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Development. Copyright 1999 The Society for International Development. SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), 1011-6370 (199906) 42:2; 8387; 008415.

SID On-line Dialogue

The New Partnership Era: But where is

the third partner?

RAFF CARMEN ABSTRACT Raff Carmen argues that civil society actors are too often
given lip-service in development transactions. He argues that far
from being seen as poor relations in development partnerships,
their human agency should be recognized and built upon.

Development Aid is tied to the power of money and the Power of Money is identified with
the right of Intervention. The ethical question on what grounds that right is based is as
yet unanswered.
Edith Sizoo (1992)

Moving to the age of globalization

Ever since the rules governing the quest for hegemony were drastically redrafted
in the post Cold War era, the international development community, too, has
had to reassess its priorities and culture which have persisted, more or less
intact, throughout the development decades. The Age of Development itself is
now in the process of being irrevocably replaced by the Age of Globalization.
As a recent editorial in Development pointed out (Amalric and Harcourt,
1997), two reports published at the gateway of this new age, the Strong Report
Connecting with the World (1996), which deals with the future direction of
Canadian development cooperation, and the EU/ACP Green Paper, subtitled On
the Eve of the 21st Century, also 1996, were harbingers of this perceived need
for a radical reassessment of prevailing assumptions.
Central to this (re)thinking of what used to be, essentially, a set of one-sided
donorclient relationships, is the concept of partnership. The idea of partner-
ship together with the vocabulary of counterpart(s) is not entirely new. It has
been floating around in governmental (GO) and non-governmental (NGO)
circles for a number of years. Partnership, however, acquires an entirely new
meaning in the context of minor players on the development scene, such as
Canada and the European Union, trying to challenge the monopoly of the
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Development 42(2): SID On-line Dialogue
World Bank/IMF in defining NorthSouth
relations and the power of the US and big inter-
ests (Amalric and Harcourt, 1997: 45).
Both reports, especially the EU Green Paper, were
discussed extensively, among others, at the Agoras
of the SID International Conference Which
Globalization?, held in Santiago de Compostela in
May 1997. The common starting point is the
understanding that the old dividing lines between
North and South have become increasingly mean-
ingless, and with them, the underlying culture of
charity, aid and paternalism. Such agreements,
expressed, more often than not, in one directional
terms of transfer (hard or soft loans, development
expertise and technology hardware, including,
unfortunately, military hardware in the context of
the old Cold War power relationships) need to be
increasingly replaced by knowledge-based part-
nerships.
The meaning of partnership
The concept of partnership inserts itself in the
framework of the sea-changes in priorities and per-
ceptions which have taken place in the develop-
ment thinking of the last two decades, grouped,
sometimes, under the heading of the participation
revolution. Part of this revolution was the dis-
covery of the existence and function of Non-
Governmental Organizations (NGOs), of Non
Formal or Adult Basic Education (NFE/ABE), of
the Non Formal Sector of the Economy (NFSE) as
well as the role of the, until then, non-visible:
women (re: Women in Development WID), and
the need for de-centralization, democratization
and, since the 1980s, the inclusion of the private
sector in development thinking and planning.
In a business partnership, two or more persons
share an enterprise or business for profit. The part-
ners are co-owners, have joint control over its oper-
ation and share, subject to contract, in its benefits.
Partnership also forms the basis of networking
relationships (with emphasis on networking as a
verb rather than a noun), in which everyone is both
contributor and beneficiary on an equal basis,
thereby radically subverting all power-based notions
of donor vs beneficiary, sender vs receiver, central-
84 ization vs decentralization, projects vs targets. The
idea of partnership is also inimical to the inter-
national Development community being presented
as the pro-active and thinking part as compared to
subordinate counterparts, perceived as the passive,
receiving or merely executive part(ner) in develop-
ment cooperation.
The common attribute of partnership is a non-
authoritarian, non-hierarchical, non-exploitative
relationship based on notions of interchangeability
and equality. One of the oldest and most durable
forms of partnership is the stable and mutually
respectful as well as beneficial relationship between
man and woman. A genuine partnership is both
conducive to and the product of what Freire used to
call dialogue, i.e. a horizontal relationship of inter-
communication and empathy between two poles
engaged in an informed, joint search for trans-
