This thesis is a study of the process of negotiating funding by a voluntary
organisation from statutory sources. It is a case study which focuses on one
organisation's attempts to obtain resources for a supported accommodation
project for people with a mental handicap. This is approached from a focus on
the inter-organisational network as a political economy. This view observes
that in such networks, organisations are competing to gain two scarce resources,
authority to operate in a domain and money to fund those operations. Thus the
funding relationships have to be viewed in a broader policy context. The
methodological approach is qualitative and relies mainly on unstructured
interviews and documentary evidence in offering an account of the process of
negotiation.In the case study, four stages in the process of securing funding are examined:
firstly, the establishment of the organisation and the way it gained legitimacy:
secondly, the development of the idea of the project through attempts to achieve
the organisation's objective through other agencies: thirdly, the attempt to
secure funding from central government through Urban Aid, where the fit
between the objectives of the funding programme and those of the project was
tenuous. Finally, the successful application for Support Finance from a health
board is examined. This highlights the complexity of the environment with
which a voluntary organisation has to negotiate. It seems that ultimately
success was more dependent on the alliance between a number of agencies to
obtain the commitment of both the health authority and central government to
the principle of community care, than on the efforts of any one organisation
alone