When did you last have a dedicated hour to reflect on the relational dynamics in a partnership you are managing? Not to plan the next meeting, not to update a logframe, not to draft the agenda for the steering committee. But to actually sit with what is going on between the people involved, including yourself: what trust has been built and what has been quietly eroding, whose voice has been shrinking, where your own assumptions might be shaping the process in ways you have not examined.
If your honest answer is "rarely" or "never," you are in good company. And that, more than any governance gap or funding shortfall, is what this article is about.
The partnership I did not have the tools for
A few years ago, I found myself building one of the most complex partnerships I had ever been asked to lead. It brought together philanthropy, government, corporate sector, research advisory organisations and implementing partners, each with their own mandates, cultures, and definitions of what success looked like. And their own assumptions and beliefs about "the others". The ambition was significant. So were the stakes.
The technical dimensions were hard enough: designing governance, navigating legal frameworks, securing board approval for a major multi-year investment, aligning monitoring systems across very different institutional logics. In retrospect, though, the technical complexity was the easier part. What kept me up at night was something else entirely.
How do you build genuine trust between organisations with long histories of competition and suspicion? How do you hold space for a government partner navigating political pressures you cannot fully see, a corporate sector partner for whom partnership is still largely transactional, and a philanthropic board expecting both impact and investment accountability? How do you name a power dynamic that nobody in the room wants to name?
I had the backing of leadership. I had high expectations riding on making this work, technically and relationally. I had access to technical advisors. What I did not have, and what is almost never provided, was structured support for the human side of the work: the self-reflection, the peer learning, the space to sit with what is hard before having to perform confidence in the next stakeholder meeting.
"It can be a lonely role as you try to hold everything together, and at the end of the day, you feel a lot of responsibility. Opportunities for guidance, sharing, and learning with others in the same boat are really needed." MSP Guide, p.162
That experience is far from unusual. It is, in fact, the norm for people doing this kind of work.
Why partnerships, and why now more than ever
We are living through a convergence of pressures that makes partnership structurally necessary. Complex, systemic challenges, such as education but also beyond, cannot be solved by any single actor. The evidence is clear: genuine cross-sector collaboration, when well designed, achieves things that no single organisation can do alone.
At the same time, a long-overdue push towards localisation is reshaping who holds decision-making power, who sets priorities, who controls resources, and whose knowledge counts. Localisation requires new forms of partnership that are genuinely equitable rather than merely labelled as such, and that means rethinking the roles, relationships, and power dynamics that shape how partnerships are designed and led.
Over all of this falls the long shadow of shrinking international development budgets. The dismantling of USAID, declining ODA commitments, and growing fiscal pressure on bilateral donors are pushing the sector to build partnerships with non-traditional actors, including corporate sector, private finance, and diaspora networks, for whom the language and logic of development partnerships is often unfamiliar. The demand for sophisticated partnership work has never been higher, and the conditions in which it is carried out have rarely been harder.
We see this clearly in the philanthropy and education space, as a recent International Education Funders Group (IEFG) blog has highlighted. As domestic and external financing resources tighten, philanthropy's comparative advantage lies in catalysing public investment, testing ideas, absorbing risk, nudging reform, and building the trust between actors that makes larger systemic change possible. That catalytic function is fundamentally a partnership function. And it is relational before it is financial.
What the literature tells us, and what it leaves out
There is no shortage of frameworks, guidance and trainings on partnership practice. The Partnership Brokers Association (PBA) with its various resources, the SDG Partnership Guidebook by The Partnering Initiative (TPI) , the MSP Guide by Brouwer & Woodhill, UNDP 's work on power in multi-stakeholder processes, and the Building Equitable Partnerships report by Plan International between them cover the full terrain: partnership types, lifecycle phases, governance design, common pitfalls, and supporting conditions.
These frameworks are genuinely useful. They describe what good partnership looks like, from the early scoping of shared purpose to the governance of decision-making to the honest review that prevents drift and resentment. They offer tools for navigating power asymmetries, building accountability, and designing for equity.
Across all of them, though, a pattern emerges: the practitioner is largely assumed rather than developed. The guidance is rich on what to do and thin on how to develop the person doing it. The skills, mindsets, and personal sustainability of the individual navigating this work receive a fraction of the attention given to governance structures and partnership cycles.
"These rather psychological aspects of the work are often overlooked. Yet they are essential if MSPs are to succeed, and equally essential in protecting facilitators from exhaustion and burnout." MSP Guide, p.128
This is a significant gap. Partnerships, at their core, are human arrangements before they are technical ones. Governance documents do not build trust. Frameworks do not repair a relationship under strain. People do.
The era of relational intelligence
Two recent bodies of thinking converge on the same diagnosis, from very different starting points.
In a recent article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Isabelle Hau introduces relational intelligence: the deeply human ability to build trust, navigate tension, repair ruptures, and create meaning with others. As AI increasingly outperforms us in analysis and convincingly simulates empathy, she argues, relational intelligence is emerging as the defining competence of our age. The future of social change will depend less on how smart our machines become and more on how well we design our institutions to strengthen human connection.
In a parallel piece revisiting their landmark 2015 article on system leadership, John Kania, Radha Ruparell , Peter Senge, and Hal Hamilton reach a strikingly similar conclusion from the world of systems change. Watching a decade of leaders aspire to system leadership, they found that many engaged with the frameworks while missing the harder underlying work: the inner-to-outer connection. In their words, "changing systems is human work: wrestling with messy problems together. This requires a willingness to look inward and confront our own inherited patterns, biases, and blind spots."
