Paper short abstract:

This paper uses ownershipping as an analytical tool for grasping public – private partnership in development processes. It captures taxonomical activities and practices relating to how actors representing various systems and rationalities establish common platforms and language.

Paper long abstract:

From the development buzzword “ownership,” I have coined the term ownershipping as an analytical tool for grasping public – private partnership in development processes in Ethiopia. I use it to capture bureaucratic or taxonomical activities and practices relating to how actors representing various systems and rationalities establish common platforms and an institutional language. The shipping aspect points to how concepts travel and new entities come to own them. This makes it possible to capture the making of bureaucratic taxonomies, the making of commitment to policies, the creation of responsibility for processes and how various subjectivities in this process become connected and disconnected in development processes geared towards public – private partnership. Ownershipping serves to explicate how various meanings of words, rationalities and practices are shipped up and down, back and forth within a global hierarchy through various individual efforts to connect and make sense locally. It provides a good point of entry for understanding variations in how people in this business see the world and make connections and disconnections. The paper further describes how ownershipping takes the form of pick and choose activities and as a catching-up phenomenon between actors, systems and elements pertaining to development processes in Ethiopia. The paper combines ownershipping with the term catching up as a specific characteristic of entrepreneurship and as a mechanism of public – private partnerships.