Academic-community collaboration, gender research, and development: pitfalls and possibilities

Collaboration has become a watchword for development practitioners and theorists. Yet collaboration or partnerships between academics and community-based researchers and activists have often proved difficult. This is particularly true for partnerships with smaller, grassroots community researchers, who are generally less resourced than their academic partners. This paper focuses on such partnerships in gender research, with the aim of reflecting on past problems as well as successes in order to develop strategies for making such projects more truly collaborative, rather than a minefield of broken promises and unspoken (and sometimes spoken) resentments.