the role of contestation in ngo partnerships

POLICY ARENA

THE ROLE OF CONTESTATION IN NGOPARTNERSHIPSy

TOM HARRISON*

St Antony’s College, Oxford, UK

Abstract: In this article I use a case study of the relationship between an international

non-government development organisation (NGO) and one of its local partner NGOs to

question the desirability of basing NGO partnerships on the principle of subsidiarity. I argue

that devolving maximum control to the local NGO in accordance with the principle of

subsidiarity would have conflicted with the interests and expectations of both the international

NGO and its local partner. As a result, there was occasional but significant contestation

between these organisations about what sort of relationship was most compatible with the

principle of partnership and what role each party should play within that relationship. I argue

that such contestation over what constitutes partnership has the potential to contribute to

the realisation of this value-laden term by involving all parties in defining the nature of their

relationship. Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: NGOs; partnership

1 INTRODUCTION

There is a well-established consensus that relations between international donor

non-government development organisations (NGOs) and the local partner NGOs to

which they provide funding should be structured according to the principle of partnership.

This value-laden but ambiguous term is widely associated with the narrower principle of

subsidiarity as the realisation of partnership is often assessed by how far international

NGOs devolve control to their local partners. In this article I question the desirability of this

prevailing tendency to equate partnership with subsidiarity. I draw on a case study of the

Journal of International Development

J. Int. Dev. 19, 389–400 (2007)

Published online in Wiley InterScience

(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/jid.1373

*Correspondence to: Tom Harrison, St. Antony’s College, Oxford, OX2 6JF, UK.E-mail: [email protected] earlier version of this paper was presented at a colloquium of the Development Studies Association’sDevelopment Management Study Group.

Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

relationship between an international NGO and one of its local partner NGOs to illustrate

that the principle of subsidiarity was not consistently compatible with the needs of the

project or with the interests and expectations of either the international NGO or its local

partner. As a result, there was occasional but significant contestation between the

organisations over what sort of relationship was compatible with the principle of

partnership and what role each party should play within that relationship. I conclude by

arguing that such contestation over what does, and does not, constitute partnership has the

potential to contribute to the realisation of this value-laden term by involving all parties in

defining the nature of their relationship.

2 THE RISE OF PARTNERSHIP

NGOs have become increasingly prominent in development discourse and are the subject

of a fast growing literature (Brett, 1993) that matches the ‘explosive growth’ in

development NGOs (Moore and Stewart, 2000).1 As the NGO sector has grown,

international NGOs have increasingly moved away from implementing projects directly

towards providing funding to local NGOs to implement the projects. In turn, many of these

local NGOs have sought the involvement of, and often transferred funds to, other NGOs,

particularly more informal voluntary organisations and village groups, to implement their

projects in specific locations. This devolution of responsibility for implementation creates

a more complicated ‘aid chain’, defined as ‘the series of links through which aid flows on

its way from donors to recipients’ (Bornstein, 2001) (Figure 1).

However, devolving responsibility for implementation does not necessarily involve

devolving control. Most studies of NGO partnerships assume that ‘the power of those with

Figure 1. A typical NGO aid chain

1In 1993, there were 28 900 international NGOs of which 90 per cent had been formed since 1960 (Edwards,2000: 9).

Copyright # 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Int. Dev. 19, 389–400 (2007)

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390 T. Harrison

money’ (Wallace and Chapman, 2003) enables donors to impose their agenda on the

recipients of those resources (Hamilton, 2000). The dominant view2 is therefore of ‘a chain

of dependency-inducing relationships’ (Fowler, 2000) that ‘establish[es] the material basis

for dancing to the tune of the donor’ (Manji, 2000). In response to such criticism, the

concept of partnership emerged during the 1980s and 1990s.3 This ‘buzzword’ (Harriss,

2000) has become so dominant that ‘today’s rule of thumb in international development is

that everybody wants to be a partner with everyone or everything, everywhere’ (Fowler,

2000). As a result, ‘the existence of North-South partnerships . . . has become part of the

foundation of current international development aid’ (Brehm, 2004b).

