Welfare-Partnership Dynamics and Sustainable Development

The welfare partnership is defined as the process through which local agents interact with each other in the dynamics of collectively defining strategic objectives and building place-based approaches that reinforce local citizenship. What can we learn from the experience of municipal social action partnerships that is likely to assist us in building sustainable development formulas? This article analyses the partnership practices in six Portuguese municipalities in the Northern Region, discussing forms of social support that are convergent with sustainable development and how they tend to be articulated in municipal social action partnerships. The present research followed phenomenological reasoning using qualitative methods and multiple case studies. There were debates with professionals, looking for explicit meanings in the abstract knowledge of the concept trajectory. The results suggest that convergence with sustainable development resides in the combination of three elements: (1) developing innovative eco-community social responses that are aligned with a comprehensive social sustainability ideal that is contextualized in the relationship between subjectivities and territory, as well as with the general principles of the providence system; (2) implementing a local strategic planning practice, monitored and aligned with local projects that act on the ecological effect, determining local vulnerabilities; and (3) adopting an efficient practice of governance and allocation of stakeholders and resources, emphasizing the multilevel articulation and durability of the implemented local processes.