East Asia

The term ‘partnership’ has become a catch-cry for development organisations aiming to mobilise the resources and collaboration needed to achieve long-term goals such as poverty reduction and sustainable resource management. Achieving effective collaboration in practice, however, can be challenging. This article adds to recent discussions on what makes effective partnerships offering lessons from an ongoing partnership between RECOFTC (Regional Community Forestry Training Center for Asia and the Pacific) and SNV (Netherlands Development Organisation).

With case studies on Millennium Development Goal (MDG)-oriented reform projects in Vietnam, this article focuses upon a persistent dilemma in attempting to turn worthy goals into implementable programmes and sustainable results. How to achieve these goals is uncertain but modern performance management, as expressed in Logical Frameworks, demands certainty. The article suggests how an open-management style can allow for pragmatic adaptation to circumstances or, more radically, how Log Frames could be redesigned to focus upon interpretation of contextual challenges.