NN41, December 2008
The New Politics of Partnership: Peril or Promise?
The Opportunity Costs of Partnerships
By Roy Carr-Hill, Institute of Education, London, and University of York
Email: roycarrhill@yahoo.comKeywords
Research Partners, North, South
Summary
This article asks how the pressure on researchers in the North to become involved in the process of partnership with researchers in the South fits with the other systems of assessing research and with the financial pressures from their institutions on researchers in both North and South to take on consultancies.
Partly through the Paris Declaration, partly as a result of more robust ?clients?/ interlocuteurs, and partly through the adoption of SWAPs/ General Budget Support, the term ?development partner? has become the only politically correct term to use in development discourse, when referring to the other side of the table. Never mind the asymmetry and the often surface appearance of partnership (Carr-Hill, 2004); we are all partners now, never more fittingly displayed than in the global economic collapse.
Like many other fashionable terms, the term begins to be adopted in many other contexts. So we now have research partnerships where a researcher in the North is twinned - or has to be twinned in order to get a grant - with a researcher in the South. It all sounds very laudable but we all know that developing and maintaining a successful collaboration takes effort and time; so there are questions to be asked: how does the pressure on researchers in the North to become involved in the process of partnership with researchers in the South fit with the other systems of assessing research and with the financial pressures from their institutions on researchers in both North and South to take on consultancy?
Research Assessment in the North
In the North, in several countries, there are now formalised systems of measuring research effort and research success. The UK version is the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) with a premium on publishing academic articles in the ?best? journals rather than books or applied research monographs etc., but there are similar systems in many other countries in the North. Like all performance indicator systems, this encourages a myopic concentration (Carr-Hill et al, 1999) on the thing that is being measured (articles in the best journals) rather than necessarily a real contribution to knowledge and definitely not making the effort to collaborate with and sometime mentor ?partners? in the South. This may appear to be a concern limited to ?development? researchers (probably should be called ?partnership researchers? these days), but one should remember that many research grant schemes within the UK set a premium on stakeholder involvement etc. which can be equally time-consuming.
But suppose this partner dimension were to be taken seriously by the assessment authorities. Apart from the obvious difficulties of assessing the quality of the partnerships, the micro-managing required to monitor the hundreds and thousands of partnerships (and levels of stakeholder involvement within them) would be horrendous. Yet ? in our measured and monitored society - this is the implication; and, of course, individual performance reviews often include an element of assessing the extent of a person?s networking.
Research Partnership or Consultancies in the South
In the South, where there are very few such formalised systems for assessing research effort and success, apart sometimes from demonstrating that the PhD has led to a publication, the conundrum is rather different. Collaboration with a Northern ?partner? on a research project may mean that one?s name gets included on a publication but all too often, the Southern researcher will find themselves buried in the ?et. al.? with very small career value. Instead, many researchers in the South have turned to the consultancy game, partly because of the pressure to earn money because university salaries are usually low, partly because they are equally or more likely to be recognised and have policy influence through a project with, for example, the World Bank or a major donor than through research (with or without a Northern partner).
The obvious consequence is the difficulty Northern researchers will face in identifying a willing ? essentially unpaid - partner in the South. But, by an ironic twist, this situation has led, in some cases, to stronger partnerships developing within the South because, faced with the competition for consultancy contracts from each other and from consultants based in the North, individual consultants in developing countries have effectively cartelised themselves into national associations or partnerships in order to maintain a reasonably high fee rate. So, partnerships can pay off!
References
Carr-Hill R.A. with M J Hopkins and A Riddell, (1999), Performance Indicators in Education, DFID Education Division Series, No. 37
Carr-Hill R.A. (2006) Improving Aid Effectiveness In The Education Sector In Uganda for Donor [development partners] Group
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