Spanning boundaries or plugging gaps: commissioners’ experiences of funding and commissioning specialist voluntary sector sexual violence services

The specialist voluntary sector (SVS) provides distinctive and much-valued support to victim-survivors of sexual violence. Nevertheless, in England as in other countries, the funding and commissioning landscape in which SVS services are situated is complex and frequently characterised as fragmented and uncertain. In turn, this context unsettles, and sometimes threatens, SVS services’ unique ways of working and their long-term sustainability. Drawing on the concept of boundary spanning, this article reports an interview study with 16 commissioners who had responsibility to commission sexual violence services. We found that commissioners saw themselves as promoting and protecting SVS services, for example through the development of local partnerships, adaptation of commissioning requirements and conventions, and building professional alliances with service leaders. We also found that commissioners worked to broker strategic partnerships with commissioners in other public sector organisations; however, this work was often time-consuming, deeply political and uncertain in its outcomes. This article contributes to the sparse academic literature on the experiences and views of commissioners of SVS sexual violence services. By drawing on the theory of boundary spanning, the article offers a novel way of conceptualising the sophisticated and sometime precarious nature of commissioning practices, including the emotional and political labour required to bring about changes to the commissioning status quo.