Governing Global Partnerships: Multi-Stakeholder Knowledge Exchange and Cross-Sectoral Capacity Building in Higher Education

Garcia, Jose

doi:10.65326/u7y10029

Governing Global Partnerships: Multi-Stakeholder Knowledge Exchange and Cross-Sectoral Capacity Building in Higher Education

21 hours ago
32 min read

Author: Jose Garcia

Affiliation: Swiss International University (SIU)

ORCID ID: 0009-0001-2055-9608

Submitted 02 May 2026; Revised 20 June 2026; Revised 27 July 2026; Accepted 4 August 2026; Available online 11 August 2026; Version of Record 11 August 2026.

Doi: https://doi.org/10.65326/u7y10029

Volume 3, December 2026, (10029)

Abstract

Two decades of guidance on equitable international partnership have coincided with little movement in the distribution of authorship, funding custody and agenda control across higher education collaborations. This article explains that persistence by separating two classes of governance instrument. Procedural instruments — memoranda, steering committees, consultation rounds, codes of conduct, equity checklists, reflexivity statements — regulate voice, visibility and process. Allocative instruments transfer custody of one of the four goods a partnership actually distributes: agenda authority, resource custody, epistemic authority, and the direction in which accountability runs. The article develops this distinction into a framework and uses it to specify a condition it calls participatory settlement, a stable state in which procedural instruments raise satisfaction with process and perceived legitimacy while leaving all four goods where they were, and in which the raised legitimacy then reduces pressure for allocative change. The account reconciles two literatures that have talked past each other, one treating partnership failure as a problem of design and the other treating design as an instrument of legitimation. Five propositions specify when a procedural instrument converts into an allocative one: when allocation is the default rather than the request, when a party outside the partnership holds enforcement standing, when transfers cannot be reversed within a funding cycle, when agenda authority and resource custody move together, and when evaluation measures allocation rather than process. The framework is conceptual, derived from published evidence, and offered for empirical test.

Keywords: partnership governance, internationalisation of higher education, capacity building, epistemic justice, research collaboration, accountability, SDG 17

1. Introduction

Across 7,100 health research articles about sub-Saharan Africa published between 2014 and 2016, authors based in the country the paper studied held 52.9% of first-author positions. Where the collaboration included a partner at a top United States university, that share fell to 23.0%, and 13.5% of the papers carried no author from the country at all (Hedt-Gauthier et al., 2019). A later study of one long-running Southern African consortium found almost none of the outright exclusion the term parachute research describes, and still reported that researchers from low- and lower-middle-income countries were roughly a fifth as likely as high-income-country colleagues to hold either the first or the last position on the byline (Skrivankova et al., 2023). Medical education journals show the same shape from a different angle: five countries supply first or last authors on 70% of papers, and 43% of the world's countries appear on none (Wondimagegn et al., 2023).

The figures matter beyond the byline because of what has been loaded onto partnership in the intervening years. Higher education institutions are now written into the development agenda as producers of the research, the graduates and the policy advice on which the Sustainable Development Goals depend, and partnership is the form through which that contribution is meant to travel between systems (Chankseliani & McCowan, 2021). Authorship is the visible trace of a distribution that runs through every part of such an arrangement. Abimbola (2019) named the underlying problem precisely: scholarship about a place is written for an audience somewhere else, and the resulting work carries the marks of the audience rather than the site.

This is the record of a period during which institutional effort to make partnership fairer was unusually concentrated. A global code of conduct for research in resource-poor settings was drafted and disseminated (Schroeder et al., 2019). A twenty-item equity checklist for bilateral partnerships was published and taken up (Hodson et al., 2023). Journal editors agreed a consensus statement recommending that manuscripts from international partnerships carry structured reflexivity statements, published alongside the accepted paper (Morton et al., 2022). Funders adopted the language of equitable partnership in their calls, and researchers began to interrogate what that language does and does not reach (Charani et al., 2022; Flint et al., 2022). The instruments multiplied. The distributions barely moved.

The obvious explanations do not survive much pressure. Implementation lag would predict a slow but visible trend, and the authorship series shows drift rather than direction. Insufficient uptake would predict that partnerships adopting the instruments diverge from those that do not, which is not what the consortium studies report: collaborations with mature governance arrangements, joint committees and explicit equity commitments produce byline distributions that look much like everyone else's (Skrivankova et al., 2023). Something in the relation between the instruments and the outcomes is misdescribed.

