Does partnership necessarily lead to democracy？
伙伴关系一定能带来民主吗？

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.
新工党（New Labor Party）以伙伴关系为重要特征，实现了地方治理的现代化。“地方战略伙伴关系”（The Local Strategic Partnerships, LSPs）和 “社区新政”（New Deal for Communities, NDC）伙伴关系是英格兰地方治理转型中伙伴关系的两个典型范例。LSPs是一个非法定的非执行性组织，与公共部门、私立部门、企业、社区和志愿服务部门在一个层面上合作，在战略决策制定和社区直接参与方面发挥了作用。该机构旨在理顺地方伙伴关系，减少重复和不必要的官僚主义。由此一来，合作伙伴们甚至包括法定部门以外的部门携手改造国家最贫困的社区，减少失业和犯罪，改善卫生、教育、住房和物质环境，似乎变得更加容易。NDC是英国政府的旗舰项目，其重点也是改善那些处境最不利的社区。每个地方的NDC项目都由一个伙伴关系委员会管理，并围绕5个主要成果领域(即犯罪、就业、教育、卫生、住房和物质环境)制定战略和实施计划。NDC的一个主要特点是强调利用NDC的资源和权力来影响主流服务的提供，而不是直接将5,000万英镑资金作为改善街区的主要手段。因此，与LSPs相比，NDC更加鼓励由下至上的参与。

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.
然而，这些强调社会包容和公众参与的新治理策略，在实践上却有一定的反效果。例如年轻人、黑人社区、少数族裔等群体，LSPs评估发现他们非但没有扩大包容度，反而将社区赋权基金用在了自己的官僚机构上，并造成了社会排斥的新局面。同时，LSPs的公众参与的代表是一群跨部门的地方精英，而非普通民众，这也导致了一种压制民主的共识政治、中间派和“第三条道路”。同样，在更多致力于社区直接参与的NDC项目中，也有研究结果证明，居民把握NDC舞台可能提供给他们权力的能力受到了制约。由于居民的利益分化和贫困地区公民参与改革工作的能力有限，社区参与的真正力量最终只局限于一小部分积极分子。

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.
研究结果表明，由于说辞与结果之间存在一定程度上的差距，贫困地区的居民完全有理由怀疑地方改造的特点。但这也反映了新自由主义影响下社区的分散性，以及因为经济动荡和重建而导致的社区网络薄弱。或许这两项政策的本意的确是为包容可靠的地方治理开辟新的可能，但现实情况往往大相径庭。至少，这些地方伙伴关系会进一步破坏地方民主进程的稳定性，限制地方政治和政策辩论的范围，以及为相对不负责任的精英决策提供特权。合理有序的社区参与，需要考虑社区的实际情况，充分衡量不同参与方之间不平等的力量，赋予弱势群体参与决策的权力，如此一来，各方平等表达的意见才能被听见，社区可持续发展的目标才会被实现。