Inter-organizational Partnership in Lithuania’s Local-Government: Implementation of Support Strategy and Enabling Strategy
Inter-organizational Partnership in Lithuania’s Local-Government:Implementation of Support Strategy and Enabling Strategy

Summary/Abstract: In recent years, Lithuania’s society transforms into more complex, flexible, and dynamic one. Interorganizational interaction, as regards to different scope and directions, is gaining a greater significance. In order to ensure the long term outstanding results of the organizational activities, the researchers on management and behaviour suggest that partnership and collaboration are the means for solving the problem and stress the significance of management democratization, effort cooperation, interest coordination and collective responsibility. In this context, the institutional situation of local government became very special. The local government plays a role of intermediary among the single citizens, communities, various organizations and the public authorities. It is necessary to understand the significance of ensuring quality existence of the links between these social subjects, the ability to integrate and implement their different aims. Quality and even opportunity of social projects implementation depends on the ability of local government institutions to ensure relevant collaboration processes. The partnership management requires specific capacities of coordination between various governmental units and agencies as well as with local institutions and community groups. The inter-organizational collaboration in the local government can essentially be implemented in two ways: from the top directed downwards, i.e. with the application of the so-called support strategy (active actions) or from the bottom directed upwards by using enabling strategy (proactive actions). Therefore, a core question of this paper is: what strategy – support or enabling – is more effective in developing partnership of local government and other organizations? The following hypothesis was tested in the research: reactive nature of local government inter-organizational interaction initiation and process managing predetermines lower results of inter-organizational collaboration as compared to the proactive one. The aim of the research was to define core differences between support and enabling strategies when implementing inter-organizational projects in local government of Lithuania and to test the hypothesis. The objective of the paper is to analyze a) context of inter-organizational partnership; b) organizational structure of the inter-organizational partnership; c) results and social impact of implemented inter-organizational project. It is worth noting that Lithuanian scholars and practitioners devote little attention on inter-organizational interaction research, and especially to local government partnership implementation. This argument allows proposing that this practical research is relevant.

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