Governing Global Partnerships: Multi-Stakeholder Knowledge Exchange and Cross-Sectoral Capacity Building in Higher Education
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Two decades of guidance on equitable international partnership have coincided with little movement in the distribution of authorship, funding custody and agenda control across higher education collaborations. This article explains that persistence by separating two classes of governance instrument. Procedural instruments-memoranda, steering committees, consultation rounds, codes of conduct, equity checklists, reflexivity statements-regulate voice, visibility and process. Allocative instruments transfer custody of one of the four goods a partnership actually distributes: agenda authority, resource custody, epistemic authority, and the direction in which accountability runs. The article develops this distinction into a framework and uses it to specify a condition it calls participatory settlement, a stable state in which procedural instruments raise satisfaction with process and perceived legitimacy while leaving all four goods where they were, and in which the raised legitimacy then reduces pressure for allocative change. The account reconciles two literatures that have talked past each other, one treating partnership failure as a problem of design and the other treating design as an instrument of legitimation. Five propositions specify when a procedural instrument converts into an allocative one: when allocation is the default rather than the request, when a party outside the partnership holds enforcement standing, when transfers cannot be reversed within a funding cycle, when agenda authority and resource custody move together, and when evaluation measures allocation rather than process. The framework is conceptual, derived from published evidence, and offered for empirical test.
DOI: 10.65326/u7y10029
Author: Jose Garcia
Institution: Swiss International University
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7202189582