Workshop on Partnerships for Sustainable Development

On 15 April 2005, GPPi, CIESIN (a unit of The Earth Institute at Columbia University), and the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagements at Colby College co-hosted a research workshop on partnerships for sustainable development during the meetings of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD).

The workshop was organized under the auspices of the Seed Initiative and took place at UNDP offices in the Chrysler Building in New York City. GPPi is the coordinator of the Seed Initiative Research & Learning Channel. Around 30 researchers and practitioners attended the workshop. Together, they discussed ongoing projects and future priorities of partnership research with the aim of coordinating practitioners’ needs and research activities across various disciplines.

Partnerships involving governments, international organizations, corporations and civil society organizations have attracted much attention from researchers and policy makers. They continue to occupy a high profile in ongoing efforts to implement sustainable development objectives in a variety of contexts. Yet the body of usable knowledge concerning partnerships as a mechanism for achieving sustainable development goals remains weak, and therefore the workshop focused on strengthening knowledge in this area.

The specific objectives of the workshop were as follows:

• Share recent research results on sustainable development partnerships Outline planned future research directions  
• Identify potential areas of collaboration
• Evaluate the salience of research findings against practitioner needs
• Identify priority research needs for the short, medium and long term
• Build a partnership research network to coordinate future activities

For a summary of the event please click here, for the workshop agenda click here.