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‘Partnership’ is the leading paradigm in development. After the NGO boom, it not only led to significant global power shifts but also changed funding and agenda-setting schemes in nonprofit sectors. Based on multi-sited research in Burkina Faso, Sweden, and Switzerland, this article provides an ethnographic account of NGOisation processes and their effects on development associations in Burkina Faso. Its main goal is to scrutinise the interplays of time, bureaucracy, and power, which leads the article towards three key arguments. By working through the history of the association Biiga Neere, the article shows how partnership policies can rupture the institutional basis of associations by socially restructuring them. Through the newly-introduced concepts of ‘donor time’ and ‘temporal brokerage’, an analysis of the temporal struggles at different levels of the collaboration highlights a growing divergence between temporal routines of donors and populations. Finally, the article illustrates how social workers remember donors and how their memories play into their navigation of partner relations, which they perceive as volatile and arbitrary.

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