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Lipsky's work on 'street-level bureaucracy' drew attention to the significant contribution to policy making made by front-line workers. This article revisits Lipsky's seminal analysis to explore whether contemporary front-line work in local governance presents a challenge to the 'street-level bureaucrat' characterisation. Since Lipsky's analysis, local government has been the subject of extensive reforms which have eroded traditional structures. In order to make local governance work, front-line workers need to be entrepreneurial to innovate and work the emergent spaces of local governance. This research uses an interpretive analysis to explore how front-line workers understand and relate their everyday work through storytelling. Front-line workers articulate a series of strategies which they employ to enable them to build relationships with the community. The article concludes that the emergent spaces at the periphery of local governance require front-line work that is less like 'street-level bureaucracy' and more like 'civic entrepreneurship'.

One of the aims of this special issue is to 'decentre' a key facet of governance, namely networks. This article considers in particular the concept 'networked community governance', a key part of New Labour's reforms in local governance and, in particular, around neighbourhood‐based working. This article draws on interpretive methods and analysis to explore the everyday work of front‐line workers in contemporary local governance through their own stories. The article is based on empirical work in the neighbourhood management system developed in Salford, a local authority in the North West of England. Key to facilitating 'networked community governance', is front‐line workers' own 'local knowledge', understood as the mundane, yet expert, understanding front‐line workers develop from their own contextual experiences. The article explores the difficulties that front‐line workers perceive themselves to face in their everyday work and how they use their 'local knowledge' to develop responsive, entrepreneurial strategies.

This important text is a response to crises of public policy. Offering an original contribution to a growing debate, the authors argue that traditional technocratic ways of designing policy are inadequate to cope with increasingly complex challenges, and suggest co-production as a more democratic alternative

Street-level bureaucrats shape policy through using discretion in their interactions with citizens and service users in delivering public services. Discretion allows street-level bureaucrats to bridge between public policy and the complex, individual, human situations they encounter. Drawing on insights from feminist institutionalism, this article establishes gender as a relevant analytical category in understanding discretion. We set out three analytical propositions: street-level bureaucrats work in gendered institutional contexts that shape their discretion; street-level bureaucrats are gendered actors, whose discretion is shaped by their individual gendered dispositions; and street-level bureaucrats' discretion has gendered effects. We investigate these propositions through a case study of the early implementation of the classification of misogyny as a hate crime among police forces in England and Wales. In addressing this analytical intersection between street-level bureaucracy and feminist institutionalism, we bring a gendered perspective to street-level bureaucracy, and a focus on how rules are interpreted to feminist institutionalism, forging new ground in public administration.

This article asks why institutional designs for urban governance are so often incomplete and what a critical perspective on incompleteness may offer. We develop a novel conceptual framework distinguishing between incompleteness as description (a deficit to be 'designed-out'), action ('good enough' design to be worked with and around), and prescription (an asset to be 'designed-in'). An extended worked example of city regional devolution in England illuminates the three types of incompleteness in practice, whilst also identifying hybrid forms and cross-cutting considerations of power, time and space. Perceiving institutional incompleteness as a design logic in its own right, held in tension with completeness, could help augment institutional design repertoires and even enhance democratic values.

'Neighbourhood' was a key political and administrative concept for the New Labour administration and was the spatial focus for a proliferation of initiatives in the early period. Yet since 2006, the appeal and use of 'neighbourhood' have waned as evidence of the impact of neighbourhood interventions over the last decade has emerged, along with active re-scaling of policy for regeneration and economic development. This article seeks to draw out why 'neighbourhood' was important to the New Labour project, to examine why and how this changed over the course of the New Labour administration, and to explore new agendas emerging in policy for sub-national governance.

Rod Rhodes (1997) Understanding Governance: Policy Networks, Governance, Reflexivity and Accountability, Open University Press 1997.Gerry Stoker (1998) 'Governance as theory: five propositions', International Journal of Social Sciences 50, 1, 17–28.Helen Sullivan and Chris Skelcher (2002) Working across Boundaries: Collaboration in Public Services, Palgrave.Janet Newman, Marion Barnes, Helen Sullivan, and A. Knops (2004) 'Public participation and collaborative governance', Journal of Social Policy 33, 203–223.From a term used largely within political science in the mid-1990s, 'governance' has become a key conceptual and analytical convention adopted by social policy, largely because of its usefulness in examining questions that are key to the discipline: citizenship; welfare rights and responsibilities; accountability; legitimacy and partnership working. Clarence and Painter (1998) have constructed a useful characterisation of public policy, identifying a shift in emphasis from hierarchies, to markets and now to collaboration. Networks, 'joined up' governance and partnership working are now central in both policy practice and analysis. These processes are not new, but New Labour have clearly expanded and accelerated them. For New Labour, collaborative working is now perceived as central in their response to key policy challenges: improving public services, tackling social exclusion and revitalising local democracy. These processes are now evident at all levels of policy making from supranational organisations such as the European Union down to neighbourhood-based initiatives. It appears that we are moving from the closed, unitary system of government of the Westminster model to a more open, decentralised system of governance. Our conceptions of citizenship have accordingly shifted, from one based on representation to one based on active participation, particularly within local communities. Governance is an issue which concerns all levels of government and citizen participation, from international-level World Bank concerns about commitment to efficiency and accountable government, to highly devolved localised urban regeneration partnerships.