“Partnership”: What’s in a name?

In 2003, in an article entitled The Purist’s Partnership: Debunking the Terminology of Partnerships, Ken Caplan called for more rigour around the language we use in relation to partnerships. With a focus on minimising the overwhelmingly positive nature of a vocabulary that erroneously implied partnerships were “harmonious undertakings”, Caplan also pointed to the need for more clarity around different partnership typologies.

Re-reading this excellent thought piece today, and in view of a number of recent conversations on the topic, it seems that efforts to support the clarification process advocated by Caplan are still highly necessary, particularly in deciphering the word “partnership” itself. Although elastic enough to encompass a range of different collaborative relationships, use of the term “partnership” without attention to a specific context, purpose and structure is problematic. As well as creating unrealistic expectations about its possibilities, poor understanding of the concept means that working in partnership can be dismissed as loose and impractical on the one hand, and inflexible and restrictive on the other.

One of the most common misunderstandings is created by the indiscriminate use of the expression Public Private Partnership to describe all partnerships. Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) are formal contractual relationships between the private and public sector. In PPPs the private sector partner provides an upfront investment in infrastructure or technology in return for a long term concession, lease or fees for the provision of public goods or services. As a result PPPs operate within legal or regulatory frameworks  and go through lengthy tendering procedures. Typified by the UK’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI) PPPs have been hailed by supporters as useful vehicles for improving the quality of public services and harnessing much-needed private capital, while criticised by detractors for promoting neo-liberal privatisation programmes and enabling the private sector to make incursions into the public domain. 

PPPs are very different from Cross Sector or Multi Stakeholder Partnerships (MSPs) in which different sector organisations collaborate in areas of mutual interest to achieve common or complementary goals. Operating through shared decision-making processes, these arrangements comprise diverse combinations of international agencies, government ministries and departments, private corporations, business coalitions, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), charitable bodies, community groups, academic institutions and trade unions, among others. Although partners may operate within legal or regulatory constructs, partnerships of this nature are generally unregulated. These are the type of partnerships promoted by the European Social Fund (see my last post) where the overarching rationale is to work together to reduce socio-economic disparities by pooling different resources. With the aim of enhancing legitimacy, coordination and transparency in order to promote social cohesion, such partnerships are vastly different to PPPs.

Our understanding of “partnership” will undoubtedly be furthered by ongoing scrutiny of the different models that exist under the umbrella headings of both PPPs and MSPs. In the meantime reinforcement of the distinction between these two partnership forms is a belated and important prerequisite for the debunking that Caplan called for almost a decade ago.

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