Conference on Governments & Communities in Partnership: From Theory to Practice, Melbourne, Australia, 25-27 September 2006

The two most important developments in policy making in recent years concern efforts to ‘join-up' different public services and related initiatives to strengthen communities to help them become more economically and socially resilient. Debates and research on these two fields are well advanced in many countries and Australia is now beginning to fashion its own approach at the national, state and local levels.

This agenda for transforming public institutions, building new collaborative arrangements and generating multi-partnered solutions for key policy problems is both an exciting opportunity and a complex challenge. How do stakeholders find one another and find a basis for co-operation? How do we keep the public interest at the forefront of these new institutions and prevent capture? How do we change the bureaucratic mind-set of both the public service and the larger non-government agencies to enable this new localism to flourish?

Fortunately for Australia there is now a wealth of experience with building these new alliances, pacts, consortia and partnerships in other countries. There are also a variety of important experiments and early implementations taking place locally.

This conference is organised by the Centre for Public Policy at the University of Melbourne (Australia) in collaboration with the OECD LEED Programme.  It will bring together key policy makers, community leaders and researchers from around Australia, together with leading experts from Austria, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United States and the United Kingdom. The aim of the program will be to deepen the academic and policy debate about the impact and value of these transformations, and also to support the needs of practitioners to discuss cutting-edge cases and issues with colleagues from around the world.

In addition to several keynote addresses, this three day event will include workshops on key issues such as:

• why collaboration matters
• the role of place
• governance models and issues
• health, environment and indigenous collaborations
• funding and financing issues
• democratic accountability
• evaluating the impacts of local partnerships, and
• leadership and skills for collaborative governance.

For more information and to register, please visit the Website of the Centre for Public Policy Transforming Institutions conference or contact Ms. Lauren Rosewarne.