Accountability and commitment
Mutual accountability
In a partnership, partners should hold one another to account. There should be a sense of shared risk and shared reward. This sense of shared risk and reward can be one of the most significant, and potentially most often overlooked, elements of partnership accountability. If a partner agrees to deliver something and fails to do so, there should be consequences. But the range of ‘consequences’ are different from a transactional contract, where there may be withholding of payment for nondelivery of work.
Collective accountability
Whether or not there is a formal accountability requirement (eg towards a donor providing funding to the partnership), all partners should feel a collective responsibility for the partnership as a whole to deliver. This means going beyond being satisfied with simply delivering on their own commitments, and to look out to support other partners wherever one of them might be struggling to deliver, or to collectively increase resources where things may not be going exactly to plan (very common for partnerships operating in complex environments).