Presentation to the Global Meeting of Generations
by
Dr. Cathryn L. Thorup
Director, Office of Development Partners, Bureau for Policy and Program Coordination, USAID
January 13, 1999

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of USAID.

I am very pleased to have this opportunity to share with you a few thoughts that grow out of USAID's recent work to strengthen the capacity of local actors to take the lead in their own development processes. This effort--the New Partnerships Initiative (NPI)--was announced by Vice President Gore at the World Summit for Sustainable Development in 1995. NPI emphasizes inter-sectoral partnering at the community level among government, business and civil society actors and was developed jointly by USAID and our partners and piloted in 15 USAID missions around the world in 1996. The results and follow-on publications, such as the just-released, Partnering for Results: A User's Guide to Inter-Sectoral Partnering, can be accessed through USAID's external web site. Additionally, to assist interested USAID field missions, the Office of Private Voluntary Cooperation has recently developed a mechanism to provide technical assistance in the strategic use of inter-sectoral partnering, and the first team will be going out to Guinea in about one week.

As we begin our discussion today on the role of "Development Partnerships in Poverty Eradication," a few general observations may be helpful:

1) Partnering--between donors and host nations; among government, business and civil society actors; across the traditional divides of border, race and class; across generations; across special interests--is not a luxury. On the contrary, in the cold hard light of immensely complex and cross-cutting challenges on the one hand and diminished resources on the other, partnering has become a strategic necessity for us all.

2) Enlightened self-interest is a powerful motivator. It is time to stop talking about the potential value of partnering and start documenting best practices and actual value added. Does shared social investment in fact produce maximum social dividend...is it more sustainable, in what ways does it allow us to tackle problems that no one sector could take on alone, does it produce the results to which a diverse array of partners aspire? Strategic partnering is the approach not the goal. We need to get down to the business of fine-tuning the approach and demonstrating its development impact.

3) We are on the eve of second generation innovations in partnering: attention to the development of vertical linkages, such as: intermediate support organizations; regional and transnational institution building and other society-to-society linkages; reform of national policy environments to facilitatepartnering; the scaling up of best practices, and more effective mechanisms for the sharing of lessons learned.

4) We must challenge ourselves to become less concerned about planting flags and more concerned about applying our respective comparative advantages to mutual advantage; to improving people's lives and effectively responding to global challenges...such as infectious disease, climate change, financial crisis; to ensuring that host nations can guide their own development; to bringing new actors--such as youth--into the development arena; to breaking precedent and exploring unconventional approaches to the achievement of sustainable, systemic impact; to measuring that impact; and to the development of partnering maps...which clearly delineate rights, roles, and responsibilities in a particular geographic or sectoral context.

5) Finally, our analytical frameworks, our language for partnering and our methodologies are still in their adolescent stage. We have made enormous progress in just the last four years and yet our ways of thinking about these issues are not yet fully adequate to the problems and opportunities produced by globalization, the information revolution, dramatic shifts toward political and economic liberalization. Our institutional arrangements lag behind the complexity and speed of change...to say nothing of our ability to integrate these changes at a societal level.

Similarly, we still have a ways to go before we have fully honed our ability to take advantage of the synergies produced when community development is a collective enterprise. We need to find better ways to take advantage of our quickly expanding social capital and to maximize social entrepreneurship.

To what extent are we prepared to handle the sociopolitical dimensions of globalization--where we see the emergence of new cross-cutting alliances across borders and across sectors and a vast extension of the knowledge base, scopes of activities and influence of civil society? We are in the midst of a transformation of the economic, political and socio-cultural landscape of development and the race is on to ensure that we have the institutional capacity to keep up.

To a certain extent, our analytical frameworks are disproportionately shaped still by traditional realpolitik thinking. In this context, relationships are grounded in power and the outcome of interactions among states are relatively easy to predict...the one with the most power--political, economic, military...prevails. That approach worked relatively well when applied to a state centric world...where relationships were primarily state to state, government to government. But in a multicentric world--with a dispersion of power, new sources of power, and wild card coalitions among actors which transcend national borders and other boundaries, the results are much less predictable.

By the same token, when we discuss partnering our language disproportionately reflects a focus on conflict rather than consensus, on power asymmetries rather than shared goals, on rupture rather than synergy. We say for example that a partnership is only a "true" partnership if both sides can walk away from the table. What if we were to focus instead on what attracts partners to the table in the first place and, more importantly, what it is that they each bring to the table? Similarly, some are persuaded that a partnership is not a "true" partnership as long as one party (a donor, for example) has the money. Why do we (and here civil society can be its own worst enemy by making this argument) sell short the value of the contributions that civil society brings to the table (the technical expertise, the local knowledge, the credibility a nongovernmental group might have with local farmers, their ideas, flexibility, etc.)? For that matter why do we downplay the non-monetary contributions of the private sector...the administrative and technical skills they can provide? As resources for development assistance shrink, the issue is not simply one of mobilizing new monetary resources, but rather of bringing different types of resources to bear...and here knowledge, ideas and innovation are critical.

As partnering, particularly inter-sectoral partnering among government, business and civil society actors, expands (and it will), we need to develop updated analytical approaches, language that is better suited to the new types of relationships that are forming...relationships that are guided less by traditional notions of conflict and more by notions of enlightened self-interest and social entrepreneurship.

In conclusion, the notion of partnership does not imply that these different sectors--state, market and civil society--must relinquish their identify as autonomous sectors...indeed, they each have unique roles to play and their own unique contributions to make. Rather, our task is to develop the most effective mix of collaboration and independence among these three spheres. A healthy degree of separation among the three is essential to the integrity and value of each, but it is also the case that the ability to partner strategically is critical to their vitality, relevance and effectiveness. That is our challenge.

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