Foregrounding power in partnerships | Reflections on ‘Powerful partnerships: Reflections and insights from EDP X-Change 2025.’

The EDP X-Change on The Power of Partnership in a Polarised World brought together diverse practitioners reflecting openly on the realities of partnership work. The conversations surfaced key elements of effective partnership practice, including collaborative sense-making, collaborative governance, and embedded learning. These insights offer valuable scaffolding for thinking about how partnerships function. They also prompt a further question: how do these practices connect to the deeper purpose of partnership, and to the ways in which partnerships engage with power?

Keynote panelists from EDP X-Change 2025 included Thomas Schaeff of GIZ, Diale Lodi from Jozi My Jozi, Juanita Pardesi from the Seriti Institute, and Saul Musker of Operation Vulindlela

As a facilitator often working in the liminal spaces of partnership – large and small, formal and informal – I was delighted to be invited to the EDP’s 2025 X-Change on The Power of Partnership in a Polarised World, held in October 2025. I was eager to see some of the partnerships I have experience of and to learn from their reflections, and those of others.

The programme offered a thoughtful, practical and stimulating exploration of how partnerships work in practice. I’m struck some months later while reading the report on the X-Changeby a familiar feeling: our work – be it in hands-on facilitation, structuring partnerships, or conceptualising the ‘in-between’ – is difficult to describe and harder still to motivate for even while, in practice, its value is almost self-evident. Given how this relational and process-focused work defies easy definition, the EDP pulled off an experience and an account of experiences that deepens our collective understanding of and insight into how partnerships work. And now, I find myself sitting with two persistent questions: are we giving enough attention to the rationale for partnerships and to how partnerships engage with power and structural change?

The X-Change itself offered ample opportunities to hear people at the centre of crucial work reflecting openly and specifically on their experiences and views. And all of it was prepared and guided in a way that structured our thinking and left us with news from the practice of others, and concepts and practical ideas for our own work. The basic premise of the X-Change made sense: the world is too fractured, too messy, and too under-resourced for anything but partnership-approaches to tackling its problems. We don’t really have a choice but to work in this way; it’s our only option. And, what’s more, it’s more effective to work together. Basically, together is better, and the X-Change set out to make space to explore how we do together better.

Without dwelling too much on these twinned rationales for partnership, the day’s work generated elegant accounts of partnerships in practice. A key insight from these is that partnerships work best as simultaneous movements of collaborative sense making, finding ways of working together, and learning and adapting to change.

This surfaced a tension for me: despite knowing that these features do occur simultaneously in partnerships, I’m struck at how they also require, as a pre-existing quality, a participatory, collaborative, and adaptive way of working, or at least a desire for it. And it is precisely this that tends to be avoided by conventional organisations and institutions. So in their very form and character, partnerships can be counter-cultural to the same organisations that create and participate in them. And this makes partnerships more edgy and disruptive than your average delivery mechanism. They are not value-neutral nor simply ‘more efficient’ ways of getting things done.

A second characterisation of partnerships that emerged out of the X-Change was the central importance of trust in developing and holding partnerships. Again, this rings completely true while also begging the question of how to build trust in contexts which actively defy it.

These questions are precisely what members of the X-Change keynote panel so impressively navigate in their places of work. They use distributed agency, light coordination, and commitment to continued engagement despite disagreement and resistance as part of their anticipated partnership life.

And thanks to the design of the day, the willingness of participants to engage complexity and the openness of the subsequent conversations, I now find myself extending my inquiry further, including into more explicitly political terrain. I want to explore and understand not only ‘How do we ‘do’ partnerships?’, but also ‘How do we expand and strengthen the qualities already in them from their start?’, ‘Where is the political will (each time) to engage in this way in the first place?’, and ‘What kind of good, facilitative leadership does it take to make it all happen?’

Partnerships are not passive entities existing as mere vehicles to accomplish the wishes of their members. They are unusual, sometimes counter-cultural organisational forms. And they need their own pioneering, leadership, coordination, and facilitation. This is particularly so if they are intended or expected also to be doing adaptive learning. And of course, particularly so if they are expected to change anything structural or significant in our policy, governance, and administrative landscapes.

Saul Musker reflected on how Operation Vulindlela (OV) has sustained partnership between the Presidency, Treasury and business into a second phase after the COVID-19 crisis opened space for a different kind of partnership model: lean, catalytic and grounded in trust rather than hierarchy.

Methodologically, there are so many ways. Partnerships might involve specialist facilitators, researchers and evaluators to hold some of the ‘in-between spaces’; they might create dedicated partnership time for sense-making, model development and adjustment, and for learning. Over time, and as partnerships develop, they might weave these capacities into ‘ordinary’ partnership functioning. And of course, there is the option of doing all of these things at different moments. However, none of the methods available can substitute for political appetite for partnership, nor for the leadership and discernment that chooses and acts with reference to the unique context, purpose, and character of each formation.

All of this raises in me – based on my observation and experience over years of working with these formations – that collective sense-making, collaborative models and embedded learning are both prerequisites for and outcomes of partnerships. These things are circular. And in the publication, they are rightly linked to where the X-Change began: knowing this is important and of value especially because we live in a ‘world marked by fragmentation and deep difference.’

Building on these insights, I am challenged by the idea that those who work so creatively and devotedly at partnership should foreground the purpose and politics of it all. Trust, collaboration and learning are central to partnership but they are not neutral. Each of these is shaped by, and in turn shapes, how power is held and exercised within and across partnerships, and also in the desired outcomes of each entity. Bringing power more explicitly into view may help deepen how we understand both the possibilities and the limits of partnership practice.

Reading the EDP’s Powerful Partnerships, I’m struck by the fact that the title foregrounds how partnerships engage power and make real changes to the way in which things happen, addressing the pressing issues of the day. These issues are partly characterised by difference and polarisation but underlying that are the pressing demands of inequality, instability and weak governance. It is these issues that so-called ‘powerful partnerships’ can make progress on addressing, and it is towards effecting change here that our efforts to learn are focused.

So seeking the ‘how-to’ in partnership, while part of the partnership process, absolutely must also make space for the ‘what for’ of partnerships. If the basic premise of partnership is that we can get the work done better together, then what is the work? What does it absolutely require of us all, and how can we engage in partnership to better serve that? How are we doing? And what adjustments are called for? If partnering really IS the best way to navigate governance and transformation through our times of polarisation and deep difference, then it needs more of these kinds of questions and support to ask them.

Partnerships, being as mobile and as dependent on context and relationship as they are, do need to reiterate and conceptualise principles and essence as part of their learning processes, and they do need to be continuously adapting out of that. But more so, partnerships and those that support them must be asking how they are shifting power and improving on the way things are done, and in that inquiry, finding answers to how best to do the work into the future.

If partnerships are indeed one of the most viable ways to navigate fragmentation and complexity, then strengthening them requires attention to both practice and purpose. This includes asking not only how partnerships function but also recognising that they shift power, influence decision-making, and contribute to more just and effective systems. And in recognising that this work is inherently political and dynamic. Holding these questions more centrally may not only deepen partnership practice but also sharpen its contribution to the challenges it seeks to address.

Edited: Natalie Tannous

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