Partnerships and the Good-Governance Agenda: Improving Service Delivery Through State-NGO Collaborations

First under the Millennium Development Goals and now under the Sustainable Development Goals, partnerships for development, especially between state and NGOs, remain a valued goal. Partnerships are argued to improve provision of basic social services to the poor: the state is viewed as providing sca...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Voluntas (Manchester, England) England), 2019-12, Vol.30 (6), p.1270-1283
Main Author: Bano, Masooda
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Collaboration
Economic development
Governance
Government
Government employees
Health care expenditures
Leadership
NGOs
Nongovernmental organizations
Original Paper
Partnerships
Political Science
Privatization
Sanitation
Social Policy
Social Sciences
Social services
Social services delivery
Sustainability
Sustainable development
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Summary:First under the Millennium Development Goals and now under the Sustainable Development Goals, partnerships for development, especially between state and NGOs, remain a valued goal. Partnerships are argued to improve provision of basic social services to the poor: the state is viewed as providing scale, with NGOs ensuring good governance. Close study of three leading partnership arrangements in Pakistan (privatization of basic health units, an 'adopt a school' program, and low-cost sanitation) shows how state-NGO collaborations can indeed improve service delivery; however, few of these collaborations are capable of evolving into embedded partnerships that can bring about positive changes in government working practices on a sustainable basis. In most cases, public servants tolerate, rather than welcome, NGO interventions, due to political or donor pressure. Embedded partnerships require ideal-type commitment on the part of the NGO leadership, which most donor-funded NGOs fail to demonstrate. For effective planning, it is important to differentiate the benefits and limitations of routine co-production arrangements from those of embedded partnerships.
ISSN:0957-8765
1573-7888
DOI:10.1007/s11266-017-9937-y