Anyone who has been involved in planning for effective partnership will know what a difficult job it is. While there are many benefits, there are an equal number of challenges and pitfalls. And it is managing these challenges and pitfalls that ultimately contribute to a successful partnership, one that is built on trust, honesty and openness. Further, anyone who has tried to assess and evaluate the impact or success of a partnership will equally know what a difficult task this is too. And all too often, those involved in partnership brokering don't even bother to find out. So while the language and rhetoric of partnership abounds and several such partnerships have been set up in Ireland to address issues of inequality, the effort put into assessing and evaluating the impact and success of such partnerships does not match this.
What is the evidence that such collaborations and partnerships contribute to improved implementation of programmes, to fairer and more equitable outcomes? There is not much I am afraid but that is hardly surprising. Measuring and assessing the impact and success of partnership working is difficult to evaluate. The outcomes are not necessarily tangible or easily measured in terms of number of outputs of physical entities. More often than not, the success or impact of a partnership can be gauged in terms of social capital that is built. And such intangibles may only have physical impact much further down the track.
Recently, the Institute of Public Health in Ireland has come up with a series of useful publications in relation to partnerships. Anyone involved in brokering a partnership or assessing a partnership will surely find the contents of these publications useful. How often have I heard local umbrella community organisations highlight the need for more skills and capacity in these areas of partnership working. Well, there are some useful tools and guidance here.
There are 3 publications:
I want to focus particularly on assessment of partnerships because the publication Partnerships: The Benefits describes an elegant and useful evaluation tool. This is called the Partnership Evaluation Tool (PET). Although developed in a health context it is practical in any partnership setting. PET involves participatory working with partnership members to identify particular benefits important in the partnership such as connections, learning, actions and impacts. Partnership members then identify a range of indicators that might contribute to realising these particular benefits. Indicators are scored on a scale of 0-5, the data can then be analysed and presented on a typical spidergram (as shown top right) or polygon.
If you are serious about your partnership and wish to avoid perpetuating arm's length partnerships or unequal power relations you might want to consider what is said in these publications and avail yourself of the useful PET tool.
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