Institutional learning and unlearning in North-South university collaborations

Transforming practices, habits, and institutional arrangements in North-South University cooperation requires a lot of reflection and experimentation of "doing otherwise". Hence, learning and unlearning, in institutional in addition to individual sense, are core concepts in moving towards more equitable partnerships, and more predominantly, in efforts of decolonizing collaborations. This paper builds on and expands a co-authored article by me and Ajali M. Nguyahambi, titled "Institutional Learning in North–South Partnerships: Critical Self-Reflection on Collaboration Between Finnish and Tanzanian Academics", published in 2020 in journal Forum for Development Studies. First, based on Gregory Bateson's classic idea, it introduces a theoretical approach of qualitatively different "levels of learning" and unlearning, which will be enriched and challenged with the emerging critical research on North-South university collaborations. Second, the approach is used as a lens to draw critical "lessons learned" on several collaborations between Finnish and Tanzanian, Ugandan, and Zambian universities where I have participated as a team member or a Principal Investigator for over 20 years. The paper reflects learning and unlearning as first, improving practices, second, reforming collaborations, and third, transforming institutional presumptions, paying also attentions to the enabling and constraining factors stemming from diverse funding modalities.