Collaboration in local sport services in England: issues emerging from case studies of two local authority areas

Encouraging collaboration has been a central component of the Labour government's drive to modernise the delivery of public services and has been a key facet of recent sport policy in England. The proliferation of different forms of collaboration represents a reaction to the changes instigated by previous Conservative governments, which created a fragmented and congested state in which management approaches were based on competition and the value for money delivered by individual governmental agencies. However, the research literature on collaboration is somewhat limited by a lack of definitional clarity and is also characterised by the diversity of theoretical approaches that have been utilised. Research on collaboration in sport also remains in its infancy. To begin to address this limitation, case studies of collaboration between agencies involved in sport and physical activity for young people in two urban local authority areas are presented. The case studies provide evidence of the importance of such collaborations where there are a variety of sporting agencies that operate in changing local contexts.