Introduction

Local Partnerships and Social Exclusion in the European Union discusses the local partnership-based initiatives that have been set up to tackle European-wide problems of poverty and social exclusion. In both the United Kingdom and the European Union today, social exclusion is one of the most pressing problems facing citizens and one of the ‘wicked’ cross-cutting issues of governance confronting politicians and policy-makers, while ‘partnership’ between public, private, voluntary and community organisations and interests is widely identified as an essential element in any solution. In the United Kingdom, one of the first acts of the New Labour government when it entered office in 1997 was to set up a Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) in the Cabinet Office at the heart of government. The SEU is a concrete symbol of the new government’s recognition of the severity of problems of poverty and social exclusion in the United Kingdom – in contrast to previous Conservative administrations, which reputedly banned the ‘p’ word from all government documents – and the adoption of the language of social exclusion, with its EU associations, seemed to signify Labour’s wish to be at the heart of European policy in this area. The SEU’s proposals for a National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal (NSNR), published in spring 2000 (Social Exclusion Unit 2000), have brought the problems of poor neighbourhoods and excluded communities into even sharper focus, and reinforced the commitment to partnership as a method of tackling them. Notably, strategic local partnerships are at the core of the policy package which the NSNR proposes.