Australian Water Partnership
September 2023 – March 2024
The Challenge
The purpose of the evaluation was to focus on how partnerships have contributed to development and diplomacy outcomes from Australia-Mekong Water Facility (AMWF) under Australian Water Partnership (AWP) Phase 2.
AMWF expects partners to bring together a combination of appropriate technical skills, and a range of other skills including relationship building, local expertise, cultural awareness, and diplomacy. Nevertheless, AMWF acknowledges that successful partnerships can take time, and often require a combination of skills that are specific to the water sector combined with skills in relationship building, knowledge exchange, communication, and negotiation.
AWP has therefore commissioned the evaluation to identify which partnerships have been most successful, the elements of the partnership that have contributed to this success, as well as the challenges and obstacles that have limited success.
The Solution
The evaluation used a mixed-methods approach. At the start of the evaluation, the team drafted the evaluation matrix and associated approach to data collection and evidence analysis. A partnership rubric was also developed to guide both the consultation phase and to help shape the analysis of evidence.
Partners (both Australia-based and those representing the respective Mekong governments) were consulted through a combination of remote and in-person interviews conducted in Lao PDR, Thailand, and Vietnam. Data collection also included documentation compilation, review, and analysis; processing and analysis of secondary project data; and validation presentations both to Post in Bangkok, and to AWP.
Of enormous significance in the evaluation was the use of the rubric co-created with AWP. Co-creating the rubric (as per the Evaluation Plan) allowed stakeholders to co-define what effective partnerships look like within the context of AMWF. The rubric also helped delineate the scope of the evaluation, and it also provides a framework for collecting (e.g. the interview guideline with key partners followed the content of the rubric) and then organising the evidence, in addition to helping to ensure an agreed set of lenses for collaboratively making sense of the evidence.
The Outcome
The main deliverable was the Final Evaluation Report, but we also prepared a short Partnership Brief that was highly valued by the client.
The purpose of the Partnership Brief is to communicate to AWP’s partners key insights drawn from the Mekong Partnership Review.
The Partnership Brief provides a summary of the findings pertinent to successful partnerships, to shape AWP’s approach to brokering partnerships in the future.