I argue that the instruments and the outcomes are largely independent, and that the reason is analytic rather than motivational. Most partnership governance instruments regulate process — who is consulted, who sits on which committee, what is disclosed, what is declared. The outcomes at issue are matters of allocation — who controls the research question, who holds the grant, whose knowledge is treated as evidence, and to whom the partnership owes an account of itself. A partnership can improve every process measure without transferring custody of any of those things. When it does, the result is not hypocrisy. It is a stable arrangement in which the appearance of shared governance is genuine at the level of participation and absent at the level of allocation, and in which the credibility earned by participation removes the pressure that allocation would otherwise face. I call this condition participatory settlement.

The contribution is a framework that distinguishes governance instruments by what they allocate, an account of why the two classes are so easily confused, and five propositions specifying the conditions under which a procedural instrument converts into an allocative one. The framework speaks to two literatures that have addressed the same object without meeting. One treats partnership difficulty as a design problem soluble by better platforms, clearer contracts and stronger deliberation (Ansell & Gash, 2018; Dentoni et al., 2018; Pattberg & Widerberg, 2016). The other treats governance design as part of the problem, arguing that the instruments encode the asymmetries they claim to correct (Kumar et al., 2024; Mormina & Istratii, 2021; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2021). Neither has specified which instruments do which. That specification is what the framework provides.

The article sets out the two accounts and the tension between them, identifies the four goods a partnership allocates, classifies governance instruments by whether they move those goods, develops participatory settlement as the condition that follows when procedural instruments are used alone, states five propositions on conversion, and closes with implications for theory, for institutions and funders, and for research, together with the limits of the account.

1.1. Analytical Approach

This is a conceptual article. It advances no empirical claim of its own, reports no primary data, and derives its framework from published work whose findings are attributed to their sources throughout. Because a conceptual argument can be checked only if its evidential base is visible, the procedure by which that base was assembled is set out here.

Sources were identified through structured searches of OpenAlex and PubMed, supplemented by targeted retrieval from publisher sites and citation chaining on the most central retrieved papers. Fourteen search strings were run across five construct families: partnership and network governance (search terms combining collaborative governance, cross-sector partnership, multi-stakeholder, accountability, legitimacy); internationalisation of higher education (internationalisation, transnational education, partnership, governance); research capacity development (research capacity strengthening, North-South partnership, equity, asymmetry); knowledge exchange and the university's external missions (quadruple helix, university-industry, knowledge transfer, third mission); and the infrastructure of scholarly communication (authorship inequality, article processing charges, language, open access). The window was 2014 to 2026, extended backwards where a work was needed to establish a position that later literature argues with.

Three criteria governed inclusion. A source had to be peer reviewed or a scholarly monograph; it had to bear on the allocation of authority, resources, knowledge claims or accountability within collaborative arrangements, rather than on partnership outcomes alone; and its metadata had to be confirmable against an indexed record. Sixty-four sources met all three. Each was logged with full bibliographic detail, the verification path, and a one-line statement of what the source claims, so that every proposition below can be traced to the evidence supporting it. Sources that could not be confirmed were discarded rather than reconstructed.

The framework was derived in three steps. First, recurrent objects of dispute were extracted from the empirical partnership literature, meaning what partners reported fighting over or reported being unable to influence. These clustered into four goods. Second, the governance instruments described across the same literature were sorted by whether their operation changes custody of any of those goods. Third, the cases in which instruments did appear to move custody were compared with those in which they did not, and the differences between them were stated as conditions. The propositions are the output of that third step.

Two limits on the procedure should be recorded. The evidence base is uneven by field, since health research partnerships are documented far more thoroughly than partnerships in engineering, the humanities or professional education. The literature is also predominantly English-language, which is itself one of the asymmetries the article analyses (Ramírez-Castañeda, 2020). Widening the construct families beyond health and drawing the governance apparatus from public administration rather than from higher education alone reduces neither limit to zero.

