Developing a Governance Typology of UN-Business Partnerships

Project context

Partnerships between business and the United Nations have become an integral part of the UN system. Partnerships can take many forms, ranging from bilateral, time-bound cooperation agreements that follow clear legal rules to global awareness-raising campaigns with no defined governance structures. They may be classified across many levels, for example, by looking at the participants involved, their geographic dimension or their function, among many other potential criteria. Due to their diversity, partnerships are exceedingly difficult to categorize in an applied yet comprehensible way.

Project objectives

The goal of the project is to develop a new partnership typology based on partnerships’ governance structures – from bilateral agreements to massive global campaigns. Whereas previous typologies were based directly around the needs of the UN or the contributions of business, the typology we propose goes a step further by identifying which type of partnership can be utilized for achieving goals, how this partnership could and should be structured and what the advantages and disadvantages of each type are. Through the new typology, UN partnership practitioners will get a better idea of how to design and implement more beneficial partnerships and of how to achieve success within each type of partnership.

For more information on this project, contact Wade Hoxtell.