Partnership, the pre-eminent buzzword of the last two decades, is still very much the mantra in development cooperation discourse, at least in the North, as we begin the new millennium. This posthoc retrospective study is an insider's account of personal experience in participating and observing the development of Tanzania's Education Sector Development Program over a one-year period in 1998--1999. The study interrogates the workings of Donor-Government partnerships within this setting in an attempt to unravel the realities on the ground in their relationships and how the power asymmetry between these principal actors and their concomitant behaviour served to subvert the effectiveness and sustainability of the partnership. / This study in development anthropology is scaffolded by the epistemic orientation of postmodern theories. The approaches adopted for constructing and telling the stories that are narrated are borrowed from the interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz and the postmodern anthropology of James Clifford. Looking back and recollecting and reconstructing events required the generation of enabling memories, for which the memory-work method was adapted and used. / The study reveals that the hegemonic rituals that characterized development interventions in Tanzania bordered more on patronage than on partnership. Partnership was very much valued in principle by all parties but when the chips were down, it seemed ownership and trust, two key concepts undergirding partnership, were casualties in the complex dance of cooperation that the contending parties engaged in. They dealt with each other politely but suspicion and mistrust were mutual at the level of Donor-Government and in situ Centre-Periphery relationships. / A modest proposal is advanced for understanding the broader context of a Donor-Government relationship; it attempts to relate operational and policy horizontality to include a more vertical consultative process involving civil society at large, particularly affected communities, NGOs and the private sector as a means of engendering a more effective and sustainable partnership between donors and recipient1 countries. / 1The normative perspective in particular on North-South relations rejects recipient as an appropriate descriptive term for a developing country receiving aid. For them, it connotes a superiority complex embedded in a language of welfarism. Throughout this thesis, I use recipient simply to convey a brutal reality: development assistance involves an element of charity and in the North-South relationship, generally, one party gives and the other receives , with the giver in a much stronger position to lay down conditions for the aid being offered.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.84495 |
| Date | January 2003 |
| Creators | Clarke-Okah, Willie |
| Contributors | Mitchell, Claudia (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Educational Studies.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002095424, proquestno: AAINQ98228, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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