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The cooperation of private and public organisations, which share the goal and responsibility of discharging public duties, has become a dominant model in administrative law scholarship. The field of Sozialrecht (social security law) has traditionally been marked by this kind of joint networking, even though this field is under particular pressure to change from the “social market”. For cooperative relationships to be formed reliably in the future, it is necessary to re-evaluate the role of the state in relation to its specific cooperative responsibility. The following article develops guidelines for this lingering problem. It illustrates that the participants, even in Sozialrecht, are subject to the clear distinction that is drawn between being protected or bound by constitutional rights, and that they do not become hybrids in a “third sector”. At the same time, however, private actors are given legally created rooms for manœuvre, duties of participation and commitments to reach set outcomes. A close collaboration with certain partners in the private sector – especially the “Freie Wohlfahrtspflege” – will nevertheless only stand a chance if it clearly avoids the impression of any illegal preferential treatment and, instead, opts for a highly transparent demands for quality and reliability.