Both articles are saying the same thing in different registers. The outer work, whether it is systems change or cross-sector partnership, cannot advance without the inner work of the people doing it.
Partnership work is precisely this. It is the capacity to build trust across deep difference, to navigate tension between institutional mandates and shared purpose, to repair the ruptures that are inevitable when people with different power, different stakes, and different worldviews try to collaborate on something that matters. No framework substitutes for this. No governance structure generates it automatically.
And yet we continue to treat partnership practitioners as though these capacities will develop themselves, through experience, through exposure, through osmosis.
What it actually takes: the practitioner dimension
What does developing as a partnership practitioner or localized leadership actually require? The evidence base, drawing on Partnership Brokers Association , The Partnering Initiative (TPI) , UNDP , and the MSP Guide, points to three interconnected dimensions that are rarely addressed together.
The first is skills. Effective partnership work requires a specific cluster of brokering capabilities: facilitating across power asymmetry; synthesising across very different institutional logics; negotiating from interests rather than positions; coaching partners towards their own agency rather than dependence on the broker; designing governance processes that will hold under pressure; and analysing and naming power dynamics without triggering defensiveness. These skills are learnable, but they require deliberate development, not just accumulated experience.
The second is mindset. The most experienced partnership practitioners describe a shift from treating partnership as a series of tasks to be managed, to treating it as a set of relationships to be cultivated. This means holding genuine non-attachment to preferred outcomes, developing the patience that complex multi-stakeholder processes demand, and cultivating the courage to name difficult truths about power, about misalignment, about what is not working, before they calcify into crisis.
Kania and colleagues name something important here: this kind of shift often requires unlearning as much as learning. Many of the habits that organisations reward, speed over reflection, control over connection, individual delivery over collective process, are precisely the habits that undermine partnership work. Practitioners often arrive at this work well-trained in the wrong things for it.
The third, and most neglected, is personal sustainability. Partnership work is emotionally and politically demanding in ways that are qualitatively different from most professional roles. Practitioners hold the tension of the whole system. They navigate power asymmetries that sometimes implicate their own organisations. They absorb the relational weight of keeping parties at the table when the going gets hard. They often do this with limited peer support, minimal organisational recognition, and almost no structured space for reflection.
"The primary tool at your disposal is yourself. The quality of your personal leadership to drive change is more than the sum of all the tools and concepts. It is also about integrity, knowing yourself, balancing the head and the heart." MSP Guide, p.13
Beyond practitioner burnout, though that is real and well-documented, the risk is that partnerships themselves become fragile when the person holding them together is running on empty.
What organisations owe the people doing the work
The evidence on enabling conditions for equitable partnership is consistent across the literature. Appointing a skilled practitioner and expecting them to succeed is not enough, while helpful. The Building Equitable Partnerships report identifies several chronically under-resourced dimensions: the time and effort required for genuine co-design, the cost of convening and dialogue, investment in capacity strengthening, and the organisational transition needed to work differently. Without these, even the most capable practitioner is structurally set up to fail.
Beyond resourcing, organisations that take partnership seriously need to create genuine space for human development. This means protected time for reflection, treated as a professional requirement rather than a discretionary extra. It means peer learning spaces where practitioners can share real cases and real dilemmas, not curated success stories. It means mentoring from people who have navigated similar complexity. And it means structured self-assessment, the kind that moves beyond annual appraisals and into genuine inquiry about where one is growing and where one is at risk.
Sustainable outcomes require investment in the human infrastructure that produces them.
An invitation to go further
This article opens a conversation rather than closes one. With PurposePhil Career, I intend to build a space with for partnership practitioners in education, philanthropy and evidence-based initiatives to develop themselves alongside their partnerships: a diagnostic tool, a peer learning community, and a growing body of practitioner voices that go beyond frameworks to the lived reality of the work.
There are three ways to get involved:
- Share your story. Do you have experience setting up or managing partnerships across sectors, power differentials, or geographies? I am inviting practitioners to join the upcoming PurposePhil Pulse interview series, together with a partner or colleague. Two voices, one honest conversation.
- Write your own reflections. What has partnership work actually required of you? We are collecting practitioner voices on what it takes to do this work well, and what the sector still gets wrong. Sign up and I will help you shape your reflections into something that we can share through PurposePhil (and beyond).
- Try the diagnostic and join a reflection session. I have built a self-assessment tool for partnership practitioners, covering skills, mindset, and personal sustainability. I am looking for practitioners willing to test it and join a small, safe peer learning session to discuss what it surfaces.
You can sign up here for all three or any of those options.
You have been doing this work. You know what it costs. You also know what it is worth. That knowledge is exactly what this community needs. Let's support each other on our journey!
Sources: PBA -- Being a Partnership Broker: Tools for Self-Assessment & Reflection (2018) | Brokering Better Partnerships Handbook (TPI/PBA, 2019) | The MSP Guide (Brouwer & Woodhill, 2015) | Building Equitable Partnerships (Plan UK / SDDirect, 2023-2025) | UNDP -- Working with Power in Multi-Stakeholder Processes (2023) | I.C. Hau -- Welcome to the Era of Relational Intelligence, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Spring 2026 | Kania, Ruparell, Senge & Hamilton -- The Inner Work of System Leadership Garrison Institute (2026) | IEFG -- From Funding to Partnership: a Multilateral Perspective on Philanthropy in Public Education Finance (2026)