2. Two Accounts of What Partnership Governance Does

The first account treats governance as engineering. Its object is the collaborative arrangement itself, and its question is what design makes the arrangement work. Ansell and Gash (2018) describe collaborative platforms as organisations holding dedicated competences and resources for hosting repeated collaborations, and identify strategic intermediation and design rules as what makes them adapt and survive. Dentoni et al. (2018) match three governance processes — deliberation, decision-making and enforcement — to three dimensions along which problems are difficult, and argue that partnerships fail when the process is mismatched to the problem. Pattberg and Widerberg (2016) distil nine conditions for partnership performance from a decade of scholarship. In the higher education literature the same logic appears in work on partnership sustainability, which identifies threats to long-term collaboration and the conditions that offset them (Lanford, 2019), in the analysis of transnational teaching networks, where governance form and network size predict what kinds of innovation a consortium attempts (Fumasoli & Rossi, 2021), and in the account of higher education steering as a multi-level arrangement in which supranational, national and institutional authority are distributed and stakeholder involvement partly serves to legitimate policy (Fumasoli, 2015).

This account has produced real knowledge. It has established that contracts and relationships are not substitutes: contractual governance shapes relational norms and partner contribution rather than displacing trust (Benítez-Ávila et al., 2018). It has shown that partnerships survive incompatible institutional logics when resource interdependence is lower, and break under the combination of incompatible logics and high dependence (Ashraf et al., 2017). It has engaged asymmetry directly rather than assuming it away: Ran and Qi (2018) set out six contingency factors governing power sharing and conclude that designing to contingencies is more productive than pursuing balanced power for its own sake. And it has been honest about its own limits. Howlett and Ramesh (2014) argued a decade ago that network and collaborative modes fail in their own characteristic ways, and that the claim they combine the virtues of hierarchy and market rests on faith rather than evidence.

The second account treats governance as legitimation. Its object is the relation between the partners, and its question is what the arrangement does to an asymmetry that predates it. Abimbola et al. (2021) set out the forms that asymmetry takes across global collaboration and argue that it is structural rather than attitudinal, which means it is not addressed by improving the conduct of the parties. Mormina and Istratii (2021) argue that research capacity development remains technocratic and unreflexive about its own normative direction, so that its instruments carry an unexamined account of what capacity is for and who decides. Flint et al. (2022) trace how United Kingdom funding models place the grant, the compliance burden and the agenda on the northern side, so that equity language does not reach the terms on which the partnership operates. Kumar et al. (2024) state the point about instruments directly: existing guidelines and checklists do not touch decision-making power, resource distribution or funder accountability. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2021) locates the asymmetry further back, in a division of intellectual labour that treats the position from which knowledge is produced as though it were nowhere in particular. The parallel argument about the university's internal arrangements holds that curricular and epistemic change requires alteration to who governs, and that additions to reading lists do not substitute for it (Bhambra et al., 2018). Read across a whole regional policy field, education agendas carry the same difficulty: Tikly (2019) treats African education-for-sustainable-development policy as an artefact of the postcolonial condition, in which the reforming instrument reproduces the relation it addresses.

Interview evidence from partners on the receiving side of capacity building supports this account in a specific way. Zambian health researchers attributed publication disputes, agenda dictation and conflicts over sample and data ownership to the concentration of funding on the northern side of the collaboration, rather than to any deficiency in the governance forms in use (Matenga et al., 2019). Members of a North-South-South network reported that donor agendas set the topics and that dependence on external calls left little room for locally initiated work; South-South collaboration within the network, the arrangement's stated purpose, remained minimal (Van der Veken et al., 2017). Angolan and Mozambican academics in a European-led project valued the training and reported that the project had not engaged their institutional context, and that the asymmetry the project was designed to reduce structured the project itself (Craveiro et al., 2020). At a Ghanaian elite university, researchers described a dependency produced jointly by external funding structures and internal institutional weakness, which no partnership agreement addressed (Nkansah et al., 2025).

The two accounts are not simply opposed, and the assumption that they are has cost the field a decade. The engineering account is right that instruments matter and that partnerships with better arrangements do better on the things those arrangements govern. The legitimation account is right that partnerships with better arrangements have not produced different distributions of authorship, funding or agenda control. Both can hold if the instruments in question govern something other than those distributions. That is the possibility neither literature has examined, because neither has asked what a partnership instrument allocates.

A third position points toward the answer without reaching it. Fougère and Solitander (2020) argue that consensus-oriented multi-stakeholder initiatives cannot be democratic on their own terms, because adversarial relations are displaced outside the initiative rather than worked through inside it. Chambers et al. (2022), analysing 32 co-production initiatives, found that effort was spent closing down disagreement between competing agendas rather than navigating it. Morrison et al. (2019) show that power in polycentric arrangements operates through rule setting, issue construction and implementation, and that the polycentricity literature has treated it as a residual. West et al. (2019) diagnose a related failure inside co-production itself, which they argue remains captive to a linear assumption that knowledge is produced first and applied afterwards, so that collaborative form does not disturb the sequence. Staffa et al. (2022) propose dissenting-within as a mode of collaborative knowledge production precisely because agreement-seeking arrangements have no place to put disagreement. Each of these observes that something is being managed rather than settled. None identifies what.

