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This article explores vertical and horizontal dimensions of the work of public, private and civic leaders involved in economic development in England, in particular, those working in the complex terrain of Local Enterprise Partnerships, a key partnership tool in the UK central government’s localism agenda for driving growth. It offers insights into innovative ways in which state, non-state and citizen agents navigate a complex set of vertical, legal authority structures within fragmented, horizontal and largely informal new ‘spaces’ of interactions/interrelationships to collaboratively co-produce strategies and plans for transforming local areas. To advance our knowledge of collaborative leadership requires new methodological approaches to investigating multi-accountabilities and how co-production works within ‘loosely coupled’ networks. It is imperative to appreciate the problems associated with leadership working across sectoral boundaries within complex networks of vertical, legal structures and horizontal, informal action spaces. In such networks, leaders, as institutional representatives, work collaboratively to achieve objectives not readily attainable by member organisations acting alone. They also need to compromise and negotiate their representative role back to a parent organisation while protecting and promoting the priorities, aims and interests of the new entity, in this case, a Local Enterprise Partnership. Theoretically, then, the article is located in recent debates on the theory and practice of New Public Governance, to show the inadequacies of New Public Management models for capturing the complexities between formal authority structures and fragmented informal sets of relationships. It also draws on accountability models, notably, from the Utrecht School, to identify social relations between collaborative leaders on Local Enterprise Partnerships, and to show how they assert agency and individual actions within the boundaries of participating institutions.Points for practitionersThe findings should benefit professionals, public managers and policymakers in understanding formal and informal linkages on partnerships for economic development. The article should facilitate an appreciation of the importance of greater accountability for actions in cross-boundary working. Moreover, in exploring vertical and horizontal dimensions of public, private and civic leadership in the complex terrain of Local Enterprise Partnerships, the findings show their feasibility as key vehicles to develop collaborative, co-produced strategies in transforming sub-national localities.

Evolving public sector roles in the leadership of place-based partnerships: from controlling to influencing policy? Regional Studies. This study argues that the role of the public sector in the leadership of some place-based partnerships is changing. It begins by developing a new framework for place-based leadership around a vehicle metaphor. The emerging shift in leadership roles is explored through a comparison of three pairs of UK-based case studies. It concludes that in some partnerships local community representatives increasingly hold the more powerful leadership roles (driver, navigator) with public sector organizations relegated to the back-seat role of technical expert (mechanic), with a more subtle, yet still significant, influence on policy.

International audience

The aim of this paper is to ascertain the impact of quasi-markets on contracting processes and factors affecting the costs of contracting in Finnish health care in the specific case of laboratory services. By means of a comparative case analysis, we ascertained the changes in organizational contracting practices and identified the actions affecting the transaction costs of contracting in the case of an autonomous municipal enterprise laboratory compared with the same laboratory as a hierarchically run municipal unit. The research was conducted during the years 2007–2011. The results suggest that introducing quasi-markets into laboratory services increased the cost factors of contracting; and had a negative impact on the laboratories’ willingness to create new market relationships.