NN41, December 2008
The New Politics of Partnership: Peril or Promise?
The Philosophy and Politics of Partnership
By Mark Mason, Hong Kong Institute of Education
Email: mmason@ied.edu.hkKeywords
Partnership, development, contemporary social theory
Summary
This article situates the philosophy and politics of partnership in development cooperation in the context of wider epistemological and axiological shifts in contemporary social theory, in order to contextualize the articles that follow in broader theoretical and practical perspective.
Ours is a period in which modesty becomes us. This is probably as true in development work as it is in any other context. Partnership in development cooperation, rather than, say, the imposition by Northern agencies of ?established best practice? in a local Southern context, in terms dictated by the former (see NORRAG News No. 39), is an expression of such modesty. Partnership has, since about the mid-eighties, become a central, if not the central, concept in the development field.
From a philosophical or social-theoretical perspective, it is no accident that this conceptual shift gained most momentum during the late eighties and has been sustained since then. It was in 1984 that Lyotard?s La condition postmoderne (1979) was published in English as The Postmodern Condition. The eminent contemporary social theorist, Zygmunt Bauman, suggests that an important aspect of the postmodern approach to knowledge lies in ?the rejection of ? the philosophical search for absolutes, universals and foundations in theory? (Bauman, 1993, p. 4). This rejection is partly a consequence of the perspectives that are typically associated with an increasingly globalized society: that ours is a plural world, with a diversity of claims to truth and goodness ? hence the abandonment, or at least the softening, of the coercive and regulatory perspectives associated with modernity. While the thought and practice of modernity may have been, to paraphrase Bauman, animated by the belief in the possibility of finding, through the exercise of reason and rationality, universal and non-ambivalent codes of practice and solutions to social problems, what is postmodern is the ?disbelief in such a possibility? (Bauman, 1993, pp. 9, 10). The shifts in the development field from external imposition and prescription to partnerships in development cooperation reflect and contribute to these intellectual shifts in contemporary social theory.
One factor contributing to these shifts is of course the proliferation of information and communications technology. Access to ?the best? information is accordingly no longer the privilege of wealthy or powerful individuals or agencies in the North (and, after all, with our contemporary sensibilities, we are no longer convinced that it ever was ?the best? information). That these technologies have also enabled people to communicate with each other more directly has contributed to a flattening of hierarchies and an expansion of networks. More widely available access to and sharing of information have thus further entrenched partnership as the dominant motif in development cooperation.
But it would be naïve to assume that these shifts in perspective have been predicated solely on the processes associated with increasing rates of globalization and on the proliferation of information and communications technology. Our recognition of plurality, of diverse claims to what might be the right or the best course of action, is also a consequence of a scepticism consequent on what we have witnessed in the twentieth century. In an age of high modernity, when we had available to us the constitutional arrangements of liberalism and democracy, we have witnessed a scale of terror never seen before, made possible by the technology and bureaucracy of modernity, which allowed the rationally planned, large-scale executions and systematic destruction of lives in the Soviet Union under Stalin, in the genocide of Auschwitz and Birkenau, and in the engineering of an entire society along ethnic lines in apartheid South Africa. These are some of the factors that contributed to the ?postmodern turn?, and to the concomitant scepticism towards such Enlightenment tenets as the view that our knowledge of society is holistic and cumulative, and that we can attain universal, objective and rational social scientific knowledge of society, upon which we can act to produce emancipation and social upliftment.
Such scepticism typified the development community as well. Since the fifties and sixties, when perhaps those in the North, or in the West, might have thought they had the answers to the problems faced by the developing world (US President Harry Truman?s perspectives and exhortations of 1949 [1] are perhaps typical), we have, in truth, had to confront enormous disappointment in the failure of large amounts of international development assistance and aid. Lester Pearson?s report, commissioned by the World Bank in 1969 to consider, in the face of the continuing poor performance of many developing countries, the sources of the growing doubt about the efficacy of development aid and, indeed, doubt about the very development aims upon which such aid was predicated, was in some ways to the field of development what Lyotard?s Report on Knowledge (the subtitle of his Postmodern Condition) was to the wider fields of sociology, philosophy and social theory. Pearson?s recommendations to establish better partnerships between agencies in the developed countries and institutions in developing countries reflected ? and pre-figured ? the epistemological shifts identified by Lyotard in our decreasing confidence in the universal efficacy of our ?rationally-grounded? solutions. Recall that a key feature of the postmodern perspective is that in an era when the range of our epistemological, moral and practical choices and the consequences of our actions are more far-reaching than ever before, we are unable to rely on a universal epistemological or ethical code that would yield unambiguously good solutions. This is why we have so little faith in what we used to be certain was right, good and true. In our humility that followed our own collapse of faith, we have learned to become more sensitive to different ways of doing things. And if we now have so little faith in what we used to know to be the right thing to do, how much less faith do we have in the applicability of our (now more tenuously held) beliefs and practices in other economic, political, social and cultural contexts? The possibility of defending principles and solutions that have practical and normative reach across all such contexts ? a question that ought to be seriously considered by any institute or agency associated with, say, UNESCO, EADI, the UNDP ? was, to its credit, seriously considered by the World Bank back in 1969.
One of Pearson?s recommendations, reported by Richard Sack (1999, p. 9), was that
'[i]t is necessary to create the building blocks towards mutual trust and respect and the establishment of better partnerships between the developed and developing countries. This requires dialogue about the ends and means, and the meaning of development. The Report raised process to the same level of importance as objectives, and recognized the importance of what we now call ?ownership?.'
