Abstract
Abstract This paper discusses how partnership between local organisations and Government inside governance spaces affects local development. The aim is to raise some critical issues about the concept of partnership and about partnership effectively for municipal development. Thus, the article uses partnership as its central theory. Specifically, it explores to what extent partnership is an effective strategy for local development in areas of historical conflict between local Government and local organisations in Pará State, Brazilian Amazonia. It focuses particularly on the municipality of Igarapé-Açú, located in north-east of Pará State. Igarapé-Açú was chosen because it is a singular case of local organisations and Government partnership since 2008 when a governance space was created to carry out a partnership process called Municipal Development Forum (MDF). Methodologically, the case study was carried out from a qualitative analysis with data gathered from documents and semi-structured interviews with key-informants. The paper shows that the great challenge to build partnerships between local Government and local organisations is not in these actors capacity to represent the state and civil society in a governance forum, but in their capacity to change the local institutional environment to enable this forum to propose changes in terms of rural development. The paper shows that institutional change does not happen rapidly; changes depend on a particular historical context. In conclusion, the case of Igarapé-Açú shows that in an environment where there is great political conflict much time is needed to create links between the rural actors.
Highlights
This paper attempts to understand how partnership between local organisations and Government inside governance spaces affects local development
Igarapé-Açú was chosen because it is a singular case (Yin, 1994) of Government agencies (GA) – local organisations (LO) partnership since it was created in 2008 a governance space to carry out a partnership process called Municipal Development Forum (MDF)
The relationship with the state at federal and regional level has passed from confrontation/conflict to confrontation/proposals, the evidence gathered in this study shows that at municipal level the local organisations have not made the distinction between political and social movements
Summary
This paper attempts to understand how partnership between local organisations and Government inside governance spaces affects local development. The study attempts an understanding of the relationships that have emerged between Government agencies (GA) and local organisations (LO) in the planning and implementation of local development programmes at municipal level. It focuses on the municipality of Igarapé-Açú, located in north-east of Pará State. The most important of these organisations have been the committees, councils and forums They are the governance spaces where GA and LO have built relationships to define the direction for local development at municipal level. The data was gathered from documents and semi-structured interviews carried out with 09 of 15 members whom were key informants with considerable involvement in partnership process: They were 04 LO’ members, 02 Pará-Rural’ staff members (one manager and one consultant), 02 LG’ staff members and 01 member from the Federal government agency called EMBRAPA
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