NN41, December 2008
The New Politics of Partnership: Peril or Promise?
Research Partnerships of the European Union: A West African Failure
By Jean-Pierre Jacob, IHEID, Geneva
Email: Jean-Pierre.Jacob@ird.bfKeywords
Research Partnership, EU, West Africa, CLAIMS programme (2002-2005)
Summary
This article highlights why one North-South research partnership, the CLAIMS programme (Changes in Land Access, Institutions and Markets) in West Africa, proved to be a failure.
The CLAIMS programme (Changes in Land Acess, Institutions and Markets in West Africa) was financed by the European Union (Directorate general for Research) for three years (2002-2005), with complementary contributions from. the DFID and the AFD.
The project involved four West African countries and mobilised four Northern and four Southern institutions. The researchers from the Nothern as well as the Southern institutions were all senior, some of whom had over twenty years of research experience. The consortium was managed by an european organisation. Each institution was allocated equal funds (approximately 130,000 Euros), with emphasis on different areas (more personnel costs in Europe, more funds for publications and workshops in the South.)
Throughout the research, the representation of the Southern partners was insufficient and the dialogue with them very difficult. The final workshop of the research project, which took place in Ouagadougou at the beginning of 2005, was a failure. Two of the four Southern institutions were not present and did not deliver any results. One of the institutions that participated did not present any report. They explained that all their data were stored on the USB stick of a senior researcher that happened not to be there at the time. The final report was written by the Northern researchers only.
One can give two principal explanations for this disappointing situation:
-the failure of the project as a system of constraint over collective action. The Directorate General for Research of the European Union contracts with each partner and leaves the research coordination with no power over the production of the researchers.
-the working environment and practices of the African researchers, which we will attempt to describe in a more detailled manner below.
This environment is characterised by four phenomena:
- a low-level of support for research on the part of national institutions,
- a teaching overload linked to a massive increase in the number of students, an effect of the democratisation of education in West African nations. There is now commonly an average of 2000 students beginning sociology at a given West African university, while the means remain what they were ten years ago, when the students were ten times less,
- a shortage of capacities. The brighest scholars gravitate towards expertise or politics, where opportunities are hard to resist due to the low wages earned in public institutions. These activities overwhelmingly dominate the researchers? time and energy resources,
- a huge number of external projects in search of national partners each year.The machine is well oiled now, and everyone knows that no project can be completed and expect funding if it doesn?t show some kind of alliance with a Southern institution or at least with some Southern researchers. The Northern promotors scramble to choose the most promising persons, always the same ?happy few? in countries that don?t provide many advanced scholars in a given field. At this stage, nobody makes sure that these scholars are really going to be available once the job starts. The decision concerning the funding is still far away and no one feels really engaged when the projects are send.
It is generally when the dead line closes in, as the CLAIMS experiment shows, that the Northern partners realise that the Southern counterparts are not going to contribute greatly to the current project?s production of knowledge. Their priorities are obviously elsewhere, imposed by the local socio-political environment, their survival strategies and the obligations to previous engagements. The idealized representation of black and white researchers working side by side to increase the pool of common knowledge once again fails to become a reality. This is a situation that arises regularly because it is both acknowledged and denied (or forgotten) at the same time. In this sense, it is not so different from any practice linked to a highly normative setting Development for instance, is also a world were inequalities are simultaneously emphasized (they are the basis on which institutions decide to act) and not taken into account (when the time for evaluation comes!).
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