Notion Of Partnership Research Articles

Localization and developmentality: Policy pragmatism in pandemic times

AbstractMotivationLocalization is increasingly invoked in debates about how to reform international aid: to improve aid effectiveness and address ethical concerns by turning hierarchical aid relations on their head. This has proved to be easier said than done. The COVID‐19 pandemic produced logistical impediments to aid practitioners, which translated into a renewed, if temporary, interest in localization.PurposeThe initial scope of the research engaged with the notion of partnership during COVID‐19, but almost all informants drew attention to the concept of localization. The article maps and analyses the challenges and advantages of localization, as seen from the practitioners' perspective.Approach and methodsThe article draws on 24 interviews conducted in Oslo with representatives of various Norwegian development and humanitarian non‐governmental organizations and government agencies, in addition to policy and grey literature review.FindingsThe article shows that the re‐emergence of the localization debate during COVID‐19 occurred not because of any ambition to reform aid, but as a pragmatic and temporary response to the logistical impediments caused by the pandemic. Reflections from the interviewees on the pros and cons offer more substantial insights into why localization fails to change practice, while at the same time localization enables a form of indirect governance related to accountability regimes. This is analysed as developmentality, reflecting the logic that localization takes place when recipients do as donors want, but they do so voluntarily, which suggests that localization counterintuitively may reinforce existing power structures.Policy implicationsLocalization is poorly conceptualized. While a definition could be helpful in practice, one that is too rigid could undermine the diversity of actors and knowledge that localization aims to advance. At the operational level, localization requires greater flexibility and slack throughout the aid chain, especially in the audit and accountability regimes of donor and funding authorities, which permeate and uphold lopsided aid relations.

Reclaiming partnership – ‘rightful resistance’ in a Norths/Souths cooperation

Over the past few decades, the development discourse has been subject to various criticisms. Instead of rejecting these criticisms, however, the discourse absorbed at least parts of them. This led to discursive incoherencies. These appear as new concepts that seem incompatible with the initial development discourse and the power relations on which it relies. The notion of partnership, which refers to mutual trust and respect, is one of the discourse’s most prominent incoherent features. In the everyday cooperation between Jordanian women’s organisations and their North-based donors, however, partnership is an ideal, rather than an actual practice, and is frequently arbitrarily misinterpreted and misused by the donors. Through a case study grounded in a two-month participant observation of one Jordanian women’s organisation and a series of qualitative interviews with their staff members and donor representatives conducted in Jordan in 2017 and 2018, the paper explores how the organisation and their staff members intentionally resist their donors’ behaviour by performing acts of rightful resistance.

Démocratie sanitaire : le patient partenaire de sa prise en charge

In 2019, the scientific committee of the French society of radiation oncology (SFRO) created an ethics committee. Its mission is to provide our professional community with food for thought on ethical issues, and to identify its specificities within the radiation oncology departments. For the 2020 annual conference, the commission looked into the evolution of the patient-carer relationship, and more particularly to the strong idea of patient partnership. Indeed, the writing of the White Book of Cancer gave voice to sick people and stressed the need for new devices, such as the Caregiving Time. Patients can no longer be considered as objects of care but as people whose dignity and autonomy must be imperatively respected. The acquisition of knowledge allows a bilateral exchange, prerequisite of a dynamic collaboration. Patients can be partners in their own care, partners in training and research (expert patient), but also partners in health institutions and policies. It is this notion of partnership and involvement of the person in their path of care in radiation oncology that we will analyse here. It will be about defining it, by developing the concept of autonomy, and bringing out its complexity and ambivalence through two examples from our clinical practice: the shared decision-making process for patients with localized prostate cancer and the patient's involvement in the success of his radiotherapy.

Whose story counts? Staking a claim for diverse bicultural narratives in New Zealand secondary schools

ABSTRACT In 1840, the British Crown and Māori rangatira (chiefs) across Aotearoa New Zealand signed a treaty that promised indigenous Māori sovereignty over their lands. In the 1980s, the government moved towards the view that the treaty signing symbolised two races coming together in ‘partnership’. Partnership is a point of contention in settler-indigenous relations, with claims that state institutions favour the interests of the dominant culture. This paper draws on the experiences of Māori teachers of English in secondary schools, to examine how everyday classroom interactions reproduce an imagined partnership between Māori and Pākehā (descendants of European settlers). Findings reveal that teachers and students enact a bicultural narrative that maintains lop-sided notions of partnership to advance Pākehā group interests. The paper concludes by arguing that breaking the silencing of violent colonial histories would authorise a new narrative of biculturalism; one with the potential to transform the idealism of 1840 into practice.

