INTERREG IIIc
SusSET – Sustaining Small Expanding Towns
THEME 6 - ‘Partnership and town management’
Notes from Strömstad and Proposal for Polen
Lead Town: Strömstad Other Towns: Stonehaven, Åmål and Kungälv
Scope
How is the theme best defined? |
Parntership and town management is the process by which local organisations from various business organisations formalise a working method for cooperation to create a broader participation and involvement in the vision and strategy work being carried out within the municipality. |
|
Why is this theme important to Sustaining Small Expanding Towns? |
The issue of Partnership is the foundation for a whole town strategy that is owned by the people living in the city. |
|
What are the consequences of small towns ignoring the theme? |
|
Town strategies and plans that do not fully reflect community needs and aspirations. Support and belief in the strategy will be lessened. Implementation is likely to be more difficult |
What do we know about the theme already? |
|
Existing practices and experiences are documented in the Town Profiles. |
Who else is doing/has done work in this field? |
There is a substantial body of academic and practical work in regard to partnership and networking methods, practices and approaches. Strömstad has participated in a partnership project in the late 90’s. |
how 'wide' and how 'deep' does SusSET need to go with the theme? |
|
Partnership is closely linked to engagement, dialogue and youth. One key-question is to create engagement and maintain it over time. The mechanism defined in theme 4 and the methods defined in theme 6 should be very useful to link together. As a theme it needs considered in regard to each work-plan, as well as a general activity in its own right. SusSET should seek to draw together a report that examines current practice, identifies best/good practice and takes forward a shared practical project designed to highlight issues and identify criteria for success. |
What discussions might SusSET need to have? |
Different approaches and methods of partnership formed in the different towns and nations. What constitutes best practice. In what way can the un-organized, youth, participate? |
In light of the above, what aspects might SusSET need to test? |
SusSET need to compare different form of partnership and if there is a difference in outcome. Special interest in the impact of official decisions and on town strategies. Is there more engagement and less conflicts where there is a broad participation in the work with visions and strategies. What different methods are there? |
Output from discussion at the Strömstad Conference
What is the theme and how do we define it?
Partnership and Town management is about creating a cooperation for planning and development of the city.
Definition of partnership: A partnership is formed by different participants and players with a common goal, ready to compromise within a certain well defined topic. All participants must know exactly what output that is expected from the partnership. The partnership must have the decision right within the topic. It is about cooperation and not about oppose.
All the participants in the theme discussion had wide experiences from different forms of partnership. A quite broad list of different failures with partnership was discussed. The most common reasons for partnerships to fail is:
· The topic was not firmly defined.
- The partnership hadn´t the right to make decisions.
- The partnership was set up at the wrong time – often to late in the process
- Wrong players, with for example people without mandate to represent
- Hard to engage everyone that is involved.
- Lack of engagement.
- Different goals.
Partnership and Town Management within the SusSET perspective is about visions and strategies. It is about common interest and includes both public and private interest. The decision right is indisputable the public governments. Within this area is the partnership a way of strengthen the democratic process and produce a better foundation for decisions.
The method of partnership is also a very useful way of conducting defined topics and makes common public and private interest happen. There is a different experience in putting things in to practice through partnership. In Sweden that is almost only the matter within the area of big road projects. Other ways of using partnership to get both public and private interest in to practice is an interesting topic to examine within the project.
Partnership and Town Management is important to SusSET because it is one way of creating a broader ownership of visions and strategies for a city. A broader ownership makes it more likely for those to get implemented. It is also more likely that partnership can be formed about projects that both the public and the private wants to put in to practice but a cooperation is necessary for it to happen.
Objectives
The goal for the theme group is to create a method for successful partnerships. A number of rules and critical factors are to be defined. From this a working method is to be produced and tested in different ways by the different participating towns.
Proposal for activities
1. Forming local partnerships
Strömstad proposes that each town interested in taking part in the theme should define a topic within there own town where it would be useful to form a partnership. The partnership formed in each town is to be evaluated and the progress and problems are to be described and reported to the other towns participating in the theme.
The individual town partnership shall be formed before next major meeting. At the next major meeting shall each town present there experiences from the different partnership.
- Best practice
The towns participating in the theme Partnership and Town Management ought to seek good example of different kinds of partnership and Town Management. They should also make an effort in finding other theoretical findings about forming partnership.
A special interest could be at Public Private Partnership and in what ways that is used among the different towns and regions.
- International partnership
The second step within the SusSET project and the theme sessions is, for all groups, to form partnerships about each theme with common objectives. Strömstad proposes that another international partnership is formed by those towns that are pointed out as seasonal towns.
The partnership among towns with seasonal economy shall be set up at a meeting for those towns with the objective to put focus at key issues for towns with seasonal economy.
Costs
The cost for the proposed activities depends largely on the number of international meetings. Number 1, forming local partnership, has no suggested international meetings and the different local costs for this are hard to estimate.
The activity “ Best Practice “ has no suggested international meetings.
The international partnership for seasonal economy has one suggested international meeting.
In what way the different towns need to involve external expertise are crucial for each individual towns budget. We will discuss this at the meeting in Polen.
|