3 THE MEANING OF PARTNERSHIP

The term ‘‘‘partnership’’ conjures a positive reaction, implying a desirable, value-laden

type of relationship’ (Brinkerhoff, 2002) based on ‘mutuality; clearly defined expectations,

rights and responsibilities; accountability and transparency [bound together by] the elusive

principles of trust, respect, integrity, credibility and ownership’ (Brehm, 2004a).4

However, many analyses of specific NGO partnerships move beyond these abstract

definitions and interpret the term as meaning that donors should relinquish control to their

local partners. For example, Simbi and Thom (2000) cite approvingly the director of a

Kenyan local NGO—‘if a Northern partner would like to get a three-month report, without

which no funds are forthcoming, is that partnership? It is not.’—suggesting that donors

should not attach conditions to the funds they provide. Many international NGOs express

similar views in their policy statements: Penrose (2000) states that one of Save the Children

Fund’s principles of partnership is to minimise the demands it places on its partners. Other

accounts equate partnership with progressively increasing the local NGO’s autonomy:

Sahley (1995) argues that ‘genuine partnership’ requires that initial capacity building of

local NGOs be followed by efforts to promote their autonomy including ‘expanding [their]

capacity to act without external support’. There is therefore a largely unchallenged

consensus that, in either the short or long term, international NGOs should minimise their

own role and cede control to their local partners.

Partnership has thus become associated with subsidiarity—the principle that ‘every

activity should be carried out as low down as feasible’ (Chambers, 1995). The central tenet

of partnership theory has become not just that the local NGO should have greater or more

equal control over a project, but that the donor’s control should be minimised and the local

NGO’s control maximised. The rhetoric of partnership therefore focuses on reversing the

power relations identified in the above aid chain by reversing the powerful but simplistic

dichotomy Chambers draws between powerful ‘uppers’ and powerless ‘lowers’ by ‘putting

the last first’ (Chambers, 1983) and ‘the first last’ (Chambers, 1997). This paper questions

the underlying assumption behind equating partnership with subsidiarity that local NGOs

2I refer to this as the dominant view, not because it is monolithic, but because ‘the scholarly literature [often]confer[s] absolute power to shape recipients’ discourse and practice on those who control the purse strings’(Thayer, 2004).3In 1987 a supplement of the journal World Development included discussions of NGO partnerships (Drabek,1987).4Different elements of this broad definition are evident in other people’s work but mutuality remains a constantfeature as partnership is taken to imply: ‘collegial equality’ (Chambers et al., 2001: 1), ‘equality of position, statusand voice’ (Mawdsley et al., 2002), and ‘mutual trust, respect, accountability and influence, with mutualdetermination of ends and means’ (Brinkerhoff, 2002).


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The Role of Contestation in NGO Partnerships 391

either want a complete devolution of control or have all the necessary skills and experience

to make such devolution effective.

4 THE DIVISION OF LABOUR

The assumption that ‘decentralisation will [usually] pay dividends’ (Edwards, 1994) and

therefore that the international NGO should automatically relinquish control to the local

NGO overlooks the benefits that come from a ‘division of labour . . . in which Northern[/

international] and Southern[/local] NGOs both have an essential part to play’ (Broadhead,

1987). As Lewis (1998) notes, ‘partnership only makes sense if it can [achieve] certain

outcomes which would not have been possible by partners singly’, as the objective of

inter-organisational collaboration is to achieve greater efficiency and/or effectiveness by

bringing together the skills and knowledge of different organisations. The central issue in

analysing the application of partnership is thus to identify what international and local

NGOs are each able to contribute that the other partner cannot. This means the assumption

in much of the literature that, in line with the principle of subsidiarity, partnership involves

the international NGOminimising its own role, has to be established in terms of its optimal

contribution, not assumed a priori.

That the optimal division of labour is in practice much more complicated becomes

apparent when I consider a specific NGO partnership in India. The partnership is between

an international NGO, Support for Knowledge and Innovation (SKI), and its local partner,

Rural Development Forum (RDF).5 RDF had extensive experience of implementing

projects relating to agriculture and microfinance, but the project it received from SKI was

for an area of work in which it had no experience—a project to inform villagers about their

entitlements from government schemes and empower them to claim these from the

appropriate government offices. From SKI’s perspective, RDF was well suited to this

project because it had a large network of village men’s groups as well as a network of

women’s self-help groups that it had set up through its work on microfinance. However,

since RDF had no experience of the type of work to be conducted with SKI’s funding, it

lacked the skills or expertise to implement the project effectively. SKI, by contrast, had

more expertise in this area: it had formulated an organisational policy, had other partners

implementing similar projects and had access to information about the work pursued by

other organisations. RDF faced further difficulties in that it did not have internet access in

its office in a large village and therefore was not well positioned to keep up-to-date with the

latest changes in government schemes; by contrast, SKI’s office was in a major city where

each staff member had their own computer with internet access.

