Partnerships for Sustainable Development: On the Road to Implementation

Following the presentation of the report, a first panel convened to discuss its findings. Marc Beckmann of UNDP’s Growing Sustainable Business Initiative underlined two important impacts of partnerships: they have a strong aptitude for facilitating capacity building and the transfer of technology and knowledge among partner organisations and they can be effective tools for creating market access for local products. He emphasised that business partners can play an important role in this respect through their expertise in marketing. The United Nations and donors could also make an important contribution to partnership success by creating a neutral space in which potential partner organisations can meet each other and by alleviating some of the risks inherent in partnerships. Specifically, he called upon the donor community to have patience for the necessary time partnerships take to successfully establish themselves and also encouraged them to make more resources available for impact assessment.

Sylvia Karlsson of the Finland Futures Research Centre raised a number of critical questions concerning local ownership. On the one hand, she cautioned that the legitimacy of local ownership is not always clear: who determines which local groups are included and on what basis? On the other, she challenged the audience to think about cases in which local ownership alone is not enough: what if local groups are not sufficiently aware of a problem they are creating and that might have an impact on other groups, e.g. concerning environmental degradation or health? She also emphasized the necessity of local ownership as means to more effective compliance and challenged the audience not to think of the costs of local ownership as a trade-off.

Dan Rundee of USAID’s Global Development Alliance contributed a donor’s perspective. He stressed that for partnerships to be successful, partner organisations need to have a significant overlap of interests and often need to undergo a culture change to be able to cooperate effectively. A crucial step for donors, he said, would be to allow themselves more room for the assumption of risks and more flexibility for investing in initiatives that have a for-profit component. In this regard, he voiced support for the findings of the report and added that USAID is moving in this direction. He also stressed that donors needed to understand their new role as relations managers.

Annik Dollacker of Bayer CropScience completed the initial round of comments by focusing on how businesses can contribute to the planning and management processes of partnerships. What differentiates corporations from governmental organisations or NGOs, according to her, are the entrepreneurial mindset and the result orientation of business. Throughout the development of a partnership, corporations can provide valuable contributions by evaluating markets, developing a business model for the partnership and ensuring that the partnership does not loose the focus on its goals. They "keep the train on track", she said.

The audience then discussed two questions in greater detail in breakout groups. The first group focused on local ownership. Based on comments from Ulrich Nitschke of InWEnt, the group discussed critical success factors for partnerships and local ownership. To identify common areas of interest between recipients and donors, the group concluded that partnerships should emerge out of a three step process. The first step consists of a needs analysis, where recipients express their needs and donors listen. Following a needs analysis, partners work to establish an environment of trust and finally build a partnership on this foundation. In this approach, stakeholders take the initiative to define clear and measurable desired outcomes and cooperate with donor partners to reach a common understanding about monitoring and evaluating the cooperation program. Such an approach entails a shift in traditional power balances: rather than one side dominating, governments, business, and civil society share knowledge and expertise (rather than simply cash) to make the partnership work.

To define the ground rules of cooperation and ensure transparency, the group considered the joint development of a written agreement or MOU key. Partners should review and adjust this agreement periodically to incorporate changes or issues that arise in the cooperation. Participants stressed that partnerships should be structured in a way that avoids dependencies.

Meryem Aaziz from GTZ in Morocco drew the group’s attention to a practical problem. To create local ownership, GTZ requires that local enterprises using its business development services pay for a share of the costs themselves. At the same time, GTZ trains local consultants to establish their capacity in this area. Other agencies, however, offer similar services for free, thus undermining efforts at building local ownership and strengthening local capacity. The group concluded that donors should coordinate their efforts and agree on common principles of engagement to avoid problems like these.

The second group discussed partnerships’ financial models. William Foote from EcoLogic Finance started the discussion by emphasizing the contribution partnerships can make in the "social capital market place", which is often dysfunctional, fragmented, characterized by ill-defined asset classes, missing positive feedback loops and poor performance measurement. In this situation of market failure, partnerships can improve the provision particularly of intangible assets. Joseph Adelegan, a Seed Awards winner, pointed out that financial and non-financial assets correspond to different organizational strengths of partnerships. The group concluded that partnership business models must develop strategies which consider both kinds of assets, as well as different organizational forms, partnerships as well as more hierarchical corporations. A platform for facilitating contacts between the private sector and partnerships in order to select appropriate partners to work together along the whole supply chain, providing technical assistance and sharing risks, was seen as important.

Considering the sustainable development process at large, John Christensen, Director of UNEP Risoe Center, raised the question of scalability. He mentioned that partnerships might be costly, but effective means for scaling up successful initiatives to achieve a larger impact on developing societies. He therefore urged the group to understand the partnership process in itself as the goal, not only as the way.

In the concluding panel, policy-makers drew conclusions from the debate. Jonathan Margolis of the US State Department emphasised the importance of partnerships to be able to demonstrate results – both in terms of the process used in partnerships and the outcomes generated – to be able to scale up their activities. Demonstrating results however presupposes that partners agree on evaluation and measurement of their joint achievements. It is therefore imperative that partners decide these essential questions at the very onset of their cooperation: How will collective profit be divided? What forms of contribution will ‘count’ in determining each payback? How should consultation services for example be weighed against direct financial investment?

Gabriel Lopez of IUCN underlined the necessity to capture and communicate the lessons learned in partnership activities to generate progress. He called for a better definition of the roles and responsibilities of the different sectors. Patricia Chaves of UNDESA described initiatives of UNDESA’s Division for Sustainable Development aimed at facilitating partnerships’ reports on progress and exchanges of experiences. She acknowledged that due to the diversity of partnerships, no "one size fits all" approach to reporting was possible.

Finally, Ros Andrews of the UK’s DEFRA explained his organisations main learnings as partnerships have become embedded as a way of working. He recognized partnerships as effective, though sometimes costly, mechanisms for implementation. He called for partnerships to monitor and evaluate internally, in a self-organised way as defined in the Bali principles for partnerships. He urged political decision makers to decide collectively what the next steps on the partnership agenda will be.