The architecture of unequal partnership: power, knowledge, and North–South research collaboration

North-South research collaborations are often narrated as spaces of mutual learning, capacity building and global knowledge exchange. Yet beneath this language of partnership lies a more enduring architecture of inequality, where agenda-setting, resources, and scholarly recognition remain unevenly distributed. Too often, scholars and institutions in the Global South enter these spaces as implementers or data providers rather than as intellectual partners and leaders, reproducing older histories of extraction and dependency. Grounded in postcolonial and decolonial theory and informed by Southern epistemologies, including relationality, this paper interrogates the structural, epistemological, ethical and infrastructural conditions that shape contemporary research partnerships. It examines how funding, governance, metrics, contracts, and institutional procedures quietly organise the distribution of power. The paper argues that equitable collaboration cannot rest on principles alone; it must be built into the institutional architecture of partnership. Decolonising research collaboration therefore requires more than inviting new voices into inherited structures. It demands a reordering of the space itself; redistributing epistemic authority, governance power, resources, recognition and infrastructural capacity so that partnership becomes not a language of equality, but a practice of shared intellectual agency.