3. What Partnerships Allocate

Read across the empirical literature, partners in international higher education collaborations report contesting, or being unable to influence, four things. They are distinguishable in principle and separable in practice, which is what makes them useful as a set.

Agenda authority is control over what the collaboration is about: the research question, the curricular content, the definition of the problem the partnership addresses. Network members report losing it not through exclusion from meetings but through the structure of the funding call that preceded the meeting (Van der Veken et al., 2017). Where a partnership responds to a call written elsewhere, the agenda arrives with the money and the joint committee's task is implementation. Academics in low-income East African systems describe the resulting arrangement as non-reciprocal, and place it alongside weak internationalisation structures and brain drain among the constraints they face (Moshtari & Safarpour, 2024). Mormina and Istratii (2021) make the sharper version of the point: capacity development that does not ask capacity for what has answered the question by default.

Resource custody is control over money, equipment and data, meaning not the volume received but the position in which it is held. The distinction matters because sub-award status and co-investigator status differ in almost every respect that governs a partnership's operation: who reports to the funder, who bears compliance cost, who can reallocate a budget line mid-project, who may terminate. Flint et al. (2022) show how United Kingdom funding architecture assigns those positions before any partnership agreement is written. Charani et al. (2022) identify funders as the actors whose practices set the terms, and call for direct funding to institutions rather than through an intermediary in a high-income country.

Epistemic authority is standing to determine what counts as evidence and as a contribution: which methods are recognised, which language the work is written and assessed in, which venues confer credit. It is the good most often described and least often treated as allocable. Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2021) frames it as the position from which knowledge is enunciated. Cummings et al. (2023) extend Fricker's epistemic injustice to its structural and systemic forms, including linguistic injustice. Ramírez-Castañeda (2020) supplies the concrete measure: among Colombian doctoral students in the biological sciences, 43.5% reported an article rejected or returned on grounds of English grammar, and 33% declined to attend international meetings because presentation was required in English. Morley et al. (2018) report epistemic exclusion as a persistent feature of academic mobility even where the material gains are substantial.

Accountability direction settles a matter partnerships rarely put explicitly, which is to whom the arrangement owes an account of itself. Where reporting runs upward to a funder, the partnership's performance is defined by the funder's categories, and the partner institution's own priorities enter only where they coincide. Mason (2020) reviewed the evidence on disclosure in sustainability governance and found that transparency improves the communication of affected parties' interests while doing little to give them capacity to sanction or steer. Nonet et al. (2022) name the same problem as the material-coupling failure of multi-stakeholder engagement, distinct from relational and cognitive alignment. In development cooperation the debate about ownership has circled this point for two decades without settling it (Morvaridi & Hughes, 2018).

Two features of this set matter for what follows. The goods are separable: a partnership can devolve resource custody while retaining agenda authority, and the practice of sub-granting an implementation budget for a question defined elsewhere is common enough to have its own critique (Franzen et al., 2017). And they are jointly sufficient to account for the reported grievances. Every complaint in the interview studies cited above resolves into a claim about the custody of one of the four, which is the empirical warrant for treating the set as complete for present purposes rather than merely convenient.

4. Procedural and Allocative Instruments

The framework's central move follows directly. Sort the governance instruments used in international higher education partnerships by whether their operation transfers custody of any of the four goods. Two classes appear, and the line between them does not track the line between weak and strong instruments, or between soft and hard ones.

Procedural instruments regulate participation, deliberation, disclosure and declaration. They determine who is present, what is discussed, what is made visible and what is stated on the record. Memoranda of understanding, joint steering committees, consultation rounds, partnership principles, codes of conduct, equity checklists and reflexivity statements are all of this kind. So, less obviously, are most capacity-building activities: training transfers skill to individuals without changing who decides what those skills are used for.

Allocative instruments transfer custody. Direct grant-holding by the partner institution moves resource custody. A partner-defined call, or a requirement that the research question originate with the partner, moves agenda authority. First-author defaults tied to the site of data generation, publication in partner-country venues, funded translation and multilingual review move epistemic authority. Reporting obligations that run to the partner institution and to affected communities, rather than only to the funder, move accountability direction.

