NN39, October 2007
Best Practice in Education and Training: Hype or Hope?
Towards Best Practice In North-South Academic Links?
By Ad Boeren, Nuffic, The Hague
KeywordsNorth-South academic links, Best practice
Summary
North-South academic links have existed for more than fifty years. One would expect that best practice would have been identified, disseminated and widely adopted by now. However, this is not the case, and the question is whether it will ever actually happen. This article argues that it will be difficult for these kinds of programmes to generate concrete examples of best practices for wider dissemination and adoption.
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North-South academic links have existed for more than fifty years. One would expect that best practice would have been identified, disseminated and widely adopted by now. However, this is not the case, and the question is whether it will ever actually happen.
There are plenty of examples of successful academic links, and it is not difficult to analyse what has contributed to their success. There have also been many evaluations of academic cooperation programmes between Northern and Southern partners which provide valuable lessons on the preconditions for successful and sustainable academic links. Given these insights, it should not be too difficult to ?construct? a model of best practice, on paper at least.
Throughout the many years that linkage programmes were supported by a host of donor agencies, some convergence seemed to have developed regarding the policy principles governing these programmes, though differences in implementation continued to exist.
In 2002 it looked as if the academic linkage programmes funded by the donor countries would also converge in terms of their approach. They tended to emphasize long-term commitment to capacity building and the partnership ideal, and gradually the need to embed academic partnerships in institutional strengthening programmes became clearly recognized. These insights had been gained through processes of learning from experience, improving practices and adapting approaches on the basis of internal and external evaluations. The changes were evolutionary rather than revolutionary. In other words: the programmes were deliberately working towards achieving better results through improved practices.
In 1999 the Netherlands? Minister for Development Cooperation broke this unspoken consensus on ?best practice? in the international cooperation programmes in higher education. She decided to abandon the existing practices and initiate alternative capacity building programmes on a completely new footing. Old principles made way for new ones. The partnership philosophy and long-term commitment were abandoned. A ?new practice? was introduced whereby capacity gaps would be filled in a business-type arrangement, with the South acting as client and the North as supplier. The new programme (NPT) [1] was designed as an experiment and was intended to cause a revolution in relationships between collaborating partners in the South and North.
Has the Dutch NPT programme disturbed or harmed the evolutionary process of arriving at best practice for linkage programmes? Probably not. The programme was a reaction to certain weaknesses that donors perceived in the existing cooperation programmes, notably the dominance of Northern and academic interests in many of the linkage projects. Unfortunately NPT will have little opportunity to prove its best practice potential, as it is to be phased out over the next few years. However, some of its elements have been positively rated by external evaluators and by the Southern organizations [2]. The programme has certainly prompted a stronger sense of ownership in the South. As such, it has contributed another useful lesson to the stock of knowledge about what makes cooperation programmes effective.
Whether changes come about in a revolutionary or an evolutionary manner, the fact remains that it will be difficult for these programmes to generate concrete examples of best practices for wider dissemination and adoption. This can be attributed to a number of factors:
successful academic links depend greatly on chemistry between individual partners as well as institutional support and commitment on both sides. While the latter is often difficult to achieve, the former is unpredictable from the start. Chemistry between people is impossible to replicate;
academic links between Northern and Southern partners involve unequal relations, at least at the start of the cooperation. Mutual understanding and respect are essential if one is to cope successfully with the ensuing tensions. Again, this requires the right kind of relationship between the partners;
local and institutional conditions and resources on both sides determine whether and how results will be achieved and sustained. In many cases these local contexts are beyond the control of the collaborating academic partners. Hence, what might work in partnership A may not work in partnership B;
the interests of the various stakeholders involved may not always converge. What individual academics may define as a successful link from a personal and academic perspective may be regarded as a failure by their institutions because it has not produced value for them, or by the donor agency because it has not contributed to development or poverty reduction. ?Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder? as the saying goes, and this certainly applies to the appreciation of the success of academic links by the various stakeholders.
The complex and context-related nature of academic links, and the fact that the interests of the academics, institutions and donors involved seldom overlap, will probably continue to prevent these programmes from defining a best practice model for North-South academic links that is fit for wider dissemination and adoption. However, approaches to or models of partnership programmes which set the stage for successful and sustainable academic links are within reach. They are evolving as practitioners learn from experience, and are modified to suit changing conditions in both the North and the South. They are based on mutual understanding and respect between partners at all levels of collaboration: individual academics, institutions, governments and donors.
Notes
[1] The Netherlands Programme for the Institutional Strengthening of Post-secondary Education and Training Capacity (NPT) which started in 2002 with an annual budget of EUR 31 million.
[2] ECORYS Nederland BV, Evaluation of the international education programmes NPT and NFP managed by Nuffic. Final Report. March 2007.
References
Boeren, A. (2005) A bird?s eye view: lessons from evaluations of international cooperation programmes in higher education, research and manpower development. In: Ad Boeren and Gerrit Holtland (eds), A changing Landscape. Making support to higher education and research in developing countries more effective. Proceedings and contributions. Nuffic, The Hague.
Further reading
Krister E. (2006) Review of Sida?s Research Cooperation. Synthesis Report. Sida Evaluation 06/57.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs (IOB) (2007) Evaluation of the Netherlands? research policy 1992-2005. IOB Evaluations. No 304 Summary, (May 2007). http://www.minbuza.nl/binaries/en-pdf/iob-evaluatie/rapporten/rapport-304-summary.pdf
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