Local Alliances as a new form of Network Governance in Germany

Local alliances as new governance arrangements just start to be established in Germany but already seem to be very successful in problem solving. This is especially true for policy issues where the state is not willing or able to set formal rules and legislation or programmes. This special form of policy networks allows for intensive cooperation between different kinds of actors (especially between market and civil society) and can built a bridge between them that secures better problem perception and problem solving. While the state and/or local administration is an active actor in many forms of local partnerships, in local alliances the local authorities can also be just in a financing, frame giving role, and the network is mainly built by business and civil society actors. Therefore, it focusses on problem solving without the intervention of public authorities. Nevertheless, political science’s research mostly neglected local alliances as a special form of new local governance in theoretical as well as empirical ways. Only little is known about the important elements of those alliances’ success, the impact of them on policies and there is no convincing differentiation of different types. Furthermore, empirical analysis in Germany is, if at all, concentrated on the “Local Alliance for the Family”, ignoring similar structures and networks in other policy fields. Therefore, the paper first, finds a clear definition of “local alliances” and incorporates it into network governance literature by giving a state of the art overview. Second, it gives different empirical examples from Germany and analyses in case studies how they work, why they were established and how successful they are. Third, it differs against the background of the empirical analysis between different types of “local alliances”.