ABSTRACT
As far as Europe is concerned, the word partnership is no longer a novelty in social policy. In spite of this, we must recall that it has several meanings and usages in different countries and languages. It has come a long way from its Latin (‘particeps’) and Greek (‘hetairea’) roots, from fourteenth-century England (‘partaker’) and the French Revolution (‘partenaire’) until its present definition and use (Estivill 1993a). Today it is a key concept in Irish social policy (Sabel 1996; Walsh, Craig and McCafferty 1997; Department of the Taisoeach 1997; and Walsh, this volume) referring to the increasingly complex interplay between the public administration, employers’ organisations, trade unions and voluntary agencies. In Portugal (Chambel 1997) it is featured in the legal texts defining the requirements that anti-poverty projects must fulfil. In France (Rocard 1989) and Belgium (Hiernaux 1998) the spirit of partnership is not only present in common language but is also a tool of the decentralisation process and urban policies in the former country and of the ongoing federalisation of the latter. It is even starting to be used in the relationships between town councils and voluntary organisations in cold Finland (Heikkilä and Kautto 1997), where the Scandinavian welfare state model had previously meant the hegemony of public provision; and in warm Greece where until very recently local authorities had few resources and limited opportunities to work in concert with other actors.
