Moving Beyond Positionality Towards Collective Framing and Governance within Partnerships

• In Event: Advancing CASE SIG as a Hub for Collaborative Partnerships With African and Caribbean Governments

Abstract

Increasingly, there is a growing push for public-private partnerships (PPPs) with many concerns for the factors that ensure critical success within the education sector (Sajida & Kusumasari, 2023). While there has been significant recognition of the knowledge gaps and a push for knowledge management approaches within this process (Boyer, 2016), less is known on the knowledge hierarchies or the power structures between knowledge producers across sectors that impact how knowledge is framed and how trust and ownership are established to impact these partnerships (Abdullah & Khadaroo, 2020). While these are not openly discussed, they represent significant lines of power that differentiate key players within the knowledge generation and change agendas cycles, which can potentially create gaps within how a given problem is situated and addressed. These dynamics however are not to be taken for granted. In many cases, a lack of understanding of how these power struggles work within the change agenda process can circumvent or abstract public-private partnerships (Chen & Hubbard, 2012) and in some cases create misinformation and misappropriation of interventions.

Within the Caribbean, there has been an ongoing push for PPPs with little interrogations of these relational engagements. Through an auto-ethnographic reflection of work experiences (Ellis, 2009) with government bodies, and that of the existing work on PPPs for the Caribbean, I advance a position that working with stakeholders requires that we take into consideration their own frames of knowledge, as well as institutional realities that inform the perspectives of and solutions to a given problem. More particularly, it is important to recognize within the framing of public and private partnerships, the diverse knowledge and experiences that feed into how the problem is being understood to inform change agendas. A critical aspect of moving this forward is that of understanding that we are all different producers of knowledge and that it is quite possible for the researcher to hold an understanding of the phenomenon that is different but complementary to how this is understood and being framed by government officials and other critical stakeholders.

It is important to appreciate the positionality of actors, the agendas that inform their interest in the partnership, and the frames of reference through which these are being actioned within the change process. Working within these diverse lenses and points of analysis are therefore critical aspects of promoting and sustaining cross-comparative and cross-institutional dialogue. It is important within these dynamics to collectively and holistically capture the motivators and objectives that influence the basis for the partnership. In doing so, it is necessary to move beyond the positionality, which informs knowledge generation, to that of the understanding and appreciation of the diverse perspectives and knowledge forms, which can collectively work to define and address a given social issue. This calls for a collective framing and governance (Author, 2023; Hinds,2019), which has been applied in some sectors, but which has the potential to differently inform experiences in education. Such collaborative governance and equitable relational approach can differently frame understanding of actionable interventions and the outcomes that emerge from these exchanges.

Author

• Talia Randa Esnard, University of the West Indies - St. Augustine