ABSTRACT
Partnership brokering is fundamentally about providing and nurturing an enabling space for the development of successful partnerships. Whatever the form assumed, evidence suggests that collaborative arrangements will require and draw upon the services of a partnership broker at some stage in their lifetime. Partnership brokering is critical for a range of reasons. As well as getting the process of partnering started, it is central to the building and maintaining of partnerships, and important for the promotion and sharing of learning about how partnership works in different contexts. Partnership brokering can therefore offer what might be described as a translation service in which both top-down and bottom-up connections are enhanced as international or national requirements are made sense of at regional and local levels, and given coherence. Partnership brokering has been positioned as a 'new' form of 'cross-boundary leadership' that promotes collective thinking and bridge-building and as 'integrative leadership' across individual, group, organisational and inter-organisational levels.