Senegal?s President Abdou Diouf?s opening remarks to the 1997 meeting in Dakar of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) typify this approach:
'In order to progress from the aid relationship to partnership, the first step lies in redefining the status and roles of those involved in a way that truly recognizes and accepts the equal dignity and responsibility of both partners, above and beyond differences in their cultures and levels of development. The type of partnership we should promote cannot be founded on a vertical relationship based on authority, constraint, the imposition of an imbalance of power, substituted sovereignty and the transposition of models, or, on the other side of the coin, paternalism and condescension. Instead, it should be founded on conditions such as authentic dialogue in a horizontal relationship in which the actors recognize each other as equals and participate in an exchange considered mutually useful and enriching by both parties?. This is necessary in order to achieve ? a common understanding of development goals and strategies'.
Such partnerships, with their shared sense of ?ownership?, envisage not only shared rights on both sides, but also, as President Diouf indicated, shared responsibilities. That responsibility has, of course, to be shared in failure as much as in success. And it is, in part, in the face of some continuing failures, despite the dominance of a paradigm of partnership in development cooperation, that this issue of NORRAG News seeks to ask critical questions about those partnerships, and the ways in which we understand the very concept of partnership. If shared rights, shared ownership, shared development objectives and policies, shared responsibilities, shared decisions about where aid is targeted, and shared implementation strategies still leave us facing challenges in development as big as we have ever faced, is it time to consider the extent to which we have expanded the concept of partnership?
Modesty indeed becomes us in development cooperation, but false modesty, especially on the part of Northern agencies, donors, NGOs and researchers, is surely to be guarded against. There are very worthwhile principles to be found guiding much Northern development work: principles that, for example, espouse fairness, transparency, accountability, and the moral responsibility to target efforts at the poorest of the poor. To compromise, say, the latter, so as to allow some Southern governments to spend the development aid which they receive in budget support merely where it will make the most difference to their EFA numbers, rather than where it might be needed most (as Keith Lewin [2008] has recently described), is, to continue the metaphor, false modesty indeed on the part of Northern donors in partnership cooperation. Reticence on the part of the latter in demanding more moral accountability with regard to the spending of SWAp budgetary support is indeed unbecoming.
Also inappropriate is a complete shrinking from any notion of ?best practice? on the part of Northern agencies. It is no accident that this special issue of NORRAG News follows just two issues after an issue devoted to critical consideration of notions of ?best practice in education and training?. I admit that I offered in that issue arguments challenging the degree of confidence we tend to have in ideas and ideals of universal best practice. But, at the same time, I acknowledged the worth, even if at a high level of generality, of claims such as ?Best practice assumes the existence and enforcement of procedures to minimize corruption in any development work?, or, ?Any development work should aim to maximize the life chances of those most at risk in the prevailing context?, or, ?Teaching or training for learning by induction, from experiences familiar to the learner, is more likely to enhance concept formation and skills development than a deductively structured pedagogy?. If insistence on these ideals on the part of Northern agencies represents a skewing of the power relationships in any development cooperation partnership, then that is surely an appropriate imbalance of the scales.
In guarding against false modesty in development cooperation, Northern donors in particular should not shrink from the fact that, while the concept of partnership commonly implies an equal distribution of rights and responsibilities among those party to the arrangement, this need not necessarily be the case, and is indeed frequently not the case empirically either. It is no doubt hard to construct an equal partnership when one party, for example, controls the purse strings. The arguments in this domain have of course been well rehearsed, whether they have to do with colonial histories and the moral obligations of restitution, the venal politics of aid when the real barriers to development lie in restrictions on trade, or with the construction and destruction of the Third World as argued by Escobar (1995). The truth, if it is to be found, of this most sensitive aspect of development assistance, probably lies, as it might do in other issues of partnership cooperation, not in the detail of a particular context, nor in the abstract ideals of perfect equality, but in both, and in the tensions between them ? tensions which are explored further in the subsequent articles in this special issue.
Footnotes
[1] ?For the first time in history humanity possesses the knowledge and the skill to relieve the suffering of [the world?s poor]?. I believe that we should make available to peace-loving peoples the benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them realize their aspirations for a better life?. What we envisage is a program of development based on the concepts of democratic fair dealing?. Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge.? (Truman, H. [1949] in Escobar, A. [1995], p. 3)
References
Bauman, Zygmunt (1993) Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell).
Escobar, Arturo (1995) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Lewin, Keith (2008) Why some Education for All and Millennium Development Goals will not be met: difficulties with goals and targets, in: Chisholm, Linda, Bloch, Graeme & Fleisch, Brahm, Education, Growth, Aid and Development: Towards Education for All (Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre).
Lyotard, Jean-Francois (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Pearson, Lester (1969) Partnership in Development: Report of the Commission on International Development, in Sack, Richard (1999) Partnerships for Capacity Building and Quality Improvements in Education: Papers from the ADEA 1997 Biennial Meeting (Paris: Association for the Development of Education in Africa [ADEA]).
Sack, Richard (1999) Partnerships for Capacity Building and Quality Improvements in Education: Papers from the ADEA 1997 Biennial Meeting (Paris: Association for the Development of Education in Africa [ADEA]).
Truman, Harry (1949) ?Second Inaugural Address?, in Escobar, Arturo (1995) Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
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