NGO Partnerships

Partnership is a contested concept: an ideal which promises so much and yet fails to meet expectations in practice. Is it time to move on, relegating partnership to the category of yet another development fad? Or is understanding the nature and dynamics of these changing relationships in fact critical to understanding the international aid chain itself: where it has come from and where it is heading?

Download the briefing paper below which summarises INTRAC's most recent research on this topic.

04Partnership.doc (48Kb)

The research was undertaken as part of our NGO Research Programme, which is run with the active participation of a group of European NGOs. The research analysed and compared the views and operational practices of these European NGOs and addressed the following questions:

How do Northern NGOs define partnership with respect to their relationships with Southern partners?

How do Northern NGOs develop and manage partnerships with Southern partners in practice?
What have been the main challenges and lessons learned?

Phase Two of the research assessed the concept of partnership from a Southern perspective, with case studies in three contrasting countries: Brazil, Cambodia and Tanzania. It set out to address the following research questions:

How have Southern civil society organisations (CSOs) experienced partnerships with their Northern counterparts in practice?
In what ways are these partnerships distinct?
To what extent do North–South partnerships contribute to strengthening civil society by enhancing horizontal linkages and interaction between autonomous civil society actors?
Or do partnerships in fact create vertical (top-down) relations of dependence between the Southern CSO and its Northern partner?
What new and innovative forms of partnership are emerging as an alternative to the conventional ‘donor-recipient’, funding-based models of partnership between Northern NGOs and Southern CSOs?

The main research study is published as Autonomy or Dependence? Case Studies of North-South NGO Partnerships by Vicky Mancuso Brehm with Emma Harris-Curtis, Luciano Padrão and Martin Tanner, 2004 (visit our publications section to order a copy).

You can also download 'Promoting Effective North-South Partnerships' (OPS 35, December 2000) for free.