What is the Power Awareness Tool?
As the name suggests, the PAT makes actors in international cooperation aware of power relations in partnerships by making them visible. In any partnership, decision-making power can be a silent yet critical factor. Who gets to decide what and how can make or break a collaboration. The Power Awareness Tool (PAT) is an online tool that helps you shine a light on these dynamics and explore how power can be shifted while ensuring that all partners are involved.
Why is it important?
In times of shifting priorities and emerging systems and roles in international cooperation, the Power Awareness Tool offers a tangible framework to sustain our commitment to reimagine partnerships. Partnerships that are built on equity. This is necessary because in many partnerships for development, donors and international NGOs have too much power, and local NGOs in the Majority World* too little. There is widespread agreement that this should change. Despite this consensus, the power imbalances persist. Therefore, we continue to promote the Power Awareness Tool.
(*Majority World refers to the Global South)
Vision on change
Partos and NGO Federatie are both committed to accelerating equitable, just and decolonial transformation in international cooperation within their networks through learning, co-creation and exchange. This is driven by the aim to take accountability to fix and transform the power-imbalanced system of international cooperation and solidarity, and promote community-led change. This transition is globally-led, in partnership with thought-leading initiatives such as RINGO, Acapaca, MCLD, and GFCF. Learn more about the different tools developed by Partos & ngo-federatie to guide this work here:
The Power Awareness Tool was initially developed by Partos, in partnership with
Woord en Daad, Oxfam Novib, Cordaid, Wilde Ganzen, Liliane Fonds, Akvo. Over the coming years, NGO Federatie will co-invest in promoting and hosting the tool.
