Dilemmas of engagement: the experience of non-governmental actors in new governance spaces
Kelly Teamey and Claire McLoughlin
Download NGPA Research Paper 30| (PDF)
To argue that understanding the dynamics of relationships between Non-State Providers (NSPs) and government agencies is complex is an understatement. Terms such as convoluted, unpredictable and thorny are perhaps equally apt, depending on the context and historical background of the relationship. This is perhaps unsurprising, for what relationships in reality are ever simple? Particularly relationships that involve groups of many individuals with various and often divergent professional, ideological, political, cultural and financial alliances coming together with a supposed common objective?
The literature discussing, analysing and theorising relationships between NSPs and Government is multitudinous and diverse. Piecing together a clear image of how these relationships work in practice is a painstaking process, particularly given the patchy and rather narrow empirical research that has been primarily undertaken and the vast array of variables that can impact on the nature of the relationships formed. Yet in spite of the dearth of empirical research on NSP-government relationships, there is still much to be learnt from the existing literature about how they can be better understood and applied in practice.
This is the first of two working papers for the Non-Governmental Public Action (NGPA) programme series based on a wide-ranging and rigorous literature review on NSP-government relationships. The literature review explored an extensive range of empirical, theoretical, exploratory and/or polemical literature that has examined relationships between government agencies and NSPs of basic services (i.e. education, health, water and sanitation) for poor people. It was carried out to situate a research project, Whose Public Action? (WPA), part of the NGPA programme that is funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
This working paper identifies and briefly discusses a range of key issues that were classified as being of particular importance to understanding the dynamics of NSP-government relationships. These relationships are not confined to, or delineated by, any particular typology within this working paper, but do cover a range of formal and informal interactions through which the state and NSPs engage. A plethora of terms are used in the literature to describe these relationships (e.g. collaboration, cooperation, and partnership) and their outcomes (e.g. complementarity, competition, co-optation). The second working paper focuses more specifically on theoretical and methodological issues (including typologies of relationships) pertaining to research that has been conducted already and suggested recommendations for future research.