PARTNERSHIP AND POLICY NETWORKS IN RURAL LOCAL GOVERNANCE: HOMELESSNESS IN TAUNTON PAUL CLOKE, PAUL MILBOURNE AND REBEKAH WIDDOWFIELD In this paper we discuss the importance of ‘partnership’ and ‘policy networks’ in the new contemporary governance of rural areas. We use these notions to contex- tualize the representation of, and policy response to the particular issue of home- lessness in the rural service centre of Taunton in Somerset. Here particular partner- ship networks have been brokered by the local authority which bring together a wide range of business, voluntary and community interests with a stake in the homelessness issue. Strong pre-existing discourses of homelessness in Taunton characterize the issue as one of a town centre problem of ‘beggars, vagrants and drunks’. We offer evidence from the local press to suggest that these discourses have been persistently peddled by particular interests in the town. New forms of partnership were inevitably embroiled with the pursuit of these existing discourses, and contrary voices were unable to redefine existing social relations within policy networks. The evidence from Taunton suggests that where partnership merely involves attempts to repackage existing resources, it seems unlikely that it will fulfil some of the more optimistic claims for a more pluralist form of governance in the local arena. RURAL GOVERNANCE: THE EMERGENCE OF PARTNERSHIP In a recent paper, Mark Goodwin (1998) has highlighted the reluctance of rural scholars to engage with new ideas about governance: ‘. . . despite huge changes in the processes and structures of rural “governing”, academic debate in the rural literature has steered clear of any serious engagement with what we might term the “governance perspective”’ (p. 6). He proposes a re-orientation of research which re-evaluates the old distinctions between market, state and civil society and which recognizes the importance of new dependencies and relationships. The re-orientation will involve new under- standings both about the structures and fissures of power in rural areas, and about the ways in which social, economic and political interests are represented in national, regional and local arenas. In this paper we acknowledge the validity of this evaluation, and use notions of governance, policy networks and partnership to contextualize the representation of, and policy response to, a particular social issue – homelessness – in a specific rural locale. We suggest that while particular forms of policy praxis emerge Paul Cloke is Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol. Paul Milbourne is Senior Research Fellow, and Rebekah Widdowfield is Research Fellow in the Department of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University. Public Administration Vol. 78, No. 1, 2000 (111–133)  Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.