Box 5-1. Lessons on partnership experiences in South Asia.
• Partnering is a pragmatic response to the need for accomplishing complex tasks that cut across disciplinary, organizational and sectoral mandates. Joint task identification and definition builds partnership. Forced partnerships and ritualistic partnerships have no value and will not be sustained.
• Partnership should last as along as there is a shared task to be accomplished and should not be viewed as a permanent linkage.
• Not all organizations have the appropriate skill to be good partners.
• While clear definition of roles of all partners is important, it also needs to be recognized that the roles of partners change during the innovation process, with different partners assuming greater importance at certain times.
• Partnering facilitates sharing of resources, skills and knowledge and is crucial to learning and innovation. Not all organizations have a culture of learning, restricting their ability to partner and generate institutional innovations.
• Rigid institutional and organizational structures, particularly those with hierarchical designs tend to stifle learning and the development of iterative relationships with broader set of partners.
• While it is easy to stereotype public, private and NGO organizations, and the organizational culture that goes with them, there is a need to examine these more closely in the analysis of project partnership viability.
• Successful partners have intuitive ways of identifying each other that relate to shared values of trust and complementarity; shared history built up over the previous partnerships contributes to this.
• Partnership skills are a range of capabilities that help organizations innovate, and that are learnt through interaction with partners and networks.
• How organizations learn and build these skills is not yet entirely clear.
• The strength of the learning process in project partners appears to be a key area of capacity development.
• Activities that widen the interaction of organizations with other partners and networks are likely to be an important way of building up innovation capabilities, both in individual organizations and in wider national systems.
Source: Hall etal.,2004.
of institutional learning concerns the process through which new ways of working emerge. It specifically asks the questions, what rules, habits and conventions have to be changed to do a new task or to do an old one better? (Hall et al., 2005) |
|
Box 5-2. Encouraging effective R&D partnerships: Lessons learned from the Indian experience.
• Time: Donors and partners should allow at least one to two years before expecting R&D partnerships to begin to deliver results and achieve impacts; where partnerships already exist, it may be more efficient and effective to invest in those to leverage previous investments rather than establishing new ventures.
• Flexibility: Management systems need to provide sufficient flexibility, allowing new partners to join over time and others to leave once it is clear that their role has changed or been fulfilled.
• Leadership: Policy makers need to create an environment that allows, indeed encourages, the delegation of both responsibility and authority to those most closely involved in carrying out the work. This can be done using broad accountability frameworks to monitor impacts and ensure the delivery of results.
• Monitoring and evaluation: Partnerships require internal monitoring and evaluation mechanisms that allow them to respond effectively to changing needs and opportunities.
• Responsibility and authority for implementing this continuing activity should be vested with project leaders and be seen as complementary to formal mid-terms and end-of project monitoring and evaluation activities.
• Livelihoods: Project leaders should be formally encouraged to seek innovative ways of empowering local communities. The work of researchers and development specialists from outside the community is all too often guided by predetermined or assumed development priorities, and such deterministic community development activities should be avoided.
Source: Authors' elaboration. • Opportunities will need to be created that bring different actors together and develop joint activities and long-term relationships. These will need to be mentored and have funding and other resources.
• Capacity development workshops with actors within the innovation system will need to be organized to enhance the ability of all the actors to think and act in a more systemic sense. These could also be used as a platform to share results of the diagnosis and identify the nature of interventions that are required to strengthen innovation capacity.
• Implementing a series of institutional changes (i.e., changes in rules, norms, conventions and habits within these organizations and the way they relate to other stakeholders) in the RDTE system and others related to RDTE will be necessary if ESAP governments want to improve the performance of this system. This has to be a learning-based approach appropriate to the specific institutional context and this process needs to be facilitated. |