The politics of partnership in tropical public health researching tuberculosis control in India

In today's globalizing world the nature of relationships between the North and South is changing to account for the closing gap in capacity to carry o ut research of international standard. The development of a lexicon sophist icated enough to address adequately these changing relationships, however, lags behind and is not supported by the current recourse to the jargon of " partnership". In this paper we explore the difficulties of negotiating a pr oductive Path through the dynamics of power and control that characterize i nternational research collaborations. We call attention to this issue throu gh recounting the story of the development of two quite different, but rela ted, international research relationships in which we have been involved. W e suggest that there is an important difference between those aspects of th e relationship that respond to institutional needs and agendas and those as pects that relate more directly to the human relationships upon which the w ork in the field actually depends. We set out this difference in a tentativ e framework, where the relationship between researchers is labelled "partne rship" and the institutional relationship "collaboration". It is hoped that , by its inclusion in a journal on social policy, this paper may also stimu late discussion on the extent to which these issues are particular to inter national relationships or are, indeed, generalizable to national-level part nerships and collaborations within the UK and Europe.