The UK Government’s HM Treasury Review of Sub-National Economic Development and Regeneration (July 2007) provided a framework for raising growth and prosperity across the UK. It was based on the three pillars of (i) maintaining macro-economic stability to enable businesses and individuals to plan with certainty for the long term, (ii) implementing micro-economic reforms aimed at addressing market failures in the underlying drivers of growth-competition, enterprise, innovation, skills, investment and employment, and (iii) devolving decision making to the regional and local levels as far as possible to ensure strategy and delivery are responsive to local economic conditions.

Encouraging state and non-state actors to work together to achieve multi-spatial city-regional aims continues to be an important aspect of government policy, and Strategic Partnerships are a defining characteristic of UK regional, urban and local economic development and social regeneration. With regard to the latter, since 2001, the UK Government has introduced a number of key initiatives aimed at managing neighbourhoods in all local authority areas, culminating in new forms of organisation, Local Strategic Partnerships and Local Area Agreements.

Local government managers now have a ‘duty to involve’ citizens’ and a ‘duty to co-operate’ with communities, state and non-state agencies to marry social and economic objectives and drive local area transformations. Within a National Performance Framework, of 198 national indicators, local areas can, through the LSP s and LAA framework agree on 35 locally determined targets. These targets are agreed through the development of a Sustainable Community Strategy agreed by all partners represented on the LSP.

Recent changes to the regional architecture have been introduced to bring further coherence to multi-spatial governance, and to avoid duplication of effort. As traditional boundaries between state and non-state agencies have become more opaque, the pursuit of citizen well-being, economic growth and productivity, new enterprise, innovation, skills, investment and employment, at al levels present new challenges and dilemmas for collaborative partnerships of local leaders and communities.

Drawing on interviews, government and other documentary source data this paper examines various strategic partnerships at neighbourhood, sub-regional and regional levels of governance in the UK to illustrate the importance of collective leadership between state, non-state agencies and communities within the policy domains of economic development and social regeneration. It presents an institutional ethnography of the main strategic partnerships, and highlights some of the emerging issues and challenges arising from these (relatively) new governance arrangements.

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