formative action.
Applied to a development context, therefore, the
partner is never (to be) perceived as the other, as
beneficiaries, defined as poor and powerless and,
therefore, the problem in need of (outside) solu-
tions. The preferred word choice is indicative of an
all too common attitude which glibly defines poten-
tial partners by what-they-are-not (e.g. poor = not
affluent), or imprisons them in notions of what
they are either not capable of doing, or in terms of
what they are perceived to be capable of receiving,
which then entitles the donors to impose con-
ditionality. Partners-in-development can only be
genuine partners if they are perceived and treated
as fully competent, qualified and respected inter-
locutors, even though or precisely because
capabilities, skills and talents are different, includ-
ing their material conditions: vive la difference.
When it comes to putting flesh on notions of
partnership, the EU/ACP Green Papers new ortho-
doxy degenerates, in the final chapter, into the
familiar stereotypes of integrating the poor in the
ACP countries into the economic and social main-
stream and into the world economic system. Uwe
Holtz, of the German Centre for Development
Research, lists some of the reasons for the dis-
appointing performance of preceding Lom
accords. To name a few: insufficient competence of
the donors and insensitivity of their experts1
towards local cultures and mentalities, lack of
feeling of ownership and control of the projects by
15 Carmen (cr/k) 21/4/99 10:48 am Page 85
the target groups2 in unfavourable political and
economic climates. Partnership is clearly identified
as the solution to these types of problems (Holtz,
1997). But, as the above quotes testify, the spirit of
interventionism persists, however surreptitiously.
Power, partnership and new
actors
As Edith Sizoo explains, most development pro-
grammes and projects, as commonly understood,
are rooted in and driven by money, which means
power, which means, in turn, the assumption
difficult to reconcile with any idea of partnership
of the right to intervene (Sizoo, 1992). A conspicu-
ous absentee from (such) programmes and projects
is any notion of agency other than that exercised by
the dominant Government Organization (GO) and
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) agency.
The agency (i.e. ability and entitlement to act) of a
third partner, namely PO Peoples or Citizens Transposed to the world of development cooper-
Organization remains largely unseen, unheard,
unresearched and, hence, invisible. The underlying
consensus, notwithstanding the increasingly fre-
quent lip-service paid to civil society and the
alternative agency of the private sector in public
pronouncements, is that people are not able
another way of saying that they cannot be
trusted.
The primary meaning of agency is autonomous
action, operation and hence power. Only in a
derivative sense does the term agency refer to a
physical or moral body, i.e. an organization, a busi-
ness or a service set up to act on behalf of others,
such as development or business agencies, whose
operatives are known as business agents or
development experts. Action, operation and inter-
vention are material realities which ultimately
depend on various degrees of power for their exer-
cise. Knowledge and expertise are traditionally
reserved to the professional: the teacher, the
trainer, the extensionist, the outside development
agent, the fund manager or donor. Agency
from a PO perspective, means people acting
autonomously as subjects, as distinct from being
acted upon as objects, or, possibly, being used as
participants in interventionist initiatives, projects
and programmes which, ultimately, are not theirs.
Carmen: The New Partnership Era
For Marc Nerfin, power as such is not the
problem: monopolization of power, by whatever
Agency, is.3 Development which finds its ultimate
justification in the power of money, is. Govern-
mental state power (the Prince) and economic
(corporate) power (the Merchant) need to be com-
plemented, counterbalanced and kept in check by
the power (the autonomous agency) of the
Citizen. Prince and Merchant more often than not
have proved unable by themselves to offer solutions
and even less to contribute to the search for
alternatives. They are more part of the problem
than part of the solution (Nerfin, 1987). Citizens
and their communities whatever the space they
operate in: local, national, global act as subjects
and are not acted upon as objects (of interven-
tions).
The power of culture
ation, the citizen can be seen as representative of
the power of culture playing an elementary and
constructive role in counterbalancing the monopo-
lizing culture of power. What is distinctive and novel
in the concept of the power of culture, which implies
citizens acting in solidarity with others for the pur-
poses of the common good, is that these (durable)
virtues have now burst into the global sphere and
that their reach is on a global scale. Peoples or citi-
zens organizations the archetypical model being
networks tend not to have a fixed address or HQ,
no general secretary, no central director of opera-
tions, no central funds, nor do they see themselves
as agents with a mission to intervene.
