Towards a new - more feminist - approach to partnership brokering

To support the commitment of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) to accelerate efforts to prevent gender-based violence (GBV), Kore Global was engaged to lead a co-design process for a major new gender equality investment - the Southeast Asia GBV Prevention Platform. The design process was highly collaborative, spearheaded by a core design team of key organizations working on GBV and informed by a rigorous mixed-method consultation process with 160 stakeholders across 10 countries in the region. To end the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, we have summarized a few of our learnings on partnership brokering from this GBV project.

Kore Global was presented with a very important - and very challenging - task: coordinating diverse actors to design an inclusive platform that addresses a complex social issue. Our role was to facilitate and broker partnerships and, ultimately, design a platform that reflects the varied needs and interests of these stakeholder groups. 

What became clear throughout the co-design process was the need to take a different and distinctly feminist approach to partnerships. Traditional approaches to partnership brokering have often replicated systems of power and inequality. These are the very systems of inequality that the GBV sector works to dismantle. 

It is against this background that Kore Global is incubating a new - more feminist - approach to partnership brokering. Through our work with DFAT and other clients, we have identified key building blocks that are critical in creating more equitable partnerships. We highlight a few of these below.

1. Co-design feminist partnership principles and behaviours 

We kick-off our partnership processes by agreeing a set of feminist principles. These principles are identified by the individuals engaged in the process, thus facilitating ownership and buy-in. They can range from principles of inclusion, decolonization, survivor-centered and self-care, among others. Equally important is bringing these principles to life, by generating a list of behaviours that reflect the principles. This is particularly important in diverse and cross-cultural settings, as principles might be understood in different ways, and by digging into behaviours, we are able to explore different and more inclusive and empowering ways to express - and live - our shared principles. We have found this process to be truly transformative as it promotes accountability for the partners involved (including ourselves) and provides a filter through which partners can make critical design decisions. 

2. Create spaces for deep listening 

Design processes can often be fast-paced, with participants forced to rush to decisions to meet ambitious timelines. Given the complexity of working on GBV (as well as other gender equality and social inclusion topics), we consciously create spaces to pause, listen and reflect (we discuss this more below). This is not always easy, but it is absolutely essential. Understanding that participants prefer to learn and share in different ways - from one-to-one conversations to large workshops - we ensure that the spaces we create meet participants' needs, so that all partners can truly understand and reflect on their inputs. Trust is fundamental to fostering a safe space, something that takes time to build throughout the partnership process, but we’ve found that developing a set of feminist principles and behaviours - and revisiting these regularly - is an essential foundation for this. 

3. Identify processes to promote collaborative decision-making 

Work on GBV aims to challenge traditional systems of power. Therefore, partnership processes should also explore new ways of decision-making that replace more hierarchical approaches. We have worked with teams to jointly identify decision-making protocols that promote transparency and collaboration as much as possible. We often encourage distributed leadership approaches, a decision-making structure that promotes teamwork and interconnectivity. At a minimum, we start our design processes by bringing together teams to create a shared understanding of how decisions are made. 

4. Ensure accountability through feminist partnership pauses 

A ‘feminist pause’ is a key moment that we weave throughout our partnership brokering processes. A feminist pause is an opportunity for participants to revisit the feminist partnership principles and reflect on how they are - or aren’t - being upheld. It can be created using a number of different tools and methods, tailored to the design process; this ranges from online platforms where partners can leave anonymous thoughts to participatory reflection workshops. Partnership processes need to be agile with the opportunity for adaptation based on feedback surfaced through feminist pauses. 

Written by Katherine Nichol, Principal Consultant, Kore Global.