Establishing Partnerships
Categories
of Partnerships | Practical
Steps to Forming and Managing Partnerships
Partnerships in Action
We’ve established the key components and principles necessary to understanding a working definition of a partnership. At this point, you may still have some unanswered questions and concerns about how a partnership will potentially affect you and your work. Does a partnership imply we have to compromise our commitments in order to receive funds? Is a partnership just receiving money? In order to answer similar questions to these, partnerships may be better understood by identifying what they are not. Specifically:
- A partnership is not a gift. A
partnership aims at taking advantage of what the recipient,
as well as the donor, can bring to the relationship. This can
include local expertise, on-site workers, and a better understanding
of priorities, needs and constraints. Even more important, a
partnership seeks joint "ownership" of the relationship
and tries to build the capacity of the recipient government
to undertake sustainable development.
- A partnership is not a relationship based on if/then
terms. Meaning, donors cannot impose conditions to coerce
FBCOs to do things they don’t want to do in order to
obtain resources they need. Partnership recognizes that both
sides must be involved in defining the terms of the relationship.
- A partnership is not a principal-agent relationship
between a donor and a recipient. In a partnership, the
donor cannot prescribe the terms of the relationship in the
way that an employer can specify terms of employment when hiring
a worker.
- A partnership is not simply a "team" activity. In an ideal sports team, everyone has exactly the same interest in winning, and everyone on the team either wins or loses. While the members of a partnership development certainly have strong interests in common, they are also likely to have some divergent interests as well. Finally, although the formal terms of a partnership may be expressed in a valid contract under international law, the donor and recipient usually have no intention to use courts to resolve their conflicts. Instead, like nations bound by treaties, partners rely mainly on each others need to maintain a good reputation to secure future agreements.
In order to further understand the theoretical foundations of a partnership, it is helpful to illustrate the partnership using "Game Theory" where a relationship is defined by: (a) identifying the players, (b) specifying the choices they have, and (c) spelling out the consequences of these choices in terms of the payoffs to the players. Analyzing the strategies available to the players reveals what is needed to foster mutually beneficial outcomes. In the context of developing partnerships, the game can be specified as follows:
The players:
The players are the donor and the recipient. The donor might be a foundation, a university or a government agency. The recipient in a partnership is often a FBO/ CBO or a grass roots organization.The choices:
The available choices can be quite complex, but for the sake of discussion, the choices can be reduced to just two: cooperate or defect. Choosing to cooperate at a given point in time means that the playerperforms the agreed upon terms of the partnership promptly and fully. Choosing to defect means that the player fulfills its obligations less than completely or slower than agreed upon.The consequences:
The consequences depend upon what each player has chosen. The basis of a partnership is that there is mutual gain to be had by working together. Thus, if both cooperate, both do well. However, there is typically a temptation to defect. Some reasons why a donor might be tempted to avoid some of its commitments include a desire to increase the amount of tied aid, a desire to reduce costs once it received credit for "flag raising" and a reluctance in practice to support leadership by the recipient FBCO.On the other hand, a recipient might be tempted to use some of its limited human and financial resources that were supposed to be devoted to the partnership for other pressing needs. In general, each side would typically prefer that the other fulfill its commitments but have freedom to choose which of its own commitments will be fulfilled. Finally, if both sides defect by ignoring their commitments, neither does well because neither side gets the advantages of the partnership.
Categories
of Partnerships | Practical
Steps to Forming and Managing Partnerships