ABSTRACT
Over the last twenty years or so a variety of organisational arrangements have been utilised for the delivery of sports development with the most common being either the establishment of time-limited, stand alone units which generally employed staff on fixed term contracts or the adoption of more traditional hierarchical forms of delivery which typified many sports development units in the UK’s larger cities. However, which ever organisational form was dominant there was always a necessity for a substantial degree of collaboration across departmental boundaries in local authorities and with external bodies. The emergence of more formal partnership working can therefore be seen, to an extent at least, as a development of existing delivery practices which were given substantial additional momentum from the Labour government elected in 1997. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the practice and impact of networks and partnerships on sports development. The chapter begins with a review of the issues that are raised by the increasing adoption of partnerships and includes concerns relating to the distribution of power and the achievement of effective accountability. A brief discussion of the emergence of partnership working in sports development is followed by a more detailed examination of three examples of contemporary partnerships: School Sport Partnerships; County Sport Partnerships; and New Opportunities for PE and Sport Programme Partnerships. The chapter concludes with a review of the issues that are raised by the three cases and by partnership working more generally.