SKI needed RDF’s involvement because it lacked grassroots connections in the area

where the project was to be implemented, because RDF’s operating costs were

substantially lower than SKI’s and because RDF would remain in the location once the

SKI-funded project had finished. However, for the project to be implemented effectively,

RDF staff needed to be provided with training either directly from SKI or by SKI

facilitating contact with other organisations pursuing similar work, they also needed SKI to

keep them informed about changes to government schemes or legislation. Thus,

5The names of both NGOs have been changed. The discussion here is based on early stages in the life of thepartnership: the intention is not to evaluate the organisations or their project, but to use the case study to develop abetter understanding of the discourse surrounding NGO partnerships.


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392 T. Harrison

conceptualising partnership as subsidiarity and thereby reducing SKI’s relationship to

providing funding would have been inadequate for the effective implementation of the

project: it would have led to a suboptimal division of labour.

5 THE LIMITS OF SUBSIDIARITY

The principle of subsidiarity dominated SKI’s official statements on partnership. In

particular, SKI’s literature referred to its desire to make its presence unnecessary by

developing the capacity of ‘local institutions’ and ‘institutions of the poor’. This rhetoric

was also used by SKI staff when explaining SKI’s philosophy: at my first meeting with the

SKI partnership coordinator, he contrasted SKI’s approach to partnership with other

international NGOs that simply tell their partners what to do.

Despite RDF’s lack of expertise in the project area, SKI’s rhetoric paid relatively little

attention to what contributions it could make beyond the provision of financial resources.

Yet, SKI’s partnership coordinator and other SKI staff clearly considered their role to be

more than simply providing funding and relinquishing control; indeed, many believed the

most progressive view of partnership involved moving beyond a simple funding

relationship to providing non-financial support in the form of their expertise. The SKI

partnership coordinator told me that the closeness of SKI’s relationship with its local

partners distinguished it from other funding agencies, which only visit their local partner

NGOs once every six months. Most other SKI staff also cited their close contact with

partners as a defining feature of SKI’s approach to partnership.

Despite its rhetoric about subsidiarity, it was clear that SKI had exerted its influence to

persuade RDF to shift towards a new area of work. When RDF first accepted funding from

SKI, it was for irrigation work in which RDF had extensive prior experience. However,

following an internal review of SKI’s work, SKI’s partnership coordinator presented RDF

with a choice: if it wanted to continue receiving SKI funding it would have to be for a project

that empowered poor people to claim their entitlements fromgovernment, work inwhich RDF

had no prior experience. Instead of deciding the nature of the project, RDFwas left with a take

it or leave it decision over SKI’s newmethodology. Unsurprisingly, given the extent of poverty

in the area and the scale of funding available, RDF accepted the project.6

Thus, for all SKI’s rhetoric of relinquishing control, its funds still represented ‘a carrot

for enticing NGOs to bite into some of their ideologies and agendas’ (Smith-Sreen, 1995).

However, the strength of SKI’s commitment to an egalitarian partnership made it difficult

to accuse them of adopting the rhetoric without aspiring to the reality. To assume that RDF

should have single-handedly determined the project would be to privilege the principle of

subsidiarity and overlook the benefits of greater inter-organisational collaboration. In this

particular context, following the principle of subsidiarity would have prevented SKI

drawing on its extensive experience to persuade RDF of the potential benefits of its new

approach. Giving absolute priority to the discourse of partnership as subsidiarity would

have restricted SKI to merely distributing funds with no influence over how those funds

were used, a role that its staff clearly did not view as genuine partnership. It would also

have prevented SKI formulating a clear organisational identity based upon its own

6This does not mean RDF was not interested in the project, but that it was practically bound to accept regardless ofits view; this is consistent with Sen’s (1998: 243) finding that most Indian NGOs ‘are involved in multipleactivities’.


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approach to development, which SKI considered essential to the effectiveness of both its

programme work and its ability to attract funds.7

6 SUBSIDIARITY AS THE DEVOLUTION OF RESPONSIBILITY

Despite its reluctance to minimise its own role and the desire of its staff to exert influence in

line with their expertise, SKI staff were not consistently opposed to the principle of

subsidiarity. For example, staff were strongly committed to strengthening SKI’s local

partners, including RDF, by encouraging them to participate directly in wider NGO fora

and networks. Furthermore, far from the assumption of the partnership literature that

international NGOs have a vested interest in opposing partnership as subsidiarity, the

discourse frequently appeared to suit the interests of the organisation or individual staff.

For SKI’s partnership coordinator, the subsidiarity discourse presented a useful means of

explaining the length of time taken to mobilise village men’s and women’s groups to

implement the project. Where planned activities may have been over-ambitious or the

timeframe inadequate, he could attribute any shortcomings to RDF. He was therefore able

to underplay his own responsibility both for persuading RDF to work in a wide area early

on, when RDF favoured focusing on a smaller area, and for not organising the training

requested by RDF. He did acknowledge that he was unable to visit RDF every month as he

would have liked, but did not present this, which could have been justified by his onerous

workload, as a possible explanation of the rate of progress. Thus, the discourse of

subsidiarity was on occasions used by the partnership coordinator to absolve himself of

responsibility.

To demonstrate that this devolution of responsibility is not unique to the individual

partnership coordinator, it is worth noting that the rhetoric of subsidiarity was similarly

used by RDF staff to shift responsibility onto the project beneficiaries. Staff frequently

referred to their role as being to inform beneficiaries of their legal rights and how to claim

them, arguing that whether people then actually claimed their rights was up to them. The

assumption was that, once provided with information, people were automatically in a

position to act upon it; although RDF did recognise the need to gain villagers’ trust before

they would listen to the information. Thus, after organising theatrical presentations in

several project villages on the government schemes available and how to claim them, an

RDF staff member suggested that it was now the villagers’ responsibility to claim their

rights and therefore planned no immediate follow-up to encourage them to do so. Yet, in

five focus group discussions with villagers in one village where the drama had been

performed, those who had seen the drama expressed increased awareness of the schemes

available but only limited understanding of how to claim these rights. More importantly,

even where they understood how to claim, they expressed no immediate plans to do so.

When asked if they thought they would get their rights, people were pessimistic and

assumed they would simply be presented with an excuse. From their perspective, it was

clear that simply asking for the schemes they were entitled towould probably be ineffective

and therefore that the mere provision of information was inadequate.

7Nor is this unique to SKI. RDF drew attention in its literature and in conversation to its strengths developedthrough experience in microfinance and irrigation, even if it was in practice willing to work on a much wider rangeof issues.


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There was thus a clear temptation for RDF staff to absolve themselves of further

responsibility by drawing on the principle of subsidiarity, but on other occasions they

acknowledged that poor people needed substantial support if their demands were to be

heard. For example, the same staff member who had organised the drama and then said

it was up to the villagers to claim their rights, had also suggested that his presence helped to

ensure that a widow’s letter claiming the money she was entitled to on the death of

her husband was dealt with properly. He claimed that his status increased the likelihood

of her being listened to, but did not extend this to the more general conclusion that

villagers needed support in making their claims. As this example illustrates, RDF staff

were highly aware of the challenges to implementing the project and of the limitations of

the principle of subsidiarity, but the discourse of subsidiarity appeared on many occasions

to block critical analysis of these challenges by allowing for the devolution of

responsibility.

However, the discourse of subsidiarity is not simply a tool for the devolution of

responsibility, it also provided a mechanism through which RDF could challenge SKI

when it believed SKI was failing to live up to its own rhetoric. For example, RDF recounted

a disagreement with the SKI partnership coordinator when he criticised the project’s rate of

progress, RDF responded by using SKI’s own rhetoric to tell him that this behaviour was

not partnership and that RDF did not want SKI’s money if he was going to behave in that

way. Similarly, RDF staff objected that SKI’s partnership coordinator was attempting to

impose his views when he criticised them for using an external consultant to write their

reports, which RDF staff justified by saying their English was not good enough to write the

reports themselves, and then insisted that RDF staff should instead write the reports in their

mother tongue for SKI to get translated. RDF was able to make these challenges because

they were constructed as a ‘call upon [SKI] to take its own rhetoric seriously’ (Scott, 1990).

Since the challenge was framed within SKI’s own discourse of partnership as subsidiarity,

for SKI to object would simply have reaffirmed RDF’s point that it was not fulfilling its

partnership rhetoric, ‘such an attack [was therefore] a legitimate critique by definition’

(Scott, 1990). Thus, contrary to the predominant view in the literature that ‘partnership’

‘disguis[es] the fact that power differences exist’ (Fowler, 2000), the discourse of

partnership can actually set the standards against which the international NGO can be

judged. Just as my research was directed towards understanding how well SKI and RDF

lived up to their rhetoric on partnership, so RDF judged SKI against its rhetoric. Therefore,

even though RDF staff were on occasions critical of SKI’s failure to live up to its rhetoric,

they appreciated their relative freedom to criticise its shortcomings, freedom that the

rhetoric itself played a central role in creating.

