The New Labour Party has modernized the local governance with a critical characteristic of partnership. The Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) and the New Deal for Communities (NDC) partnerships are two typical partnership examples of local governance transformation in England. LPSs is a non-statutory and non-executive organization that played a role in cooperating with the strategic decision making and the direct community participation at the same level engaging with the public sector, the private, business, community and voluntary sectors. The agency aims to rationalize the local partnership, to reduce duplication and unnecessary bureaucracy. It is easier for partners, including those outside the statutory sector, to cooperate to revitalize the country's most deprived communities, reduce unemployment and crime, and improve health, education, housing, and the physical environment. NDC is  the UK government's flagship programme that also focused on improving those neighbourhoods suffering the most disadvantages. Each local NDC project is managed by a partnership board. It has developed a strategy and a delivery plan, based around the five key outcome areas:  crime, employment, education, health, housing, and physical environment.  A key feature of NDC is that the emphasis is placed on utilizing the NDC resources and powers to influence mainstream service provision, rather than regarding the £50 million funding as the primary means by which the neighbourhood will be improved. Therefore, comparing with the LPS, the NDC is more encouraging on bottom-up participation.

However, these new governance strategies, which emphasize the social inclusion and public participation, have achieved the opposite result to some extent in practice. For groups like young people, the black community, and ethnic minorities, the LSPs evaluation has found that instead of widening the inclusion, they spent the Community Empowerment Fund on their own bureaucracy leading to a new situation of social exclusion. Meanwhile, LSP's public participation was represented by a group of cross-sectoral local elites rather than the general public leading to a consensual, centrist, ‘third way’ politics that suppressed democracy. Similarly, in the NDC programmes that put more effort into direct participation from the community, there are also findings proving that residents' ability to grasp the power which the NDC arena potentially offers them is constrained. Due to the divisive interests of residents and the limited ability to participate in reform work of citizens in the deprived areas, the real power of community participation is ultimately limited to a small cadre of activists.

The results of the study suggest that residents in deprived areas have full reason to doubt the feature of local renewal actions to some extent because of the gap between words and results. But it also reflects the fragmented nature of the community under the influence of neoliberalism and the weak community network because of economic turmoil and reconstruction. These two policies may indeed be meant to open up new possibilities for inclusive and responsible local governance, whereas it must be concluded that the reality is often very different. At the very least, these local partnerships can further destabilize local democratic processes, limit the scope of local political and policy debate, and privilege the relatively irresponsible elite decision-making. Reasonable and orderly community participation requires consideration of the actual situation of the community and the full measurement of the unequal strength of various participants, and empowerment of weak parties to participate in decision-making so that the equal expression of views from all sides could be heard and the goal of sustainable community development could be achieved.