urban regeneration in deprived european neighbourhoods 417
does not have as positive a connotation as partnership does. When people
collaborate it is a response to differences in terms of access to power and the
limitations on their capacity to act unilaterally. The language of partnership
tends to gloss over the reality of differential distribution of power.
VIII CONCLUSION
The contemporary European city can be contextualised by examining the
wider societal trends that have included key changes in the national state’s
economic activities:
(a) a shift from nationally determined, locally relayed, welfare oriented
measures of economic and social redistribution to (supra) nationally
facilitated, locally determined, wide-ranging supply-side interventions in
the local and regional economy;
(b) a shift in economic governance mechanisms from the typical post-war
bifurcation of market and state to new forms of network based policy co-
ordination which cross-cut previous “private public boundaries and
involve “key” economic players from local and regional as well as national,
and increasingly, international economies; and
(c) an associated shift from an allegedly Fordist, Keynsian, welfarist policy
paradigm to one stressing flexibility, innovation, and entrepreneurship,
(Jessop, 1997, p. 35).
The diffusion of partnership from the state down to the city and its
constituent neighbourhoods, reflects the view that development policies
“... should facilitate more targeted and flexible solutions which are able to
adapt to increasingly varying social needs in differentiated local contexts,”
(Kazepov, 2005, p. 26). According to Benington, all partnerships face a number
of challenges in relation to legitimation, innovation, problem-solving and co-
ordination. The different messages emerging from partnership research
“... reflects the different conditions and contexts of partnership across the EU
- in different countries, associated with different programmes and with
different ‘mixes’ of partners”, (2001, p. 216). The case studies reported on here
confirm the complexity associated with the form that partnership takes, and
the processes through which it is negotiated, at local level in the contemporary
European neighbourhood. The freedom of manoeuvre that localities have,
varies across the different cities, and depends very much on the institutional
frames of reference, which constrain and enable options at different scalar
levels (Kazepov, 2005, p. 26).