LEED Forum on Partnerships and Local Governance

The Forum seeks to optimise the contribution of partnership and other forms of governance to local economic and employment development and the effectiveness of policies. It pursues the following objectives:

• Improving the dissemination capacity of the partnership experience in designing and implementing local development strategies, stimulating learning between partnerships and facilitating the transfer of expertise and exchange of experiences within and between OECD member and non member countries.
• Creating synergies between partnership programmes of different countries and supporting the development of cross-border partnership co-operation.
• Assessing and developing co-operation models between partnerships, clusters and local innovative systems. 
• Advising and supporting the LEED Directing Committee, partnership organisations and other stakeholders on the ways to promote an integrated approach and improve the co-ordination between labour market, education, economic and social policies at local and regional level.

Through their designing and implementing of area-based development strategies, partnerships gain helpful know-how on local development practices.  However, this knowledge is not adequately exploited due to the weak linkages between partnerships themselves and between partnerships and government administrations. The OECD Study, through its examination of the partnership experience  in 14 countries and with its multidisciplinary panel of experts, also highlighted a potential for broader exchanges of experience at international level.

The OECD LEED Forum on Partnerships and Local Governance seeks to fill this gap and stimulate the exchange of know-how between relevant organisations worldwide to ensure that: i) partnerships learn effectively from each other, and that ii) local development practitioners and policy-makers at all levels learn the lessons from the partnership experience. This helps to make the best use of good practice and avoid costly failures. 

The Forum uses the following definition of partnerships: The area-based partnership is a tool to improve governance. It seeks to ‘improve policy co-ordination and adaptation to local conditions, lead to better utilisation and targeting of programmes, integrate civil society’s concerns into strategic planning exercises through more widespread participatory democracy, stimulate corporate involvement in local projects and promote greater satisfaction with public policy’ (OECD, Local Partnerships for Better Governance, 2001).

Partnerships can be focused on either employment, social or economic development issues. They are often subject to the same following characteristics however. They are:

• MULTI-LEVEL: Partnerships decision-making involves stakeholders from national, regional and local levels.
• MULTI-SECTORAL: They involve stakeholders representing various policy areas and various economic sectors/branches, and governmental as well as non-governmental actors interested in improving the co-ordination between labour market, education, economic and social policies at local and regional level.
• MULTI-DIMENSIONAL: Partnerships apply integrated approaches to multi-dimensional problems.

Contact the Forum on Partnerships and Local Governance