Teachers’ fidelity to curriculum: an insight from teachers’ implementation of the Indonesian EFL curriculum policy

While the notion of partnership has become the new genre of curriculum implementation, Indonesian government has decided to shift back to centralized curriculum policy by issuing the 2013 curriculum (K-13). The reason is that teachers are incapable of shaping their own school curriculum based on the National Standards of Education. Centralized curriculum policy leaves the classroom as the end of the chain of decisions in which the position of teachers is merely as implementers, rather than involved decision-makers. This type of curriculum clearly demands high degree of teachers’ fidelity. The purpose of this study is to investigate the extent to which EFL teachers faithfully commit themselves to fidelity approach to curriculum implementation of the K-13 at Senior High Schools in Makassar, Indonesia. Four EFL teachers were interviewed using ethnographic interviewing technique. The findings showed that these EFL teachers implement the K-13 with high degree of fidelity. The findings, however, indicate that these teachers’ commitment to fidelity approach split into two distinctive reasons: interactive and coercive. The former means that teachers adhered to K-13 because they perceived it as being comprehensible through their interaction with the K-13 documents, while the latter seemed to be influenced by the K-13 curriculum policy that was typically coercive and top down practice.

Why isn’t my professor Māori? A snapshot of the academic workfWhy isn’t my professor Māori? A snapshot of the academic workforce in New Zealand universitiesorce in New Zealand universities

This article provides insights into the ethnicity of academics employed by Aotearoa New Zealand's eight universities, with a particular focus on Maori academics. We show that, despite values espoused by universities in terms of diversity and within their equity policies regarding Maori staff, there has been no progress in increasing the Maori academic workforce. Maori academics were severely under-represented at universities between 2012 and 2017, comprising approximately 5 per cent of the total academic workforce. This raises questions about the will of universities to build a sustainable Maori academic workforce, their level of commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the notion of partnership, and the efficacy of academic equity and diversity policies. We highlight the immediate need for universities to move beyond diversity and equity statements and not only commit to, but also initiate, significant actions to recruit, retain, support and promote Maori scholars within the academy.

Putting student partnership and collaboration centre-stage in a research-led context

In this case study, we evaluated the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) initiative at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU), an extracurricular programme that focuses on academic staff-student partnerships and collaborations. While not directly integrated into university degree programmes, SURF provides students with the opportunity to develop practical research skills related to knowledge they have acquired in class. Participating students receive an authentic research experience, which involves collaboration on research projects with academic staff. All students are required to present results of their projects at a public poster presentation event organised by the university. This case study is a partnership between Academic Enhancement Centre (AEC) staff, who organize and run SURF, SURF students, and a lecturer (M.B.N. Kouwenhoven), and it presents a reflection on their experiences of the SURF programme, and in particular on the notions of partnership and collaboration and the potential tension between those two concepts.

Mennonite partnerships: Two ethnographic case studies

This article brings cultural anthropology into conversation with theological reflection around the notion of partnership, focused on two case studies: the first examines Mennonite institutions in the United States working for inclusion of new immigrants from Latin America; the second considers the international community development work of the Mennonite Central Committee in a rural area of Bolivia. In both cases, humanitarian impulses galvanized action aimed towards the construction of horizontal power relations for social and economic justice. In both cases as well, however, the concentration of economic resources along with deeply embedded assumptions about ethnic and cultural difference made substantive equality in partnership difficult to sustain. Close attention to these challenges can shed light on ways in which Christian organizations can at least mitigate, if not resolve, the deeply entrenched power differences that have historically plagued engagement and partnerships across the world.

Notation for the Audience

A hybrid that composes with texts and notations; this article acts both as a discourse and a choreographic score about the performance of readership as a mode of participation. Naming this participation 'implication', the article studies the notion of attachment developed by the spectator-reader, and the notion of partnership with the artist (becoming 'partner in crime' by searching together with the artist). The term 'implication' also refers to the relation that is inherent to reading. Composing with the movement of the eyes, the contact with the paper, the breathing and the possible relations emerging from reading, the scores of this article show examples of notation addressed to the audience and invite for an understanding of how notation can perform on their readers, and of how can it trigger encounters between spectators.

Strengthening Local Governance in Developing Countries: Partnership as an Alternative Approach

One of the major current concerns in administrative science is the scarcity of partnership-based administration in developing countries, where the capacity of local government is generally weak. Due to the impact of globalisation, the growth of information technology and the rise of third sector organisations, public administration has adopted a new paradigm but given it different names i.e., partnership, public-private partnership, networking, sound governance, good governance etc. As a result, the notion of partnership has emerged as one of the key approaches to meeting the governance challenges of the new millennium focusing, in particular, on building and strengthening the capacity of local governance. As a model, the sustainability of a social system based solely on state capacity has failed in most developing countries. As such, this paper intends to analyse the prospects for partnership based local governance in the developing countries. We argue that there is no alternative to building partnerships at the local government level between the state, private and civil society in order to improve the capacity of local government, enabling it to better attain sustainability, ensure good governance and promote participation in an attempt to mitigate the problems of social exclusion and fragmentation in the delivery of services and products.