Table 1 sorts the instruments the literature describes. The pattern in the final column is the finding: the instruments that have proliferated fastest are almost entirely procedural.

Table 1

Governance instruments in international higher education partnerships, classified by the goods whose custody they move

Instrument	Class	AG	RC	EA	AD	Documented in
Memorandum of understanding; joint steering committee	Procedural	–	–	–	–	Lanford (2019); Fumasoli & Rossi (2021)
Partnership principles and codes of conduct	Procedural	–	–	–	–	Schroeder et al. (2019)
Equity checklists applied across the project cycle	Procedural	–	–	–	–	Hodson et al. (2023)
Structured reflexivity statements published with the article	Procedural	–	–	○	–	Morton et al. (2022)
Training, mentorship and fellowship provision	Procedural	–	–	○	–	Franzen et al. (2017); Kasprowicz et al. (2020)
Consultation on an agenda already funded	Procedural	–	–	–	–	Van der Veken et al. (2017)
Direct grant-holding by the partner institution	Allocative	–	●	–	●	Charani et al. (2022)
Partner-originated calls and question-setting	Allocative	●	○	–	–	Mormina & Istratii (2021)
First-author default tied to site of data generation	Allocative	–	–	●	–	Hedt-Gauthier et al. (2019); Skrivankova et al. (2023)
Funded translation; multilingual review and dissemination	Allocative	–	○	●	–	Ramírez-Castañeda (2020); Cummings et al. (2023)
Fee waivers and diamond open access for partner authors	Allocative	–	○	●	–	Borrego (2023); Butler et al. (2023)
Reporting obligations owed to partner institutions	Allocative	–	–	–	●	Mason (2020); Nonet et al. (2022)
Consortium leadership vested in partner-country institutions	Allocative	●	●	○	●	Kasprowicz et al. (2020)

Note. AG = agenda authority; RC = resource custody; EA = epistemic authority; AD = accountability direction. ● indicates that the instrument transfers custody of the good; ○ indicates a partial or conditional transfer; – indicates no transfer. Classification is analytic: an instrument's class follows from what its operation moves, not from its formal strength. Compiled from the sources listed in the final column.

Four qualifications keep the distinction from hardening into a dismissal. First, procedural instruments are preconditions, not decoration. Without a forum, an agreement and a record, there is no place in which allocation can be raised, contested or even named; the interview studies show partners identifying asymmetries precisely because a partnership existed in which they could be identified (Craveiro et al., 2020). Second, several instruments sit on the boundary. Reflexivity statements move a small quantity of epistemic authority by making the division of labour assessable by editors and readers, and Morton et al. (2022) designed them to do exactly that. Third, the class of an instrument is a property of its operation rather than its text. A code of conduct that a funder makes a condition of disbursement operates allocatively even though its clauses are procedural, which is the first of the conversion conditions developed below. A fourth qualification cuts the other way and should be stated by its strongest advocates. Caniglia et al. (2023) argue that the quality of collaborative knowledge production turns on the situated judgement of the people doing it rather than on compliance with any procedure, which implies that classifying instruments by what they allocate may miss what actually determines whether a partnership goes well. The framework does not dispute that. It claims only that judgement operates on whatever the arrangement has placed within reach, and that custody determines the reach.

5. Participatory Settlement

If procedural and allocative instruments were merely different, the pattern in Table 1 would be an oversight and the remedy would be obvious. The framework's second claim is that the two classes interact, and that the interaction is what makes the pattern stable.

Procedural instruments do something that matters to the parties who hold the four goods. They generate legitimacy. Participation, disclosure and declaration produce evidence that the arrangement is fair, and that evidence circulates: to funders assessing a renewal, to institutional leaders reporting on internationalisation, to editors assessing a submission, to the partners themselves. The finding that trust, confidence and perceived equity drive the legitimacy of governance arrangements (Turner et al., 2016) holds here in a form that cuts against equity, because the perception can be produced by process alone. Legitimacy so generated is not counterfeit. Consultation did occur, the committee did meet, the statement was filed.

The consequence is that legitimacy and allocation come apart, and that the first substitutes for the second in the political economy of the partnership. A collaboration displaying good process faces less pressure to change custody than one displaying poor process, because the visible indicators of fairness are process indicators. Funders assess partnership quality through governance documentation. Institutions report internationalisation through partnership counts and agreements (Alexiadou & Rönnberg, 2022; Tight, 2021). Journals, until very recently, assessed nothing about the division of labour at all. Where every monitoring channel reads process, process is what improves.

