ABSTRACT
During the 1980s and 1990s ‘partnership’ became one of the most used and abused terms in the language of governance, just as in recent times ‘corporate working’ (joined-up thinking in practice) has become the leitmotif of local government. Ward (in Cullingworth, 1999, p. 232) observes, however, that partnerships have been a feature of British planning practice since the 1947 Act, initially to reconstruct the shattered commercial centres of British towns and cities following the Second World War, and from the 1960s onwards in the construction of major residential expansions. Indeed, in a broad sense, all land assembly arrangements, planning gain agreements and the very nature of planning itself can be regarded as partnership arrangements of sorts because they all involve the negotiation and agreement of outcomes that offer shared benefits for the two (or more) parties involved.