Une résidence d’artiste à l’école : Enjeux et répercussions

An artist residency in France, integrated within a project opera primary school’s objective is to stimulate student interest and enhance their prospects by offering new learning tracks and developing skills and knowledge in a transversal approach. Our sociological framework articulating the problematic concepts and notions of partnership, worlds, conflict of values and principles initiates the assumption of values from the art world and the world of the school who find themselves in tension. The analysis of these school conflicts allows us to better understand issues ranging from the teacher’s side and the artist’s side. The results reveal an artist residency torn by tension values, highlight the impact of this device on students and reflect the complexity rarely shown human relationships within a school artistic partnership.

Negotiating Problems of Practice in Research–Practice Design Partnerships

This chapter focuses on how researchers and practitioners negotiate the focus of their joint work within design-based implementation research (DBIR). Studying and facilitating successful negotiation of the problems that become the focus of work and the search for solutions is important for developing DBIR, because of its commitment to focusing on persistent problems of practice from multiple stakeholders’ perspectives. Case studies of two different research–practice partnerships provide a context for exploring two different perspectives on negotiation. In one case study, the notion of partnerships as forms of cultural exchange across institutional boundaries that differ with respect to goals, norms, and practices is used to analyze a design partnership focused on repurposing curriculum units in elementary science. In the second case study, the concept of framing as developed in social movement theory is used to illuminate issues of status and authority within a partnership between a district and researchers. The chapter concludes by describing the contributions of each perspective to an understanding of how teams jointly negotiate the focus of their work and by providing some recommendations for how teams can do so successfully.

Partnership working in services for children: Use of the common assessment framework

Transformation in the structure and delivery of services for children and young people in the UK Children Act (Department for Education & Skills, 2004. The Children Act. London: HMSO) initiated new alliances between statutory, public and voluntary agencies. Traditional relationships and notions of partnership have been extended, necessitating an innovative approach to dialogue and multiple perspectives. Hudson's assertion that although the “rhetoric on partnering remains strong, the real policy thrust is now about choice and contestability” (2006, Journal of Integrated Care, 14(1), 13–21) exemplifies the dynamic policy context around notions of partnership and the rationale for collaborative advantage. This paper explores the experiences of practitioners working in a relatively new multi-agency context – the common assessment framework (CAF). Envisaged as a standardized approach to the assessment of need and as a tool to facilitate integrated working, the CAF is utilized by practitioners in the UK to improve outcomes for children and young people. We present data from a study that employed an interpretative phenomenological analysis approach and gathered semi-structured interviews with 20 practitioners. Interviews drew upon their experiences of interprofessional working in which diversity, partnership working, and competing aims and objectives emerged as significant themes. The insights that were gained are discussed in terms of their potential impact on service delivery in the UK and their contribution toward responsive practice across dynamic professional boundaries.

Bridging Theory and Practice: Partnerships and Collaboration in Childhood Education

Partnerships and collaborations between the professions, families and communities are an increasingly important dimension of policy landscapes internationally. Across a range of disciplinary fields whose practitioners work with and on behalf of children, there is an expectation that professional knowledge and service are at their most effective when there is meaningful collaboration with stakeholders. In this special issue, contributors working in the field of education consider a range of ways in which notions of partnership and collaboration might be brought to bear in early childhood education and in partnerships between schools and universities. The contributors explore the possibilities of new approaches to partnership, as well as challenging taken-for-granted aspects of partnership discourse. With an increasing demand for innovative partnership research, many educational researchers have shifted to work within an interpretive framework reflecting phenomenological,

The Eastern Partnership Initiative: A New Opportunity for Neighbours?

The EU's relationship with its neighbours to the east has long been founded on the aspiration to build a kind of partnership that does not automatically offer the prospect of membership to former Soviet republics apart from the Baltic States. The mechanism for this was initially the European Neighbourhood Policy, embracing a wider range of countries, which has been further buttressed by the Eastern Partnership initiative (EaP) in an effort to revitalize the partnership-building process in the east. Although more differentiated and versatile, the EaP has nevertheless inherited the Neighbourhood Policy's original conceptual limitations, especially concerning the ill-defined nature of partnership. Practical limitations, on the other hand, include the policy's lack of coherence and management, as well as its low visibility and public appreciation on the ground across the board. The East European response to the EU's initiative reveals further tensions and contradictions, especially pertaining to partner countries' geopolitics and cultural and civilization differences. It is clear that the EU's ‘politics of inclusion’ needs further conceptualization in order to shift the balance away from the EU towards the partner countries themselves. Only in these circumstances of de-centring can the notion of partnership become true and effective.

Human-Sled Dog Relations: What Can We Learn from the Stories and Experiences of Mushers?

