NN41, December 2008
The New Politics of Partnership: Peril or Promise?
Politics of North-South Partnership in Education and Research
By Jolly Jose, Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Oman
Email: drjollyjose@yahoo.co.inKeywords
Partnership, Education, Research, North-South
Summary
This article explores issues connected to the globalisation of research and research partnerships.
Knowledge is an essential ingredient for sustainable development. This growing reality in the globalised world has resulted in increasing co-operation between northern and southern nations and new research partnerships are getting established. The increased collaborations are also the result of the requirement of the market, which is playing both visible and invisible roles in governing today?s world. As a result, the research is increasingly getting privatised. The new research paradigms are often defined and designed by the economic agenda. This has potential implications on governing mechanisms for the research as well as on setting the research agenda.
Global governance of research is affected by two facts. First and the foremost is the changing landscape of the educational sector that has been a dominant player in research and knowledge generation. With the globalization of education, we argue that education has become increasingly seen as a commodity to be purchased by a consumer in order to build a ?skill set? to be used in the marketplace or as a product to be bought and sold by multinational corporations. This has significant influence on the way in which academic institutions are involved in research. Secondly, research itself is moving out of academic settings to other international arrangements. Research takes place in the context of international networks consisting of corporations, researchers, donor agencies etc. For example, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations.
Globalisation of research and research partnerships are also influencing local research agendas ? which are getting oriented towards the international research agenda, not necessarily reflecting local developmental priorities of southern nations. The international orientation may also cause research to get less embedded in the societal context of the south.
In such a situation it is likely that many priority issues connected to poverty and underdevelopment like environmental degradation, migration, loss of bio-diversity etc are likely to be ignored. We argue, therefore, that poverty development strategies should be the focus of international cooperation. This is so crucial today as we consider the power of research to support policy directions.
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