and structures of these partnerships can provide practical insights into how to encourage participation, build confidence, and develop skills and capacity in local communities.
These goals will be achieved through three main research elements.
Desk-based document analysis will be used to collect publicly accessible information about each LPIP region, its central actors and partnerships, as well as the main regional issues of concern.
Interviews with regional stakeholders will be used to examine how and why LPIPs were created, and deepen insight into the relationships between central stakeholders. They will also foster knowledge of each partnership’s architecture and processes.
Finally, workshops with regional stakeholders will be used to explore emergent insights on regional governance arrangements, the role of partnerships and local policy innovation.
The Team
Jake Barnes, BA Innovation Fellow
Outputs
Events
‘Assembling the impossible’ was a workshop delivered to the Yorkshire Policy Innovation Partnership (YPIP) in Leeds in January 2024. It used art, performance and humour to provoke insight into the difference between organising to deliver transformative change and organising the delivery of transformative change in place.
Blog
Governing for Net Zero? A British Academy Report and its value to Local Policy Making
September 2025