The politics of empowerment: power, populism and partnership in rural Ireland

Abstract

Since the early 1990s local area partnerships, sponsored either by the state or by the EC/EU together with the state, have proliferated in Ireland as elsewhere (Geddes, 2000). What inspired these area partnerships initially was an official analysis that the conditions resulting in urban and rural decline had reached crisis dimensions that cried out for a fresh policy response. The basic idea was to tackle intractable economic and social problems by creating institutional arrangements capable of producing a consensus among key actors and of harnessing the energies of the public, private and voluntary sectors in new dynamic area partnerships.