Partnership inside Governance Spaces: the case of the Municipal Development Forum of Igarapé-Açú, Pará, Amazonia

Abstract

This paper discusses how partnership between local organisations and Government inside governance spaces affects local development. The aim is to raise some critical issues about the concept of partnership and about partnership effectively for municipal development. Thus, the article uses partnership as its central theory. Specifically, it explores to what extent partnership is an effective strategy for local development in areas of historical conflict between local Government and local organisations in Pará State, Brazilian Amazonia. It focuses particularly on the municipality of Igarapé-Açú, located in north-east of Pará State. Igarapé-Açú was chosen because it is a singular case of local organisations and Government partnership since 2008 when a governance space was created to carry out a partnership process called Municipal Development Forum (MDF). Methodologically, the case study was carried out from a qualitative analysis with data gathered from documents and semi-structured interviews with key-informants. The paper shows that the great challenge to build partnerships between local Government and local organisations is not in these actors capacity to represent the state and civil society in a governance forum, but in their capacity to change the local institutional environment to enable this forum to propose changes in terms of rural development. The paper shows that institutional change does not happen rapidly; changes depend on a particular historical context. In conclusion, the case of Igarapé-Açú shows that in an environment where there is great political conflict much time is needed to create links between the rural actors.