Enhancing the Effectiveness of Sustainability Partnerships Summary of a Workshop (2009) / Chapter Skim
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VI Partnerships for Sustainability: Examining the Evidence--Background paper prepared for the symposium--Derek Vollmer
VI Partnerships for Sustainability: Examining the Evidence--Background paper prepared for the symposium--Derek Vollmer
Pages 33-62
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From page 33... ...
The important role for national governments also tends to be underestimated or at least not fully realized as partnerships become operational. Effective partnerships tend to benefit from a flexible coordinating body (e.g., a secretariat)
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observations on the different classes or types of partnerships. THE ROLE OF PARTNERSHIPS IN A SUSTAINABILITY TRANSITION Partnerships and Sustainability Challenges To most partnership practitioners, the question of whether or not partnerships are uniquely suited to address complex sustainability challenges seems to have an obvious answer: of course they are.
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Public–private partnerships in water, sanitation, and numerous other sectors have formed not only as a way to deliver services more efficiently, but also to attract private investment in areas in which the public sector has either lagged or is currently incapable of providing the necessary resources. Major global partnerships such as the SEED Initiative and Global Water Challenge have helped shine the light on these public–private partnerships.
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Quantifying these benefits in comparison to measurable outputs is difficult but should not be overlooked. Finally, partnerships offer the opportunity to operationalize capacity-building efforts, which are consistently identified as a critical need for sustainable outcomes.
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(2001) brilliantly separated out "endearing myths" from "enduring truths" about successful partnerships, and point out that partnering organizations need not share common interests or goals, so long as the partnerships contains the right combination of institutional mandates and delivery mechanisms to achieve the individual aims of each partner.
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In particular, many global partnerships continue to be criticized as "donor-driven" rather than demand- or user-driven. Nonetheless, the most successful partnership efforts will be the ones that engage end users at the outset in developing sustainable solutions, e.g., having farmers substantially involved in initial discussions of an agricultural program.
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has been discussing patent pools for pharmaceutical research and production though this remains a contentious issue. 3 The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD)
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Global Water Challenge partners from the private and NGO sectors expressed surprise that the private sector partners were not being asked to contribute field expertise or specific knowledge (e.g., of supply chain management) to projects.
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to existing partnership efforts is one way to engage a national partner and access additional funding (Tomich et al., 2007)
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Partnerships that fail to identify this facilitator role, or conversely, turn it over too quickly to an existing organization, tend to quietly fade away without realizing their full potential. For each individual partner, it is useful to have "interface capacity" within their own institutions; this often requires some level of institutional reform, with the ultimate goal of integrating partnership-related work into the broader institutional framework (Witte and Reinicke, 2005)
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In the Agua para Todos case, local ownership is identified as being particularly critical to the success of the partnership; local owners are true owners because they finance part or all of the water distribution networks in their communities. The Global Water Challenge also places an emphasis on local ownership and seeks to identify creative financing mechanisms to make this a reality.
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In order to foster cross-cutting dialogue, it is organized into broad themes and attempts to identify some common challenges and potential solutions. Problem Definition One of the first advantages that a partnership approach brings to sustainability challenges is that it can identify highly specific problems and solutions, which help make sustainability issues more tangible (Hale and Mauzerall, 2004)
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. The Green Power Market Development partnership was successful in framing its issue in a way that appealed to its corporate partners, and in pooling existing interest in renewable energy into a particular direction.
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In particular, reputation seems to be a significant driver, especially for private sector partners, but this is often underestimated or written off. However, it is important to recognize that private sector partners can be drawn into partnerships even if they do not stand to directly profit from their involvement.
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Major Challenges In addition to the sustainability challenges partnerships seek to address, the partnerships themselves face several unique challenges, many of which are common to the field across both scales and sectors. Many partnerships cite resource constraints as a major challenge.
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National governments are continually cited as a missing link in many partnership activities. They do not necessarily need to be formal partners, but many partnerships lack even a connection.
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The Green Chemistry Institute has faced recent challenges from new partnerships or initiatives with strong and vocal champions. The Multilateral Initiative on Malaria has faced challenges from results-based global partnerships which, fair or not, seem better able to generate support than do research-based efforts.
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A centralized staff can facilitate communications, but partnerships also benefit from open and diverse lines of communication. The East Coast Fever partners communicated through scientific conferences and telephone and email correspondence, in addition to their regular annual meetings.
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Within a partnership, asymmetric accountability can undermine the partnership's effectiveness. The Sustainable Forest Products Global Alliance shows evidence of this, as private sector partners balked at having to report back to the U.S.
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. Partnerships such as the Global Water Challenge are starting to invest larger amounts in M&E -- sometimes this is all they contribute to ongoing projects -- because partners contend that it is critical to develop local monitoring capacity alongside on-the-ground projects, and that the results of this monitoring can help inform their decisions regarding future support.
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It could help partnerships strategically assess where their relative strengths are. The Green Chemistry Institute provides a good example of a partnership that has resisted the foray into research, recognizing its niche (and the perceived need)
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Public sector partners provide a number of supporting roles, both tangible (market development) and intangible (legitimacy)
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Connecting these projects to knowledge networks is one step. National governments also play an important role in developing suitable policy climates to support scale-up of projects and programs (SEED, 2007)
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. As the East Coast Fever Vaccine case points out well, it is also imperative that partners identify an endpoint and exit strategy if the project is not producing desired results.
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As the REEEP case points out, most energy partnerships are heavy on knowledge dissemination, the "widest and weakest tool in achieving sustainable development goals." Ideally, all partnership efforts could make a contribution to disseminating information, but the reality is that thousands of disparate guidebooks and web sites proclaiming best practices will only serve to clutter the landscape. Thus, a primary challenge is harnessing all of this knowledge being generated in labs and in the field, and making it widely available in formats that aid decision makers.
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, and Global Water Challenge (GWC) are three examples of large global partnerships that essentially give support to smaller, "on-the-ground" partnerships.
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Finally, although community-building and capacity-building efforts share common traits, practitioners from all types of partnerships remark that capacity building needs to be an integral part of almost any partnership activity. Effective partnerships tend to recognize this immediately.
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. "Thinking Globally and Acting Locally: Can the Johannesburg Partnerships Coordinate Action on Sustainable Development." Journal of Enironment & Deelopment 1�(3)
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The Contribution of Locally Driven Partnerships to Sustainable Development. Berlin, Global Public Policy Institute.
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