Partnership working and solving complex societal problems

: policy solutions to knife crime

Abstract

This PhD study focuses on the role that multi-agency partnership working has in resolving complex societal issues, with a particular focus on youth violence and knife crime in the UK. The work progresses from an analysis of collaborative working (Roberts, 2016) to a book written for Vernon Press in 2020 on policy solutions to knife crime through modelling a partnership approach in the public sector (VRU, 2020; Roberts, 2020). Across all publications included in this PhD, the theme is reiterated from locally based multi-agency partnerships to nationally supported partnerships between the governments of England and Scotland, plus the partnership approaches used in the USA to combat violent youth crime. Beginning with a conference paper on partnership working in 2016 and moving through to journal articles, book chapters and finally a monograph in 2020, partnership and collaborative working are explored in real-life social issues and latterly, with a detailed focus on youth violence and knife crime. The body of work addresses a recent (within the last five years) dearth of academic research into partnership and collaborative working as a means to address complex social problems such as knife crime. The contribution that this work makes to the field lies in the uniqueness of the primary research and in re-stating the relevance of a partnership approach to knife crime in particular

Date of Award	2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Portsmouth
Supervisor	Paul Stephen Flenley (Supervisor), Wolfram Kaiser (Supervisor) & Karen Heard-Laureote (Supervisor)