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Sustainable Partnerships — a Brazilian View

In an attempt to reach concrete conclusions, this article will focus on the specific context of Brazilian Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and how they may engage in sustainable partnerships, understood as "long term" partnerships.

We will start with a description of four case studies of such partnerships, to try to identify some patterns that seem to characterize sustainability in this context. The cases have been chosen so that they could reflect the reality of a reasonable number of Brazilian HEIs, and are: the Brazilian initiative called PEC- G; the bilateral partnerships Brazil/France and Brazil/Germany; the Brazilian experience in Erasmus Mundus projects; and finally the Mercosul network called AUGM.

After presenting and discussing these cases, we provide a synthesis and considerations on sustainable partnership: in our opinion, middle-term objectives like funding or language should not be the main issue of sustainable partnerships, but pre-requisite for it. What most matters in our view is an appropriate combination of mobility (of students, but also of staff - academic and administrative) and joint research actions, that should complement each other, and be supported by the proper mix of central, administrative management and of individual involvement of the academics. These actions must be supported by a national political will, but need to be defined by strong, university-based policies that seek in selected partners some competence that is not present a priori. Complementarity, more than symmetry, should be sought in these partnerships.

Our experience of the national situation is that all this can be found in most Brazilian HEIs, who have had years of experience in Erasmus Mundus programs, in Science without BorderF, or in other international associations like AUGM.

Author(s):

Nicolas Maillard    
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
Brazil