summary paper - Alliance of Religions and Conservation

These development programs will mean better food security, improved marketing through farmer
cooperatives, adult literacy, community health care and a team of life to fight against HIV/AIDS.
Chikweti means really developing local capacity.
The Anglican Church of Mozambique is not an outside organization, NGO or service provider,
We are a key community stake holder
Living, working, laughing, crying, being ­ striving together in community as community.
Yes, there have been and are many challenges and difficulties:
· Plantation agriculture
· The introduction of exotic species
· Use and ownership of land and water resources
· On­farm labor shortages and food security
· Gender and employment polices
· Bureaucracy
· Limited local capacity
But, despite these obstacles, for us,
Chikweti means a professional well­run, ethical, sustainable commercial, business investment;
It means Conservation of Mozambique’s natural resources, and
It means Community Development to improve the lives of some of the poorest people in the world.
For us, Chikweti is a step toward that dream of a better future.
Imagine, it’s easy if you can.
Aud V. Tønnessen
Dr., Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo, Norway:
‘Criteria for partnership. A gender perspective’
Partnership has for a long time been a key word within development. “Today´s rule­of­thumb in
international development is that everybody wants to be a partner with everyone else on everything,
everywhere” Alan Fowler (2002) says (243). At the same time it is stated that “the talk of partnership often
fails to address potential conflict and inequalities” (Crewe and Harrison 1998:87). What I will say today
has to do with potential conflicts and why partnership with religious communities and faith groups should
not be on everything, everywhere.
Partnership has been an answer to two interrelated but different problems within development. On the
one hand partnership is a description of a way of working. Instead of, say, a Norwegian development
agency operating their own development project in another country, employing their own staff, a staff
often consisting of a majority of expatriates, partnership means the agency is collaborating with one or
more local organizations or groups that are responsible for a project or program. The roles are changed
from donor­recipient to partners. And the terminology presupposes a collaboration the whole process
through. It is no longer the donor telling the receiver what to do, since longtime experience from
operational projects have taught that this seldom results in local ownership to the projects. Partnership is
therefore a strategy to promote and secure local ownership, something seen as fundamental for
sustainable development.
On the other hand partnership is a normative way of describing an ideal relationship within development.
As opposed to the donor­receiver relationship, partnership means a symmetric instead of an a­symmetric
relation, where the partners are mutually sharing responsibility and obligation. Instead of the paternalism
of the operational model, partnership is seen as based on equality and a balance of power. Transparency
must go both ways. Empirically though, it has been seriously questioned if partnership is any solution to
paternalism. A Swedish study concluded that despite the partnership model, Swedish and Danish aid
workers in Tanzania still maintained an image of themselves as representing the “reliable and trustworthy
Western Self” whereas their local partners were seen as unpredictable and unreliable (Baaz 2005:167).
At the same time the local partners did not experience the relationship as being based on mutual
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