What the word ‘partnership’ conjoins, and what it does

Abstract

This essay proposes that ‘global health partnership’ might usefully be conceived as a boundary object, in that the term’s capacity to encompass widely divergent and incompatible understandings, and to facilitate mutual misunderstandings, is a crucial part of how it ‘works’ in the world to help bring together assemblages of people and organizations across great distances and steep gradients of inequality.