This is participatory settlement: a stable configuration in which procedural instruments accumulate, satisfaction with process rises, perceived legitimacy rises with it, and custody of agenda authority, resource custody, epistemic authority and accountability direction remains where it began — with the pressure for allocative change falling as legitimacy rises. Figure 1 sets out the framework and the reinforcing loop that holds the configuration in place.

Figure 1

The allocation framework: procedural and allocative pathways in partnership governance

Note. The upper pathway shows procedural instruments producing participation, deliberation and disclosure, which generate perceived legitimacy. Dashed lines mark the reinforcing loop: legitimacy reduces the pressure for allocative change, and reduced pressure lowers the rate at which allocative instruments are adopted. The lower pathway shows allocative instruments transferring custody of the four goods. Conditions C1 to C5 are the conversion conditions stated as Propositions 1 to 5.

The configuration resolves several observations that are otherwise puzzling. Partnerships with mature governance and explicit equity commitments produce authorship distributions indistinguishable from those without them (Skrivankova et al., 2023) because the commitments operate on a channel that does not reach the byline. Partners report genuine benefit and persistent asymmetry in the same interview, a pattern so consistent across the capacity-building studies that it reads as contradiction until the two are recognised as reports about different goods (Craveiro et al., 2020; Matenga et al., 2019). And the agonistic critique's central observation follows without recourse to bad faith: consensus-oriented arrangements suppress dissent (Fougère & Solitander, 2020) because dissent is the only route by which an allocative question reaches a body constituted to handle procedural ones.

A finding from outside higher education fits the same shape. Mason (2020) found that disclosure improves the articulation of affected parties' interests while doing little to enable them to sanction or steer. That is participatory settlement stated in the vocabulary of environmental governance, and its appearance in a separate domain suggests the configuration is a property of governance arrangements under certain conditions rather than a feature of any one field's practice.

Participatory settlement is not a claim that the parties holding the four goods act strategically to retain them. The configuration requires no such intention. It follows from two ordinary facts: procedural instruments are cheaper, faster and less contested to adopt than allocative ones, and the channels through which partnerships are monitored read process. Where those two hold, the configuration forms whatever anyone intends. That is what separates this account from the stronger versions of the legitimation critique, which read the instruments as capture (Meagher, 2021). Capture is one route into the configuration, not the only one, and the account does not depend on it.

6. When Procedure Becomes Allocation: Five Propositions

The framework would be of little use if procedural instruments never converted. They do. The cases in which the literature reports movement share features that the cases without movement lack, and those features can be stated as conditions. The propositions below are offered for empirical test; each specifies an observable that would count against it.

Proposition 1 (default rule). A procedural instrument converts to allocative operation when it establishes allocation as the default state rather than as an outcome available on request. An instrument that permits a partner institution to hold the grant leaves resource custody where the transaction cost of asking places it. An instrument that requires the partner institution to hold the grant unless a documented reason exists moves it. The waiver literature supplies the test case: fee waivers for authors from low-income settings are available on application and, reviewed across two decades of evidence, have not extended access as intended, in part because the criteria for qualifying and the act of applying carry their own costs (Borrego, 2023). Diamond open access, which requires no application, allocates by default.

Proposition 2 (external standing). A procedural instrument converts when a party outside the partnership holds standing to enforce it. Instruments enforced within a partnership are enforced by the parties who hold the goods, which makes enforcement conditional on the outcome it is meant to produce. The journal-side interventions are the clearest instance: the consensus statement on equitable authorship works through editors, who are outside the collaboration, control something the collaboration needs, and assess the reflexivity statement as part of the decision to publish (Morton et al., 2022). Funders occupy the equivalent position on the resource side, which is why Charani et al. (2022) direct their argument to them rather than to the partners.

Proposition 3 (within-cycle irreversibility). A transfer of custody holds when it cannot be reversed within the funding cycle in which it occurs. Devolved authority that can be recalled is delegated authority, and delegation does not change custody. A budget line released at a project's start and administered by the partner institution for the project's duration allocates; the same sum released tranche by tranche against milestones assessed by the lead does not. This is why the sustainability of partnership arrangements is a question about custody rather than about goodwill (Lanford, 2019), and why consortium models that vest leadership in partner-country institutions for the full award period behave differently from those that rotate a chair (Kasprowicz et al., 2020).

