NN41, December 2008
The New Politics of Partnership: Peril or Promise?
?The Whereabouts of Power? in Partnerships
By Susan Robertson, University of Bristol and Toni Verger, University of Amsterdam
Email: S.L.Robertson@bristol.ac.ukEmail: tverger@gmail.com
Keywords
Partnership, Concept, Power
Summary
This article briefly examines the concept of partnership and asks what this very powerful idea is a solution to, as well as what it conceals. It highlights the importance of understanding the power dynamics of any partnership.
Given the ubiquity of the idea of partnership in characterising all kinds of governance arrangements around the globe?from research to the provision of education for all?it is important that we ask what this very powerful idea is a solution to, as well as what it conceals.
The notion of partnership is not new, though its various deployments and incarnations are. Stephen Linder (1999) argues that in the United States, at least, a key problem for the idea of partnership to solve was how to enable the 1980s privatisation agenda of public services to tactically continue. Viewed in this way, linking the public and private interests together in a relationship called partnership is accommodationist; on the one hand it enlists support from more moderate elements opposed to whole-sale privatisation, whilst on the other it promises less state and more market to those in the neo-conservative and neo-liberal camps. Here the idea of partnership ties the ?public? and the ?private? together in a relationship of mutually-shared ambitions, projects, strategies and outcomes. The idea that risk might be asymmetrically shared, that private know-how is fetishized over public experience, or that money is to be made and careers advanced by this kind of management reform, is made absent. For the idea of partnership trades on the illusion that power, if not absent, is at the very least, shared. In other words, partnership is invoked as empowerment.
Similarly, if we look at research and learning partnerships that have become particularly fashionable at the current time, we would argue that locating the problem and the whereabouts of power enables us to ask why the partnership takes the form that it does, and to then see what the likely consequences might be in social justice terms. Take for instance the partnerships for teaching and research at Master?s level advanced by the European Commission under the Erasmus Mundus programme. Launched in 2003, Erasmus Mundus involves a group of European universities from the Member States to construct a partnership with a select number of universities outside of Europe ? especially in developing countries. These are represented by the European Commission as partnerships shaped by the principles of cooperation, reciprocity and global citizenship. Partnership is thus constructed as a solution to the problems facing low-income countries; a way of advancing knowledge together. However scratch the surface and it becomes very evident that this is no symmetrical relation. Peel back the partnership discourse and we quickly see that this project is about bringing the talented to Europe to participate in Europe?s competitive knowledge-economy strategy, and not the reverse. Moreover, look at the knowledge that is being acquired in the context of these partnerships and this is no decolonised knowledge. It is the knowledge of the centre, and not the periphery. In fact, such centre-periphery research partnerships, constructed on the basis of an unequal exchange, have the potential to undermine certain logics of production of knowledge coming from the South, in turn promoting a world academic monoculture.
Now at this point we do not want to suggest that partnerships per se necessarily all operate in the same way, or with the same outcomes. It is just possible that the talented recruits will seize the opportunity to learn, to ask questions about the whereabouts of power, and to name it for what it is. It is equally possible that those involved in public private partnerships are able to navigate and negotiate a relationship that is mutually beneficial, open, and socially-just. In certain conditions, partnerships could also promote the introduction, or even better, the emergence of epistemologies and theoretical frameworks coming from the South in international research agendas. Nevertheless, this does not diminish the central idea of our argument and the importance of our claim; that in order to know quite what kind of partnership we are dealing with, we need to open up the black box, look inside, and to ask: ?whereabouts is power? (Allen, 2004)?
References
Allen, J. (2004) The whereabouts of power: politics, government and space, Geographiiska Annaler, 86 B (1), pp. 19-32.
Linder, S. (1999) Coming to terms with the Public Private Partnership: a grammar of multiple meanings, American Behavioural Scientist, 43 (1), pp. 35-51.
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