Today higher education is an increasingly important part of the world economy. However, the legacies of colonial rule, Cold War conflict, the debt crisis, and decades of austerity have left African universities under-resourced, overcrowded, and struggling to integrate into transnational circuits of academic exchange and collaboration. As a result, the ‘economic and epistemic asymmetries between the North and South remain enormous’ (p. 7). African universities – and institutions across the global South – have sought to narrow this gap by developing transnational higher education partnerships (THEPs) with foreign institutions. On the one hand, both African and Western institutions desire to develop working partnerships with each other while, on the other hand, there exists a persistent difficulty of doing so on an equal footing.

It is into this political tension that Koehn and Obamba's book The Transnationally Partnered University makes an important contribution. Specifically, the authors seek to understand whether the ‘reality of partnership matches its golden rhetoric’ (p. 7). The authors start by examining the ways in which higher education has become an important part of national and international development agendas; a phenomenon they refer to as the ‘higher education-development nexus’ (p. 19). One of the book's important contributions is providing considerable background about the current state of such partnerships. While sometimes a bit too technical and detailed, the early chapters nonetheless give the reader a comprehensive overview of the current state of transnational academic partnerships.

The book's greatest contribution, however, comes in the chapters examining what successful partnerships looks like. Chapter 3, ‘Asymmetry and Symmetry in Transnational Higher-Education Partnership’, is a must-read for academics actively engaged in developing academic partnerships between Northern institutions and African universities. Koehn and Obamba begin by detailing ‘the staggering resource and knowledge inequalities between Northern and Southern researchers’, and documenting how these asymmetries ‘generate and reproduce structural-power and epistemological hegemonies’ that make ‘the construction of symmetrical partnerships’ exceptionally difficult (p. 74). The ‘legacy of colonial domination, structural asymmetries, and material inequalities’, for example, reappears every time Northern partners hire senior African academics as research assistants and ‘local facilitators’ rather than intellectual contributors (p. 75) – a problem all the more pronounced since Northern academics generally control the purse strings.

Without assuming that these material differences can be easily overcome, Koehn and Obamba nonetheless argue that scholars and administrators should work towards partnerships that are ‘near-symmetrical’ (p. 79) and ‘mutually transformational’ (p. 9). The following chapters examine how to initiate and construct (Chapter 4), manage (Chapter 5), build capacity for (Chapter 6), sustain (Chapter 7) and evaluate (Chapter 8) partnerships that are near-symmetrical. Given that most THEP initiatives come from Northern researchers, the authors recommend that African institutions reflect upon their own priorities and then actively seek out partnerships that fit ‘their own needs, academic initiatives, long-term and short-term research and development objectives, distinctive features, organizational commitments, and strengths’ (p. 88). Similarly, near-symmetrical captaincy building entails providing African institutions with the resources and technology to cultivate human and institutional capacity, while also encouraging ‘context-inspired creativity’ whereby African scholars are empowered to ‘initiate collaborative research and development efforts that transform Northern universities’ (p. 114). The book concludes with some examples of successful and not-so-successful partnerships between Northern institutions and two African universities: Jimma University in Ethiopia and Moi University in Kenya. The authors find that while transnational higher-education partnerships are not ‘a panacea’ they nonetheless ‘offer immense potential for improving living conditions for people in the South and North’ (p. 197).

The Transnationally Partnered University is a useful resource for those engaged in the study and creation of transnational higher education partnerships. I wish, however, that the authors examined why African institutions are commonly sought out as partners in development-related projects. I would have liked to see the authors engage the more fundamental question of how the very concepts and practices of ‘sustainable development’ are themselves products of material and epistemic asymmetries between African and Northern countries. The authors do not question, for example, why nearly all partnerships lie in health, medicine, agriculture and related fields (p. 67). The epistemic violence of colonialism, the Cold War, debt and austerity, however, also entails the fact that the very terms and concepts used to establish what is ‘sustainable’ and what is ‘development’ are also driven by Northern research agendas. In short, I would have liked to see the authors tackle the question of whether sustainable partnerships entail simply collaborating to develop new, mutually useful policy solutions, or whether it also entails learning new ways of knowing the world.