Proposition 4 (bundling). Agenda authority and resource custody must move together or neither transfer holds. Devolving money for a question defined elsewhere converts the partner into a contractor, a form the capacity development literature has described critically for two decades (Franzen et al., 2017). Devolving the question without the money produces an agenda the partner cannot pursue, which is the position the network members in Van der Veken et al. (2017) described. The prediction is specific and falsifiable: partnerships transferring one without the other should show no improvement over partnerships transferring neither, on any measure of the third and fourth goods.

Proposition 5 (measurement of allocation). Where evaluation measures allocation rather than process, procedural instruments convert; where it measures process, they do not. The reinforcing loop in Figure 1 runs through monitoring, and monitoring is the point at which it can be cut. Bibliometric studies of authorship position have already demonstrated that allocation is measurable at scale (Hedt-Gauthier et al., 2019; Wondimagegn et al., 2023), and the caution that affiliation data alone cannot distinguish extractive from collaborative practice is well taken (Purnell, 2024). Grant-holding position, agenda origin, publication language and reporting direction are all recordable at the partnership level, and none currently appears in the reporting frameworks through which internationalisation is assessed.

7. Discussion

7.1. Theoretical Implications

The framework closes the gap between the engineering and legitimation accounts by locating their disagreement in an unexamined premise both share: that partnership instruments operate on a single dimension along which arrangements are better or worse. Once instruments are sorted by what they allocate, both accounts turn out to be locally correct. Design does determine how well the deliberative and coordinating work of a partnership is done, which is what the collaborative governance literature has measured (Ansell & Gash, 2018; Dentoni et al., 2018). Design has not determined the distribution of authority, resources, epistemic standing or accountability, which is what the critical literature has measured (Kumar et al., 2024; Mormina & Istratii, 2021). The disagreement was about which dimension governance operates on, and the answer is that it operates on both, through different instruments, with different conditions of effectiveness.

The account also supplies something the polycentricity and network governance literatures have looked for. Morrison et al. (2019) called power in polycentric arrangements a black box and identified rule setting, issue construction and implementation as the sites at which it acts. The four goods specify what is at stake at each site, and the procedural-allocative distinction specifies which instruments touch them. Carlisle and Gruby's (2019) separation of the definitional attributes of polycentricity from the conditions under which it functions has the same structure as the argument here, and the propositions can be read as conditions of that kind. That the configuration appears in environmental disclosure (Mason, 2020) and in multi-stakeholder engagement for the development goals (Nonet et al., 2022) suggests it is not specific to higher education, though this article does not test that.

For research on higher education specifically, the framework reframes internationalisation as an allocation question. The literature has documented that national internationalisation strategies serve domestic priorities (Alexiadou & Rönnberg, 2022; Tight, 2021), that market-making actors reinforce existing asymmetries in the global south (Robertson & Komljenović, 2016), and that institutions use mobility to hold together conflicting mandates without structural change (Majee & Ress, 2020; Stein et al., 2016). Each of these is a claim about what internationalisation allocates. The critical scholarship on the ethics of internationalisation has argued that remedial efforts carry the assumptions that produced the problem (Pashby & Andreotti, 2016; Stein, 2016). Participatory settlement gives that argument a specifiable form: the remedial instruments carry the assumptions because they operate on process, and process is the dimension on which the asymmetry does not sit. The same reframing bears on how the sector's contribution is assessed. Findler et al. (2019) found that the literature on what higher education institutions do for sustainable development is dominated by project-level case studies and short of system-level analysis, which is what one would expect where the reporting channels record activity rather than allocation.

7.2. Implications for Institutions, Funders and Journals

The practical reading of the framework is a sequencing argument rather than a rejection of current practice. Institutions entering a partnership should treat the four goods as a design checklist and record their custody at the outset, in the same document that establishes the committee structure. Where custody is not transferred, the partnership can still be worth forming; what the framework rules out is describing it as equitable on procedural evidence.

Funders sit where Propositions 1 to 3 can be satisfied at once. Direct grant-holding by partner institutions moves resource custody and accountability direction together; making it the default rather than an option satisfies the first proposition; and funders enforce from outside the partnership, satisfying the second. The proposal is not new (Charani et al., 2022), and the framework explains why it has more effect than the checklist approaches with which it competes for attention.

