ABSTRACT
Partnership has become a buzzword in today’s world. It is used in many different contexts, both at the national and international level, and between different partners, such as governments, international organizations and private and civil society actors – illustrated by the NATO Partnership for Peace Program, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), the Economic Partnership Agreements between the European Union and African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States, or the trilateral Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP). Particularly in the field of development, the partnership concept has come to be used prominently to describe new forms of north–south and aid relations (Abrahamsen 2004; Fowler ; Maxwell and Riddell 1998; Ruckert 2006). While the use of the partnership notion in the field of development can be traced back as far as 1969, when the Pearson Commission on Aid and Development called for ‘a new partnership based on an informal understanding expressing the reciprocal rights and obligations of donors and recipients’ ( Commission on Aid and Development 1969: 127), it was only in the mid-1990s that the term became more prominently used, such as in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report Shaping the 21st Century: The Contribution of Development Co-operation (May 1996) or the UK Department for International Development (DfID) White Paper Eliminating World Poverty: A Challenge for the 21st Century (1997). Generally speaking, the notion of partnership has positive connotations and is associated with a desirable, voluntary, inherently positive form of Co-operation among equals, pursuing common goals based on mutual respect ( Laakso 2007: 118). In the field of development, the move from the conditionality of Structural Adjustment Policies towards a partnership approach within the Post-Washington Consensus has been said to empower developing countries and to foster participation and ownership of their development agenda ( Ruckert 2006: 36). Thus, for example, the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD calls for partnership as a central aspect of its strategy for the twenty-first century: ‘In a true partnership, local actors should progressively take the lead, while external partners back their efforts to assume greater responsibility for their own development’ (OECD 1996: 13 quoted in Harrison 2002: 590).