Citizen action is as multidimensional as the
diversity of human endeavours. It may be local or
global, small or massive, permanent or ephemeral,
highly dramatic or almost invisible, confron-
tational or collaborative, spontaneous or organ-
ized, promoted by associations of like-minded
individuals or by large civic movements. Or it may
be any combination of these, depending on the
needs of the moment (Darcy de Oliveira and
Tandon, 1994).
Petrella estimates at half a million the number of
interest groups, voluntary and not-for-profit
associations and networks around the world, 85
15 Carmen (cr/k) 21/4/99 10:48 am Page 86
Development 42(2): SID On-line Dialogue
united in the principle of solidarity, equality and
partnership (Social Capital). They represent 600 to
800 million members and supporters, with
approximately 5 to 6 million leaders.
It is not the churches, be they Catholic, Islamic, Hindu,
Buddhist or Shinto, who give expression to the worlds
moral conscience. It is all those associations who are
fighting for what is good and just friendship, respect for
human rights, sharing, solidarity, love, kindness and
human efficiency. If there is, in fact, a world moral con-
science, it is these people who nowadays give expression
to it. Fortunately, globalization does not stop at the
globalization of capital. (Petrella, 1995: 4)
The power of capital (money) need not mean an
automatic right to supremacy, precedence or the
right to unilaterally impose conditionalities. As is
shown by the Federation of NAAM groups in
Western Africa with a 1/4 million membership
spread over 1350 NAAM groups and 4000 affili-
ated groups, external assistance, including mone-
tary assistance (both a must and a moral
entitlement on the part of the poor) does not need
to happen at the expense of local autonomy. The
insidious link between donor money and the
automatic right to lord it over others, by means of
the power of the cheque book, can be broken, as
in the case of the Naam Federations, by, for
example, the mechanism of flexible funding or
revolving funds which puts the headquarters of the
federation in the local provincial town of
Ouahigouya (Burkina Faso), rather than in Geneva
(where the funding originates) (Uemura, 1997).
Elsewhere, Ferdinand Vincent, in Financer
autrement/Alternative Financing (1995), reports the
activities of the Swiss-based RAFAD Group
(Research and Applications of Alternative Financ-
ing for Development) which assists local economic
activities in the South. An International Guarantee
Fund is at the disposal of the partners. Letters of
Guarantee extended by established commercial
banks allow access to start-up capital uncluttered
by the heaviness of a named NGO or GO Fund
Providers. By 1995, the system was in operation in
20 countries in Latin America, South East Asia and
Africa, with a total of US$20 million in credit
disbursed to associations of peasants, livestock
breeders, artisans, micro-entrepreneurs and
86 womens associations, every single one of them
rich in organizational skills, but capital-poor.
Twenty million Vincent adds wryly, not wasted.
Smitu Kothari cites just six out of an infinite
variety of actual civil society actions in the Third
World: the building of social movements (Pakis-
tan); the forging of a cross-border alliance of hope
(Asia); the revolt against predatory capitalist inter-
ests (Mexico); the demand for tribal self-rule and
autonomy (India); the demand for local control
over seed, the very basis of life (India); as well as the
unprecedented mobilization of women in prep-
aration for the 1996 Beijing conference (Kothari,
1996).
There are also the quite unique and insufficiently
known systems of autonomous job and income
generation (called SIPGEI in Brazil), which are
practical and successful manifestations of the
power of social capital and of autonomous agency
in the economic sphere. The inspiration comes
from the Theory of Organization of the Brazilian
sociologist Clodomir Santos de Morais. Applied,
since the 1970s, on three continents, the Organiz-
ational Workshops (OWs) throw a lifeline to the
dispossessed, the excluded, the unemployed and
semi-employed not only in the Third, but also in the
former Second World and in a postindustrial
society moving away from welfare as-we-know-it
to welfare to work and workfare, either of which
may prove, in the long term, to have been tempo-
rary diversions rather than an avenue to a genuine
future to the excluded (Carmen and Sobrado, forth-
coming). It is within the power of civil society to
become entrepreneurially literate in a capacitating
process inside an enterprise which is both experi-
mental and real (CAHE, 1998). It is, in turn, within
the power of the State to create space for such
autonomous citizens initiatives.
Moving beyond the acceptable
Even though subsequent debate has proven to be
pointing resolutely in the direction of the need for a
partnership with civil society and the private sector
(e.g. Reisen, 1998), it is revealing that both the
spirit and the letter of the original Green Paper
pretty much confine the idea of partnership to the
accepted and acceptable face of development
cooperation, namely, relationships of partnership
15 Carmen (cr/k) 21/4/99 10:48 am Page 87