Journals and publishers control the epistemic good more completely than any other actor, and the routes by which they do so are already documented. Author-side charges exclude by price and waivers have not compensated for it (Borrego, 2023; Butler et al., 2023; Frank et al., 2023). English-only submission and review impose a cost measurable in rejections and non-attendance (Ramírez-Castañeda, 2020). Reflexivity statements assessed by editors satisfy the external-standing condition and are already in use (Morton et al., 2022). Funded translation and diamond open access satisfy the default condition; waiver schemes do not.

The framework is silent on one thing that matters to practice. It specifies the conditions under which custody moves; it does not specify whether moving custody improves the substantive quality of the work, and the evidence on that question is thin in every direction. Consortium models that vest leadership in partner-country institutions report benefits (Kasprowicz et al., 2020), and the argument for them in that literature is made on grounds of equity and sustainability rather than of output quality. The framework should not be read as promising a quality gain it does not establish.

7.3. Limitations

Four limits bound the account. It is conceptual: the four goods, the two instrument classes and the settlement condition are derived from published evidence and have not been operationalised or tested, and the propositions are offered as testable rather than as tested. The evidence base is uneven, drawn disproportionately from health research partnerships, whose funding architecture is unusually concentrated and whose authorship conventions are unusually well studied; whether the configuration holds where funding is more diffuse is unknown. The four goods are claimed to be sufficient for the grievances the literature reports, which is weaker than a claim to exhaustiveness, and a further good such as control over infrastructure or over the training pipeline might prove separable on evidence not examined here. And participatory settlement is specified as a configuration rather than measured as one; distinguishing it empirically from slow implementation requires longitudinal data on custody that no current reporting framework collects, which is a limitation of the account and an argument for Proposition 5.

7.4. Future Research

The work the framework most needs is measurement. Partnership-level indicators of custody for each of the four goods would allow a test of whether custody moves independently of procedural indicators. Grant-holding position, agenda origin, first-author position by site of data generation, publication language and reporting direction are all recordable, and the bibliometric work shows the authorship component is already tractable at scale (Skrivankova et al., 2023; Wondimagegn et al., 2023). Proposition 4 admits a more direct test, comparing partnerships that transfer agenda authority and resource custody together against those transferring one alone; existing funding portfolios contain both arrangements in sufficient numbers. Beyond health and beyond research, transnational teaching consortia, joint degree programmes and university-industry arrangements allocate the same four goods under different funding structures, and the knowledge exchange literature has mapped their instruments without asking what those instruments move (Miller et al., 2018; Skute et al., 2019). Whether the configuration appears where the fourth helix is civil society rather than a partner university is an open and answerable question (Cai & Etzkowitz, 2020; Compagnucci & Spigarelli, 2020).

8. Conclusion

The instruments of partnership governance have multiplied while the distributions they were meant to correct have held. This article has argued that the two facts are compatible because most of those instruments regulate process, and the distributions are matters of allocation. Four goods are allocated in an international higher education partnership: authority over the agenda, custody of resources, standing to determine what counts as knowledge, and the direction in which accountability runs. Governance instruments either move custody of these or they do not, and the class that has grown fastest does not. The result is participatory settlement, in which good process generates the legitimacy that would otherwise be the pressure for allocative change.

The argument does not counsel abandoning procedural instruments. It counsels sequencing them behind allocative ones and reading them for what they are. It also yields five conditions under which procedure converts: allocation by default, enforcement from outside, transfers that cannot be recalled within the cycle, agenda and resources moving together, and evaluation that measures where the four goods sit. Each is stated so that evidence could contradict it. The framework's usefulness will be settled by whether anyone collects that evidence, and the case for collecting it is that a field which has spent twenty years improving what it measures has not yet measured what it says it wants to change.

Declarations

Funding. This research received no external funding.

Conflicts of Interest. The author declares no conflict of interest.

Use of AI and AI-assisted technologies. Generative artificial intelligence tools were used solely to improve the readability and language of the manuscript. The author conceived the research question, developed the analytical framework, appraised and interpreted all sources, and drew all conclusions. The author reviewed and edited all content and take full responsibility for the accuracy and integrity of the published work.

Ethics Statement. This article is a conceptual analysis of published scholarly literature. It involved no human participants, no animal subjects and no primary data collection, and ethical approval was therefore not required.

Data Availability. No datasets were generated or analysed. All sources supporting the argument are cited in the reference list and are publicly available through the identifiers given there.

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