Interview with the Expert: Humility in Network Partnerships
Part Three of Our Conversation with Professor Joy Fitzgibbon — Interview with Micaela Tam and Christy Davis
And the last part of our conversation with Professor Joy Fitzgibbon, a fellow and Assistant Professor of Trinity College in University of Toronto and the Associate Director of the prestigious Macmillan Trinity One Program, is here! Though we’re sad to end this series, we’ve gained many insights from her on how to create inclusive interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary spaces (Part 1) and the role of impact and redefining what’s possible in multi-sector partnerships (Part 2).
Today, we wrap up this conversation with a focus on the importance of humility in partnerships.
How can humility factor into the work you do? How can we affect the narrative in the way we talk about and talk to those we seek to serve?
Humility factors into the narrative that Partner’s In Health (PIH) seeks to cultivate with communities: the whole idea of community-led development. But let’s get down to the nitty gritty. What do you do when we think they (the community) should be doing A when they’re asking for C? I was on the board of directors for several years for Food for the Hungry Canada and I found myself in Guatemala with their National Director, Julio. I had him in the car for 3 hours going northbound into territory that only aid workers are in, working with the indigenous people. I was quizzing him about how we pivot: how do we resolve conflict in opinion? It is very much a negotiation, but it comes from a place of respect. He had one issue, it was a WASH (water, sanitation and health issue) one, where locals stated they needed plumbing but it wasn’t on Food for Hungry’s to-do list. It was also very difficult to implement hence a project that Food for Hungry was hesitant about doing. But the community was very determined to get plumbing: they were very willing to invest their resources into a plumbing project. So, both sides started negotiating. Long story short, they made the project work but it was driven and owned by the community. The whole idea is the negotiation, and how you have that discussion… it starts with humility.
When we, as academics work with communities as well as with the community leaders themselves, that’s a quick lesson in humility. They may have better ideas in how things are done, but perhaps need more help in the technical aspects, which is where we come in.
When we think we’ve taken one step forward and gotten a project moving, we meet so many other roadblocks. Often times, we get hit by so many things at once and we have to constantly reframe our conversation with stakeholders, for example governments, that aren’t convinced about moving forward. How do we deal with that?
The challenge to break it down into tractable components. What should you be tackling first? Getting the government to comply seems to be a very important step. Try to discern if they care. I see different projects happen with different types of groups of people, but sometimes it’s a matter of doing one thing at a time. Paul Farmer of PIH was trying to get nutritional supplements to people and a roof over people’s heads but he was having trouble getting through on both ends (the community and the government were hesistant), so he had to break it down.
There’s also the issue of violent outbreaks: how do you plan for the unexpected? Try to build capacity. One of the things that’s coming up in public health is that there is this awareness that there’s a long-term need for structural building with central government. One example is Rwanda, reforming their health system, it was very controversial, but there was a very engaged government. How do you get them engaged? There were personal relationships with a couple of senior government officials. So then the next step was running around the officials who were resisting. Higher level pressure and also pressure from below. That’s the kind of tactic we’ve seen in a lot of advocacy efforts with NGOs: a boomerang effect.
The other thing is that there are people who’ve had similar situations, whether they’ve been academics who have experience with consulting or other NGOs, that have had parallel challenges with difficult governments. We need a space where we can discuss lessons learned and how to replicate their process. In essence, this also links back to humility… acknowledging that perhaps you do have limits as a singular organization, but that you can learn from so many others if you just reach out to them.
Do network partnerships generally comprise of organisations based in the Global North or are those boundaries increasingly blurring?
I love that question, thank you for asking. Short answer is what I hear from my colleagues doing research in specific regional areas in the “Global South” or as my former CIDA friend calls it the “majority world.” We are increasingly seeing South-South collaboration in partnerships. And some of the more innovative relationships are South-South collaborations. Many years ago, when The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells came out, Richard Stren (co-writer of Networks of Knowledge and Senior Fellow of Global Cities Institute) talked to some of our colleagues in the South, and these colleagues said particularly in South America, Manuel Castells (a sociologist who argued that we are seeing a historical trend that’s increasingly organised around networks and collaboration) may be a scholar but he’s got this right. This is what we’re seeing happening on the ground immediately. We’re seeing this in the real world. So they started thinking in their own space about South-South partnerships as well as the North-South aspect. And I think that some of those conversations began to plant seeds. I suspect we’re seeing a fairly big power shift right now.
Power is going to China and that’s translating to more South-South partnerships. Look at China… its investment in Africa is incredible. So by necessity and by capacity, the Global South are rising in these types of relationships. The other thing I like to pay attention to, whether it’s North-South or South-South collaborations, is who has the power in those relationships? So we tend to automatically think, to some extent correctly, that when it’s North-South that it’s the North enforcing its view on their Southern partners. And there have been many cases of that, we could talk about that for ages, but there’s also the possibility in those partnerships, if they’re structured correctly, that Northerners get a reality check really fast. When Northerners start to realize how much they don’t know, they realise that the North actually needs to repent in some cases (that’s an unpopular term), that we need to ask for forgiveness for what we’ve done or those before have done, have a reconciliation process as a necessary condition in these types of network partnerships. Sometimes the power relations in these types of relationships are shifting when we realise we actually depend on local/practical knowledge and that I, as a researcher from the North, need my partners in order to make better my contribution. But the same can be said with South-South collaboration. So the interesting thing to look at is how relations play out in networks. Do you still have dominant countries trying to take control at a network meeting? That actually comes back to worldview and humility. That doesn’t mean the North-South and South-South dichotomy important, it represents a power shift.
