North-South/South-North partnerships: closing the 'mutuality gap'

This article examines mutuality and difference in partnerships. Partnership is a widely-debated concept: it can represent collaboration based on equality and mutually-beneficial processes and outcomes; it can also involve highly unequal power relations and determination of means and ends. The article examines the construction of mutuality based on difference in practitioner to practitioner partnerships between local governments in Uganda and the UK. It argues that some of the lessons from these partnerships can help to rethink partnership in other contexts. First,practitioner to practitioner partnerships can pose an alternative to partnerships based simply on division of labour between organisations. Second, partnerships conceived as learning models that build on mutuality and difference offer the potential to challenge power relations. Rethinking how practitioner to practitioner partnerships can be made more effective in this respect can provide models for other types of partnership

Fathers on Leave Alone in Portugal: Lived Experiences and Impact of Forerunner Fathers

In Portugal there has been a continuing enhancement of fathers’ leave entitlements over the last two decades. Policy goals have underlined the improvement of workfamily balance for both parents and the well-being of the child as well as the promotion of gender equality, in particular through the increased involvement of fathers in child care. The last reform of the parental leave system, in 2009, addressed all these objectives but put a strong emphasis on fatherhood and gender equality by increasing paternity leave to 4 weeks of fully-compensated leave (taken with the mother after childbirth) and, more importantly, by introducing a 1-month ‘bonus scheme’ in case of gender sharing of leave (Wall and Leitão 2014 ).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio