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Partnership as Form In the previous chapter, we made note of the fact that the notion of partnership emerged at a particular historical moment, crystallizing in the Pearson report. (See Power 2003, 132.) The Pearson report conceptualized aid in terms of partnership. Although at the time “partnership” referred mostly to governments, the report also had profound implications for how people began to think about the “goods” of aid. Today partnership is a salient feature of aid cooperation, if it isn’t the most prominent and dominant form through which development programs and practices unfold. Partnership in its current guise, however, is far different from the nation-to-nation relations envisioned by Pearson and his co-authors. At present, it has to do with “putting aid-recipient countries in the driving seat” and ensuring “local ownership” (Mosse 2005a, 10; see also Gould 2005, 65). The fact that the present discourse of partnership paints a rather harmonious view of how donors and recipients relate, one that has relatively little to say about economical or institutional power relations and asymmetries , obviously doesn’t mean that such relations no longer have a role in development aid. Critical development researchers (e.g., Cooke and Kothari 2001) have analyzed partnership as a particularly insidious rhetoric precisely because it seems to hide power under an ideological smokescreen of equality, commonality, and shared win-win situations. However, this bleak view misses much of what is actually taking place under the form of partnership. In any case, current forms of partnership involve a far more diffuse set of actors than those engaged in macro-politics. Indeed, partnership has become the ideal for cooperation by governments as well as for grassroots efforts. It provides a way of describing practically any set of relationships in 2 Recursions: Partnerships, Infrastructure, and Ethnography 32 Chapter 2 development work. For example, farmers are expected to partner with farmers , but also with non-governmental organizations’ field staff and researchers , who are expected to partner with each other. NGOs are expected to partner with each other, and also with businesses, cooperatives, or governmental institutions (Lewis 1998, 108). In our cases, developers of aid information tools and platforms likewise partner with a wide variety of actors who, meanwhile, constantly look for yet more potential partners. Even Audit Offices engage in participatory exercises that implicate them in processes of organizational learning with the ministries and agencies they audit. For social scientific researchers, such as ourselves, too, partnership becomes a condition rather than merely an object of study. As these varied examples indicate, there is at present no universal model for partnership, and there probably never has been one. But we argue that even though partnerships are very different, consisting of different actors, with different goals, who engage in different forms of collaboration for different purposes, partnership is itself invested in particular forms of relation making (Thévenot 1984), much as the anthropologist Annelise Riles (2000) suggested that a particular aesthetic form undergirds discourses and practices of networking. In her study of international NGO networks, Riles noted that “the idea of the Network, as the term is used here and by the subjects of this study as a form that supersedes analysis and reality, might also be imagined to borrow from the reflexive turn in the social sciences— from the notion that there is no longer such a thing as dependent and independent variables, that causes and effects are all mutually constituted in an endless feedback loop” (2005, 263). Riles realized that the discourse and analytics of networks and networking were as important to the subjects of her study as they were in anthropological theorizing. In our case, much as it was inconceivable for Riles’ activists to live outside networks, it seemed impossible to refrain from thinking through and engaging in partnerships. Indeed, this entails doubt as to whether it is possible to study these activities and practices without becoming a partner. The upshot of this is that our social scientific knowledge claims in this context are encompassed by the partnerships we aimed to study. This raises questions about the very form knowledge can take in this context. In short, and recursively, partnership has consequences for the making of knowledge about partnerships. While partnerships, like networks, promise to provide development actors with simply “a technical device for doing what one is already doing, only in a more efficient, principled and sophisticated way” (ibid.), they thus do much more. Among other things, as Riles noted for [18.217.208.72...

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