NN41, December 2008
The New Politics of Partnership: Peril or Promise?
Reflections on Recent British Attempts at Educational Partnerships
By Simon McGrath, University of Nottingham
Email: Simon.Mcgrath@nottingham.ac.ukKeywords
Educational Partnerships, UK, DFID, DIUS, EPA, ESRC, DelPHE
Summary
Since 2005, the UK Departments for International Development (DfID) and Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) have launched five new partnership programmes with a partial or complete focus on education. Based on a review of these programmes, this article asks some questions about the nature of ?good practice? in education-for-development partnerships.
In NN 39 Ad Boeren reminded us of the long tradition of North-South partnership and the long-standing consensus that partnerships should be long-term and maximally symmetrical. In this piece I want to consider how recent British practice lives up to these ideals.
Since 2005, the Department for International Development (DfID) and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) have launched five new partnership programmes with a partial or complete focus on education. The largest of these, the DfID Research Programme Consortia (RPC), has a five-year span and a minimum budget per consortium of £2.5 million, whilst the smallest, the Education Partnerships for Africa (EPA) offers a maximum of £60,000 and 12-15 months timescale. In between are EPA?s predecessor, England-Africa Partnerships (EAP), as well as three rounds of a DfID-Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) research competition and the Development Partnerships in Higher Education (DelPHE).
My intention is not to get into detailed analysis of these programmes but rather to use them to ask some questions about the nature of ?good practice? in education-for-development partnerships.
A narrow development agenda?
There has been long-standing concern that the British Labour Government has sought tightly to focus university work in developing countries on a narrow pro-poor agenda. Certainly the thematic terms of reference for those bidding for the RPCs were very clearly set by DfID in this direction. This in itself is hardly surprising as the RPCs are effectively intended to be the bulk of official spending on education-for-development research. The other DfID programmes also show a strong pro-poor focus, although this has been drawn widely enough in practice to allow my colleagues in Nottingham to focus on genocide education in Rwanda and professional development in South Africa. However, it is striking that the DIUS programmes are not primarily poverty-oriented. Indeed, the EPA programme is very explicitly about an international competitiveness agenda, with all projects to be focused on employability.
What partner countries?
Both DfID and DIUS programmes have sent fairly strong messages about which countries are priority ones ? although they have not always been entirely consistent in their application of such prioritisation. For DfID, again, the focus has primarily been one of which are the poorest countries, although a strong Anglophone bias can be detected in both the prioritisation and the responses of research applicants. The DIUS programmes, however, have been outsourced to the British Council to manage, and the priority countries reflect the complex history of where the Council has offices. This is justified on the grounds that the Council wishes to be an active partner in the programmes, although this appears to be more aspiration than reality.
What is partnership?
With a five-year timescale and, indeed, grants to short-listed consortia for pre-application workshops, it is clear that the RPCs have been encouraged by DfID to take partnership seriously. Nonetheless, even in these programmes, it is inevitable that some tensions will surface as consortia try to balance process and product considerations. However, in the one-year EAP programme, there was clearly little time for process-driven partnership. Although one of the seven short-listed RPC consortia was led by the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, it is only in DelPHE that the lead partner must be Southern. DelPHE also has the rather curious tool of a matchmaking service through which the British Council helps institutions North and South to find new partners. Whether this is an innovative way of making new partnerships or simply a device to generate more applicants is in need of evaluation. What seems clear across the programmes is that there is a complex calculation to be made by the lead British institution (even if in DelPHE they are not officially the principal): how to balance the need to have partner(s) with existing capacity against how to avoid concentrating on the same narrow range of partners and countries.
Research or development?
Whilst the RPC and DfID-ESRC programmes are clearly primarily research-oriented, DelPHE and the two DIUS programmes are much more focused on development activities. There is a case for balancing the two foci but it is worth considering what seem to be some of the unintended consequences of the two approaches. There is a clear weighting towards elite research universities in the more research-oriented programmes, whilst EAP (the one programme that has now finished) saw a far wider spread of institutions being involved. The larger funding available for the research programmes and the possibility of generating high status publications from them are clearly very important in the competitive higher education funding regime in Britain. In such an environment, it is much harder to motivate for participation in the shorter development-oriented programmes.
This is especially the case in the EPA programme, announced this September 2008. In this case, there is to be no funding for staff time of British academics. Already with EAP, it appears that many partnerships were highly personalised, built often on relationships that originated in graduate student supervisions or on past institutional affiliations. EPA makes no sense to research offices of research universities such as mine ? it offers no money and little prospect of research publications. It may only be a small number of academics who will be able to participate in such programmes in the future.
Impact?
The RPCs and DfID-ESRC can be anticipated to have a significant research impact. The smaller programmes are intended to have a more direct development impact, although the short time scale of EAP-EPA may limit this in practice. However, it is striking that all this work has effectively been outsourced by the two Departments. Most of the administration is being done by the British Council or the ESRC, with the RPCs also doing a considerable amount of such work. It is worth considering what the effects of this outsourcing are. Does either Department have sufficient awareness of how their programmes are working and what is being learned about partnerships and education-for-development. More seriously, does either Department have the capacity to use the research generated?
Whilst the five programmes touched upon here have the merits, taken together, of presenting a varied portfolio of approaches, it is far from clear that there is any capacity (or indeed intention) to think systematically across DfID, DIUS and the British education-for-development constituency about what works and doesn?t work in these approaches and to locate this securely in the changing context of British higher education. Yet this is surely necessary if such work is to have its intended impact.
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