Partnerships as strategic choices in public management

Partnerships are not new phenomena in public administration. However, there is now a more explicit recognition that managing public policy networks involves partnerships within and across policy fields and linking interdependent levels of government nationally and internationally. The aim of this paper is to widen the scope of strategic choice in designing partnerships in public management by developing an alternative approach: the Power-Role Analysis. As the term suggests, Power-Role Analysis uses distinctions between types of power and the roles and relationships corresponding with them to clarify and define different forms of partnership. Power-role analysis provides a basis for considering systematically the problems that arise in managing partnerships of different kinds. It also gives guidance for establishing congruence between forms of partnerships and the results to be expected from selecting one form rather than another. The Power-Role analysis is afterwards performed, its focus being two empirical cases.