What is it about?
Commissioning has become mainstream in English local government as well as other settings such as health policy, most local authorities looking at implementing commissioning practices. This paper examines what commissioning means and what practices become known as 'commissioning' practices in a given English locality following the 2010 UK Government austerity agenda.
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Why is it important?
The 2010 UK Government austerity agenda drastically cut local government funding and led many local authorities to formulate new organisational and delivery programmes to deal with this shortfall, many of them mobilising commissioning. Yet little research has been conducted to analyse what commissioning actually means in a local setting and how it is understood by different groups in a given locality. This paper takes on this task by calling on concepts of empty and flowing signifiers to highlight the politics at play in defining and mobilising commissioning in a local setting.
Perspectives
During my doctoral research into austerity and local government, I was struck by how commissioning had come to mean to many different things to different people in the locality I was analysing. As in other localities, commissioning was often seen as objective and allowing co-operation or collaboration between local partners. This paper has allowed me to demonstrate that 'commissioning' like other signifiers before such as partnership can be emptied of meaning by competing political projects seeking power and thus requires critical analysis.
Dr Eleanor MacKillop
University of Liverpool
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This page is a summary of: How do empty signifiers lose credibility? The case of commissioning in English local government, Critical Policy Studies, December 2016, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/19460171.2016.1236740.
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