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Africa Knows! It is time to decolonise minds

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Accepted Paper: D16-06. To panel D16.

Title of paper:

Authors:

Casper Andersen (University of Aarhus);

Annette Skovsted Hansen (Aarhus University).

Long abstract paper:
In this paper, we try to combine the recent changes in international development studies with a human resource management and development perspective by looking at Capacity Development (CD) as the common meeting ground. CD has been pursued by political institutions and practitioners working in the public and private sectors. Recently we have seen theoretical contributions trying to combine the two disciplines of capacity development and human resource management (see Analoui and Danquah, 2017 and Danquah, 2017). However, exploring CD is a story about very diverse concepts understood, and used, in a variety of ways over the last two decades. Likewise HRM, is by no means characterized by a shared definition or a common understanding among practitioners and within the research community. It is based on many different approaches and success criteria, and different actors attach various meanings to the concept - from highly normative to a severe critique. But does it solve anything to combine two very diverse disciplines and try to apply them to practice? In the paper, we juxtapose international development literature with human resource management and introduce Garavan et al. (2018)'s model of multilevel analysis, as a potential solution to sort the many questions. We try to disentangle, reflect on, and debate these various understandings and potential challenges - using examples from Ghana-Denmark public-private relations in and around the new Tema port terminal (MPS), the largest in West Africa. Through this illustrative example, which is part of a longer, on-going, project, it is our hope to qualify the CD conceptual approaches within the two domains (what domains?) and to further develop the knowledge on cross-national public private partnerships in international development.

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