While RDF staff drew on the principle of subsidiarity in situations such as those cited

above, they were not consistently in favour of subsidiarity any more than SKI was

consistently opposed to it. For example, RDF staff explicitly praised SKI’s extensive

involvement in formulating the project proposals and expressed their appreciation that SKI

held discussions with all staff and some intended beneficiaries, whereas most donors would

only talk with senior staff. RDF staff also said that they had asked SKI to provide themwith

training in how to implement the project, thus clearly expressing their desire that SKI play a

more active role in the partnership by providing them with greater guidance on how to

implement the project. Thus, while the partnership literature often assumes that local

NGOs want international NGOs to implement the principle of subsidiarity by devolving as

much control as possible, their expectations, like those of their donors, are altogether more

complex in reality.


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7 CONTESTING ‘PARTNERSHIP’

Given that the original motivation for forming an inter-organisational relationship is to

combine the different attributes and strengths of the different organisations (Penrose,

2000), it is unrealistic to expect these different organisations to have exactly the same view

of how the relationship should be structured. This is apparent in each of the cases abovewhere

RDF and SKI clearly express different views about what role each party should play in the

relationship. Yet, these differences do not consistently correlate with the assumptions in much

of the partnership literature that the local NGO will favour increased subsidiarity while the

international NGO opposes it. As has been demonstrated above, the interests and views of

each party are far more nuanced than such a simplistic dichotomy suggests. Furthermore, in

the examples discussed above, we see disagreement not just about whether particular forms of

behaviour are compatible with the principle of partnership, but also contestation over what the

principle of partnership entails.

This is apparent if we return to the discussion above about RDF’s use of external

consultants to write its reports for SKI. The SKI partnership coordinator attributed RDF’s

reliance on an external consultant to RDF staff feeling unable to write in English. He

therefore insisted that they write the reports themselves in the state language and let SKI

get them translated into English. He justified this in terms of the need to break RDF’s

dependent mindset, and hence promote the goal of subsidiarity. However RDF presented

the issue very differently. An RDF staff member told me that somebody in the state capital

might not be able to translate the subtleties of their local dialect accurately and that it

would therefore be better if RDF arranged the translation itself. This argument was

made less compelling by the fact that the consultants RDF employed were not always from

its locality; furthermore, while the dialect contains a number of colloquial variations,

they are unlikely substantially to hinder translation. It is more plausible that RDF staff were

concerned that SKI organising the translation could reduce RDF’s control over the content

of reports or that they did not feel able to produce the reports, not because of their language

skills, but because they felt unable to analyse the data. In this case, the partnership

coordinator emphasised subsidiarity, but his conception of subsidiarity actually involved

reducing RDF’s control in order to empower them, an approach that RDF viewed as

domineering. Yet, it appears that RDF’s interest may have been in greater support from SKI

to help produce the reports, not greater independence through subsidiarity.

A similar point emerges if we revisit the difference of opinion between RDF and SKI

over the project’s rate of progress. As has already been highlighted, RDF responded by

calling upon the principle of subsidiarity to assert that the SKI partnership coordinator

should not behave in this way. However, at other times when the SKI partnership

coordinator questioned their progress RDF staff drew on alternative conceptions of

partnership in their responses. In particular, they promoted a conception of partnership that

directly contrasted with the principle of subsidiarity when they challenged SKI’s

partnership coordinator to become more directly involved in addressing the problems he

was highlighting in their work.

SKI too explicitly drew upon and promoted other conceptions of partnership. For

example, the partnership coordinator expressed concern to me about RDF’s project, funded

by a different donor, to provide grain to poor households. Being unaccustomed to eating the

particular grain supplied, some recipients apparently considered it inedible and were

reportedly selling it instead. From the perspective of SKI’s partnership coordinator, this

conflicted with people’s right to edible food and with the government’s responsibility to


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396 T. Harrison

meet this right. In discussing this issue with me he thus appealed to a conception of

partnership as ideological unity rather than subsidiarity. There was a clear tension between

these two conceptions of partnership: for the partnership coordinator to act on his concern

would have involved attempting to establish greater influence over RDF by questioning its

other projects, whereas the principle of subsidiarity would focus on minimising SKI’s

influence over RDF.

