NN41, December 2008
The New Politics of Partnership: Peril or Promise?
Framing Research between Africa and the UK
By Jonathan Harle, The Association of Commonwealth Universities
Email: j.harle@acu.ac.ukKeywords
Partnership, research, Africa, UK
Summary
Partnerships will continue to be an effective form of research support, but only in so far as they demonstrate an understanding of the wider landscapes of research. Most critically, the priority of UK-Africa partnerships should be to support and enable the reinvigoration of continental networks, if genuine collaboration across African and UK academic communities is envisaged.
This article offers some observations and tentative conclusions from a recent meeting in Nairobi, sponsored by the British Academy and organised jointly with the Association of Commonwealth Universities. Its aim was to examine the challenges of successful research partnerships in the social sciences and humanities. Recognising its own support could only be very small, the Academy was keen to convene a broader debate on the challenges facing African research, in order to understand how it and others could better support its renewal.
Clearly, understanding the partnership process first requires an understanding of the environments within which researchers work. Good research is done in Africa, but much more high quality work could be produced if conditions for doing it were more favourable. That there are too few trained to PhD level, that essential resources and facilities are lacking, and that institutions and their internal structures are weak and unresponsive is well known. These and many other problems besides have hollowed-out departments and dissolved research cultures. Such obstacles to research generally are also obstacles to the very partnerships which hope to improve it.
Symptomatic of this, many African scholars are now academically isolated and face a relative lack of intra-Africa networking, which has a critical effect on their ability to sustain vibrant research programmes. Reinvigorating collaboration within Africa must therefore be a priority if research levels are to be increased and if cultures of rigorous, high quality scholarly enquiry are to be encouraged and supported. Similarly, the weak state of many universities means that very few, outside of South Africa perhaps, have the capacity to undertake a full and varied programme of research across the humanities and social sciences. Turning institutions around will take time, and in the meantime research will only be improved by forging links and networks between institutions, which can harness the talents and experience of a number of researchers within a particular field (eg a department or faculty) or around a particular thematic area (which may be interdisciplinary and inter-departmental), and can also pursue some degree of shared resource development. These two observations ? looking from the perspective of both individuals and their research careers and institutions and their research cultures ? set the context within which extra-continental partnerships need to be explored.
For Africa-UK collaboration to offer genuine support to African researchers, from postgraduate to senior level, they will need to embed themselves within a landscape and culture of African academic dialogue. With a good African base, north-south partnerships can be used to plug dynamic networks of African scholars into counterpart communities across other regions. Without such a continental focus north-south partnerships instead risk drawing African academics outwards, rather than encouraging collaboration inwards. Similarly, stronger African networks will offer research environments of greater value to their Northern partners, whose own ability to explore African social and cultural questions will be significantly enhanced. Considered long term solutions, rather than quick fixes, are clearly required.
International support will of course be critical in achieving any programme of renewal, both because public funds within Africa for higher education and research are limited, and because good research depends ever more on international collaboration and the sharing of knowledge and ideas. Partnerships are likely to be a valuable (and popular) mode of delivering this support. In particular they can offer a valuable framework through which essential material and collegial assistance can be provided, and African networking enabled. Many initiatives do this very well already (though many offer only small numbers of awards), and by encouraging mobility and interaction between the UK and Africa have genuinely, if paradoxically, cultivated intra-Africa cooperation.
While collaborations may be funded on a UK-Africa basis for example, they may in practice entail a three- or four-way partnership, where the African membership is relatively greater ? bringing a group of African academics to a UK centre, or linking, in the context of a particular programme of research, one UK but several African scholars. Such a funding opportunity, and the UK involvement, may buy time and travel for research which would otherwise prove impossible to get off the ground. It may in turn be a catalyst which enables researchers to translate existing interests into larger projects, or provide a locus for African colleagues to explore new ways of working together, and in doing so to develop continental relationships which outlast the initial project. Where African universities are able to establish their own inter-institutional networks, there may also be a role for UK (or other) universities who seek to establish departmental research links to forge partnerships through existing collaborative programmes.
An important point which is implicit here, but which is nevertheless worth emphasising, is the need to be responsive to what African humanities and social science researchers define as their needs and the ways in which a collaborative project can help to advance these. The practical constraints of some funders (that grants must be disbursed via a UK institution for example) may complicate this; funders can help by ensuring that there is sufficient time and space ? and where appropriate access to additional funding ? for colleagues to explore the design of a project. A system of research funding is also needed, which across the range of donors and research agencies offers a web of support at multiple levels, such that researchers who secure funding for an exploratory project subsequently have the potential to generate more substantial financial support for a longer-term and deeper programme of research. Too much funding for networking or for putting ideas together is of no advantage if there are limited prospects for taking these early investigations further.
How this might be done, and what partnerships might provide for ? research, postgraduate training, and publishing for example ? is significantly more complex than this very brief and basic sketch allows for. By no means will it be possible for one partnership scheme to set out to achieve all of this within the confines of its own programme of support, and nor would that be desirable. The aim has been to suggest the wider research landscapes which partnerships need to be cognisant of, and to articulate with, if they are to make an appropriate and effective contribution.
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