Carmen: The New Partnership Era

largely confined to what EU States, on the one
hand, and the ACP States, on the other, do among
themselves, with an allowance made for NGO
inputs. As for the Third Partner or the Third
System (Nerfin, 1987), they are treated as the poor
relation or are absent in terms of meaningful con-
sideration, let alone practical proposals. Partner-
ship, inside such residual patterns of hierarchical
thinking, acting and intra-institutional behaviour,
is a delicate flower deprived of the oxygen and light
which only the culture of power can provide.
Countering deep-seated fears and apprehensions,
symptomatic of monopolized forms of power of
whatever description, civil society does not intend to
thwart, subvert nor usurp the power of Prince or
Merchant. Their power, on the contrary, will come
out of this test invigorated, because legitimized in
the crucible of genuine partnership. It will be power
truly in its place. The common good can only result
from a common effort, a partnership in which the
abiding creative power, always alive in the Third
System, is allowed to play its proper role.

Notes Globalization, Editorial in Petrella, R. (1995) Politics has

Development, Vol. 40, No. 2. Abdicated in Favour of Private
1 The internal irony and
CAHE (1998) Manchester University Enterprise, The EU/ACP Courier,
contradiction of an insensitive
Web Page Learning from Brazil. June issue.
(i.e. ignorant) expert typically
<man.ac.uk/education/intconfl.html>. Reisen, M. van (1998) The Future
escapes the sensitivities of official
Carmen, R. (1996) Autonomous of the European Community
documents such as these: it is not
Development. Humanizing the Development Programme.
entirely unknown for the
Landscape. London: ZED. Eurostep Webpage
presumed expertise, for as much
Carmen, R. and M. Sobrado <eurostep/reisen.htm>.
good as it does to the locals, to
(forthcoming) A Future for the Sizoo, E. (1992) Wearing Masks in
amount to little more than an
Excluded. From Freire to de Morais. Development, Culture and
airplane ticket to an exotic
London: ZED. Development, No. 3, Brussels.
location delivered, free of charge,
Darcy de Oliveira, M. and R. Tandon Strong, M. (1996) Connecting with
by a development agency to the
(1994) An Emerging Global Civil the World: Priorities for Canadian
instant expert.
Society. CIVICUS publications Internationalism in the 21st
2 Which I define elsewhere as <civicus.org/html>. Century. Ottawa.
Projectile Projects (Carmen, European Commission (1996) Uemura, T. (1997) Sustainable Rural
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Holtz, U. (1997) The Future of autrement/Alternative Financing.
3 The worst excesses of the French
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a New Partnership?, Development
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