Reframing the Delivery of Local Housing Services: Networks and the New Competition

Abstract

The creation of quasi-markets within the social housing sector has put more emphasis on local authorities’ indirect regulatory, strategic and enabling roles, increased cost-consciousness and encouraged competition between a full range of providers of local housing services, and heralded in ‘the new management’ (Goodlad, 1993; Le Grand, 1990; Stoker, 1991). At the same time the emergence at local level of networks and coalitions of service-providing organisations and the growth of interorganisational approaches to housing and urban management projects has increased opportunities for collaboration and coordinated approaches. This development extends Ball et al.’s (1988) notion of ‘structures of housing provision’, with its focus on social agents and their interlinkages, to encapsulate generative causal mechanisms and the exercise of powers and liabilities within these mechanisms. This echoes the approach and focus proposed by Bhaskar (1975) and Sayer (1984).