NN41, December 2008
The New Politics of Partnership: Peril or Promise?
Symmetry and Asymmetry in Research Partnerships: Lessons From 20 Years Experience
By Berit Olsson, formerly of SAREC, Sida, Stockholm
Email: berit.m.olsson@gmail.comKeywords
Research partnership, education, Sida, Sweden
Summary
This article examines Swedish Sida support to research partnerships. It notes, among other things that asymmetry is unavoidable in spite of all rhetoric about mutuality. Nonetheless, there is mutual interest, though the nature of this interest is different for the Northern and Southern ?partners?.
What are research partnerships - how do they work
Cooperation among peers is a sine qua non for research. Researchers refer to earlier findings as a starting point for their own studies and publish internationally as an input into the ongoing scientific dialogue. International peer review is practised in assessing submitted articles and candidates for promotion. Researchers engage in direct cooperation across borders in joint and comparative studies. Do we call such interaction partnerships? I believe not. The partnership concept, which somehow implies a degree of equality, is one which nowadays has become popular in development cooperation and often refers to a relation between those being supported and those supporting. These are basically unequal relations, although some are more unequal than others.
As an actor in Swedish research funding since mid-80s, I have followed a great number of such research partnerships. Like many aid agencies, Sida funds research addressing issues of major importance for development. Front line researchers collaborate for instance in developing a vaccine against malaria or environmental friendly low cost energy. Sooner or later such research requires research links in low or mid income countries and here often asymmetric relations occur. The research leader, who ?owns? the grant, is often from a recognised Northern institution. She/he may offer collaboration to a ?partner? at an institution in the South. Such partnership modalities remain the norm for many development research funding agencies. Frequently, it is assumed that the project contributes to enhancing research capacity in the partner country. Capacity building, however, is a secondary ambition to the main goal of addressing defined research issues and themes
Sida has observed that external cooperation offers certainly may contribute to individual research careers. However, as long as the partner country and institutions have a weak basis for research, their capacity to benefit from such offers remains limited. Instead, the many diverse cooperation offers may add to fragmentation. Aid-funded research tends to be very applied and does not contribute to the build up of basic disciplines and research methods, say in statistics, biology, sociology, etc.
From early 1990s, therefore, Sida, in addition to funding thematic research, has directed its bilateral research cooperation to enhancing the very basis for research. As the primary objective is to enhance the capacity of a national scientific community in low income countries, we have moved from project funding addressing defined issues to supporting institutional conditions for research. Part of the support packages goes to research management and research infrastructure, such as laboratory and library facilities as well as ICT connectivity. A major part goes to research training of academic staff, which involves research cooperation between relatively weak partners in the South and established researchers in the North as supervisors.
The asymmetry is unavoidable in spite of all rhetoric about mutuality. Of course, there is a mutual interest in such relations, mutual but not the same. The Southern institution gets material support in addition to research training of its staff. The PhD candidate may look forward to research opportunities and promotion. The Northern researcher gets access to situated perspectives and data necessary for addressing the research questions and may enjoy the excitement of visiting countries with different conditions. In spite of good intentions on both sides, however, the relation may easily be abused. The partnership may involve risks on both sides; also the risks are mutual, but different.
The Northern partner risks delays resulting from poor communication or other weaknesses, and costs may be less predictable than at home. The Southern partner risks becoming more of an assistant than a partner in research, and risks having limited influence over the research agenda and problem formulation, and risks losing influence over data and property rights, just to mention some risks. The Southern institution as well may risk losing a qualified staff member to the Northern institution.
Swedish research cooperation, over the years, has sought ways of minimising such risks and balancing the asymmetry. We started in 1975 with consulting national research councils for research priorities, then allocating funds and assigning Swedish researchers to engage in collaborative studies. We soon realised that in many cases, there were no qualified scientists as partners and decided to reorient the support towards research training of individuals and groups within the projects.
From early 1990s individual project grants were replaced with support packages aiming at enhancing conditions for research at national universities, seen as the hub for research development in the low income partner country. All along, the research training modality was ?sandwich based?, i.e. the PhD candidate remains a staff member active at the home institution, spending shorter periods with an external supervisor. Thus, conditions at the home institutions gets enhanced, both through investments in facilities and in minimising the brain drain risk.
Another shift was the allocation of funds to the national university. Supporting their selection of and decision on research links became the norm. Swedish, or in some cases South African or other invited resource partners/supervisors will still have the upper hand concerning research methodology etc, but cannot unilaterally decide on research orientation. The principle of allocating the funds to the weaker partner certainly contributes to empowerment in the relation.
Most importantly, the support is negotiated in line with institutional strategies (increasingly also with national strategies) for research development, thus contributing to a planned development. Reporting, auditing etc are also aligned with the local institutional cycle, thus reducing management and transaction costs. During the last few years, we have tried to convince other funding agencies to follow this path, much in line with the generally accepted principles of the Paris Agenda for aid effectiveness. With a degree of frustration however, we find that our major colleagues in research funding still prefer to start with thematic priority setting, leaving capacity development as a secondary ambition. The focus on grand research programmes makes it difficult for researchers in low income countries to become principal investigators, and thus researchers from the funding countries continue to have an upper hand even if funding in principle has become untied.
As long as research on and for development, often guided by agency policy needs, appears to be the main objective rather than capacity for research by and in partner countries, low income countries will have difficulties enhancing the analytical capacity they direly need to manage external relations, including the aid negotiations.
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