Towards Greater Transparency Regarding Partnerships for Technology Development

This article explores the problems and potential of funded short-term cross-sector partnerships to address technological deficits in the nonprofit sector by engaging with the partners of a concluded project. The partnership case study that forms the backbone of this article was a three-year nationally funded nonprofit-industry-academic partnership. The ob- jective of the partnership was to increase the data collection capacity of a national nonprofit organization and its affiliate centres through the development of a web-based app. This article highlights the challenges and differing experiences of nonprofit-industry-academic partnerships more generally, and technology-development partnerships more specifically.

Towards effective and sustainable global academic partnerships through a maturity model informed by the capability approach

Background Shortage of skilled workforce is a global concern but represents a critical bottleneck to Africa’s development. While global academic partnerships have the potential to help tackle this development bottleneck, they are criticised for inadequate attention to equity, impact, and sustainability. We propose a new values-driven partnership model for sustainable and equitable global partnerships that achieve impact. Method The model was based on the authors’ experiences of participation in over 30 partnerships and used insights from the Capability Approach. Results We developed an Academic Partnership Maturity Model, with five levels of maturity, extending from pre-contemplative to mature partnerships. The level of maturity increases depending on the level of freedom, equity, diversity, and agency afforded to the partners. The approach offers a framework for establishing a forward-looking partnership anchored in mutual learning, empowerment, and autonomy. Conclusion This is a pragmatic model limited by the biases of experiential knowledge. Further development of the concept, including metrics and an evaluation tool kit are needed to assist partners and funders.

Community-Academic Partnerships in the Community Engagement Literature: A Scoping Review

This article contributes a novel dataset mapping the partnership literature in the community engagement field and invites scholars of community-academic partnerships in the community engagement field to participate in the development of scoping reviews as a way to effectively scan extant literature as they seek to build upon or critique it. This scoping review includes key article-level characteristics regarding the representation of community-academic partnerships within 141 published articles from seven peer-reviewed journals in the community engagement field.

The Global Knowledge Value Chain on Sustainability: Addressing Fragmentations through International Academic Partnerships

While research on universities’ role in sustainability transitions has flourished in recent years, explorations into the potential of academic internationalization for the promotion of sustainability transitions are still rare. This article aims at contributing to this incipient literature by emphasizing an underexplored property of international academic networks and transnational academic cooperation: their potential to break disciplinary and geographical barriers in the global debates on how transitions towards sustainability can be achieved. When realizing this potential, international partnerships are able to provide more comprehensive knowledge to inform sustainability transitions while shaping sustainability transitions in various places at the same time. This article pursues three objectives: First, it introduces the concept of the “global knowledge value chain on sustainability” and explores its value as a heuristic to understand global knowledge production relevant for sustainability transitions. Furthermore, it identifies two fragmentations in this chain resulting from global inequalities and specific dynamics within the global science community. Second, it confirms empirically the fragmentations of this global knowledge value chain on sustainability. Third, it provides good practice ideas on how international academic partnerships can overcome these fragmentations by drawing on the authors’ experience with the international partnership “trAndeS—Postgraduate Program on Social Inequalities and Sustainable Development in the Andean Region” carried out by the Institute of Latin American Studies of Freie Universität Berlin and the Department of Social Sciences of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru (PUCP).