The ways in which partnership relationships between the VCS and other public agencies (including City Hall) are constructed and understood across the sector have been discussed in a number of studies of different cities. In these different places, the autonomy or capacity of VCS managers or organisations are with the role they occupy as intermediaries between the local community and the state. The extent to which they are agents of chance and mobilization or facilitators of continuity and consensus has emerged as a key question in the literature and a potential framework for exploring the role of the VCS in the Manchester cases. The experience from the research suggests that whilst some individuals or groups do define themselves as agents of political change whose role is to enable people at the grassroots to asserts of political change whose role is to enable people at the grassroots to assert their voice, they find it hard to mobilise effectivety. One actor from the sector voiced her frustration in one of the research focus groups
The VCS as a whole is often defined by others in terms of whether it has a ‘Legitimate’ face or a ‘headbanger’ approach. If you are potentially situated in the former then there is a process of incorporation and co-option. If you are in the latter then marginalization is quickly followed by exclusion, the experience ultimately of CPI. CN4M encountered the opacity of decision making when it was in with the Manchester partners two comments from VCS participants about their experiences in partnership spaces stand out. One person expressed their sense that ‘decisions were made in pre-meetings and that consensus, and the rules and framework of the process was used to avoid dissent’. Another made the point :
A real partnership must include difference and conflict; if it isn’t dealt with through competing ideas, instead its about managing an anodyne politics, things are buried, people begin to second guess, to self- censor, and gaining access is enough, diluting their agendas to what is possible; people only ark for much smaller thing than they think are possible, and they in turn narrow the space as fewer people stay involved. It becomes a ritual.
The lack of overt confrontation might account for why some interviewees from the council side talked about better relations with the VCS and improved understanding of their role. The research partners, on the other hand , as will be explored next, outcomes were generally discouraging. Does this confirm the leader’s skepticism towards people’s in interest in participation.