AbstractIn this qualitative study, the elements and quality of musher-sled dog relationships were investigated. In-depth interviews with a narrative design were conducted with eight mushers from northern Minnesota and northwestern Ontario. The mushers were asked to contribute ideas by sharing stories and experiences of working with dogs, as well as art or photographs. While all the participants had their own ideas about musher-sled dog relationships, six themes emerged. The mushers stated the importance of getting to know the dogs, their respect for their sled dogs’ abilities, the idea of a two-way communication that takes place, the importance of trust, the notion of partnership, and what can be learned through working with sled dogs. This study supports other research suggesting that humans and animals engage in interspecies relationships and that these can be quality relationships with multiple elements. The importance of researching and teaching about dogs as subjects is discussed, as well as the significance of humans having direct experience with other animals.

The Partnership Project: learning from experts by experience in mental health services; the Jersey Partnership perspective

Partnership between people who use services, their carers, and professionals is seen as an increasingly important aspect of providing a quality service across health and social care. The concept is enshrined in national policy, but the application of it is patchy at best, and has partly been undermined by constant restructuring and organisational change ‐ both in partnership working and in the organisations set up to deliver health and social care. Partnership that recognises service user/survivor expertise and assets and promotes equal and reciprocal working between staff and users is being recast as ‘co‐production’ or ‘co‐creation’ in UK public policy. The Jersey Partnership Project demonstrates a co‐productive approach, which is being seen as a way forward for adult social care service development and design.The Partnership Project, which commenced in the summer of 2009, and which is reaching the conclusion of its first stage at the time of writing, brings together experts by experience and mental health professionals, including a number of the latter who use services themselves, in a way that is designed to map out a new way of working, in partnership, across services. The Project is due to complete its first stage in June 2010, and further stages, perhaps bringing in a wider range of community services, are under discussion, following a presentation to the Jersey Minister for Health in November 2009.This article explores the notion of partnership as both ‘truth‐telling’ and ‘walking on common ground’, allowing those who provide and those who make use of services to enter into a sharing of experiences and knowledge, and an integrated spirit, that provides a clearer direction for developing adult mental health services in Jersey. The article then goes on to consider some of the barriers to more inclusive ways of working and looks at the current discourse and practices around the ‘co‐production’ agenda. Finally, the article covers the practical operation of the Partnership Project looking at structure and learning points and concludes by looking to the final six months of the Project and beyond.

Occupational therapy and indigenous peoples: partnerships for change

‘Partnerships for Change’ is an emerging international community of practice focused on occupational therapy and indigenous health. This article describes a community of practice, explores notions of partnership, and promotes one way that the authors believe will support partnership with indigenous peoples to promote equitable access to health care and occupational justice.

Governing by partnerships: dilemmas in Swedish education policy at the turn of the millennium

In recent years, governing through partnerships has become more and more common and is today reflected in a range of policy areas. In the following article, governing through partnerships is analysed in Swedish education policy around the turn of the millennium, where the notion of partnership has had a large impact. Using as its point of departure a theoretical perspective inspired by Michel Foucault, the article analyses the calls for partnership in Swedish education policy as part of a set of governmental rationalities forming individuals into partnering, that is active and responsible, citizens. In the article, some of the long‐term consequences of the uses of the concept of partnership in Swedish education policy are discussed, focusing particularly on issues of inclusion/exclusion and democratic regeneration. With the idea of governing through partnerships, it is argued that the political landscape is redrawn. The role of the State, for instance, is increasingly to leave room for various voluntary and independent actors and associations, to co‐ordinate and interact, as a partner, among others, rather than directing society ‘from above’.

Striving towards Inclusive Research: An Example of Participatory Action Research with Older Lesbians and Gay Men

This paper sets out to explore the implications of participatory action research (PAR) as a method of encouraging older people from minority groups to have a ‘voice’ in defining knowledge, theory and practice about their lives. Recent policy in Britain has promoted the recognition of diversity of experience in later life () and the importance of working with older people as equal partners (). At the same time, notions of partnership and service user involvement in both research and practice development are now firmly established within health and social care practice. Despite this, the needs of older lesbians and gay men are still very much invisible within mainstream policy and practice (). PAR approaches seek to address issues of power, politics and empowerment () and therefore offers an inclusive method of working with marginalized and excluded voices. This is important in research with minority groups, as their experiences can be masked by imposing mainstream categories and assumptions (). The paper considers participatory action research as a methodology for inclusive social work research and uses a case study to explore the methodology. It reviews the ‘cycle’ of research using the six principles for working with disempowered groups identified by . The paradoxes involved in participatory research are explored, including issues of inclusiveness and exclusivity, and the possibility of ‘untold truths’ (). The challenges involved in striving for inclusive and empowering research methodologies are discussed, exploring the implications for ‘outsider’ researchers, and the challenges of working with ‘variant truths’.