Thus, occasional disagreements between SKI and RDF about whether particular actions

and forms of behaviour were compatible with the principle of partnership espoused by SKI

were not just about how this principle should be implemented but also about the conception

of the principle itself. Rather than suggesting that only one partner is right and therefore

viewing these differences of opinion as an obstacle to genuine partnership, my case study

suggests it is preferable to recognise the constructive potential of such contestation, as it

provides scope for partners to debate what would constitute the optimal division of labour

and the most desirable inter-organisational relationship. Furthermore, such contestation

between partners over who is interpreting the concept of partnership correctly is likely to

advance the realisation of partnership by encouraging the mutual involvement of all

partners in delineating the terms of the relationship.8

Partnership therefore does not require that partners have a unified perspective, but that

they are all committed to resolving their differences, and achieving either consensus or

compromise through non-coercive discussion and negotiation. Focusing on this aspect of

partnership does not conflict with the existing literature, but it does provide a different

emphasis. There is nothing in the definitional literature that says partnerships should

involve minimal disagreement, but most critiques of existing partnerships use examples of

disagreements to illustrate the failure to realise the rhetoric of partnership. By contrast, the

understanding of partnership advanced in this paper suggests the focus should not be on

whether disagreements occur but on how they are resolved. If disagreements are not

discussed openly or are not resolved on an equitable basis, then the reality would indeed

fall short of partnership; on the other hand, contestation through open and equitable

discussion would provide evidence of genuine partnership.

8 CONCLUSION

Partnership refers to more than just collaboration between organizations; it is a value-laden

term with strong normative overtones about what form a relationship between partners

should take. Despite most of the literature on partnership suggesting a clear consensus

exists on what these values are, my case study suggests not only that different partners can

have different conceptions of partnership but also that each partner may operate with

different conceptions of partnership at different times or in different contexts. This

inevitably leads to debate about how each partner should behave and how the relationship

should be conducted. Such disagreements are often cited as examples of a failure to

realise the ideals of partnership and are mostly attributed to the international NGO as the

‘dominant’ partner failing to cede control to its local partner in accordance with the

8This analysis is influenced by Gallie’s (1956) notion of an ‘essentially contested concept’—an abstract conceptthat is used appraisively to appeal to a common ideal but has no single correct interpretation—and particularly byhis suggestion that competition over the meaning of an essentially contested concept may contribute to theachievement of the original exemplar from which the concept is derived.


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principle of subsidiarity. However, by drawing on a case study of a single NGO aid chain, I

have sought to demonstrate that equating partnership with subsidiarity overlooks the range

of contributions that an international NGO can bring to a partnership and the fact that both

international and local NGOs may expect a division of labour where the international NGO

contributes more than just financial resources.

In my case study, SKI had expertise and experience that it wanted to exercise through a

strong organisational identity that was incompatible with fully relinquishing control to

RDF. However, RDF also looked to SKI to play an active role in the implementation of the

project and praised those donors that visited most often. It too did not want SKI to minimise

its involvement, even if it was also keen to ensure that SKI’s involvement should not

challenge its autonomy, as the disagreement over who should write its reports

demonstrates. This suggests that the principle of subsidiarity was not fully realised in

practice because it would have conflicted with the interests of both organisations. In my

case study, incidents of contestation such as those cited in this paper were not especially

common but they were significant for the development of the relationship between SKI and

RDF: they not only demonstrated that SKI and RDF shared a commitment to the principle

of partnership, even if they often disagreed about exactly what this meant, but also played

an important and often positive role in the development of their relationship.

Contestation between SKI and RDF over the nature of the partnership was therefore not

just about whether the principle of subsidiarity was being realised, nor was it necessarily an

indication of the donor’s inability ‘to let go’ (Simbi and Thom, 2000). Such contestation

provided the potential to improve the project by drawing on the skills and knowledge of all

parties to realise the benefits of inter-organisational collaboration. However, partners do

not simply contest the most constructive division of labour but also their understanding of

partnership. Such contestation therefore contributes towards the realisation of the concept

of partnership by involving all parties in defining the terms and nature of their relationship.

Thus, contestation between partners not only has the potential to improve a project by

developing a more effective division of labour but also to contribute towards the realisation

of the value-laden notion of partnership.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the participants of the colloquium of the Development Studies Association’s

Development Management Study Group for their suggestions. I am also grateful to Esme

Gaussen, Barbara Harriss-White and two anonymous referees for commenting on drafts of

this paper. My greatest debt is to the two NGOs and their beneficiaries whose willingness to

discuss their experiences provided the material for the case study presented here.

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