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The 21st Century Leadership Challenge


Multi-stakeholder partnerships are now a tried and tested approach to the intractable problems of poverty, environmental degradation and weak governance.
Their impact has been exciting, with clear benefits, but their full potential remains untapped.  Multi-stakeholder partnerships could achieve so much more if corporate, NGO and public policy frameworks were more explicitly supportive.

This Partnership Declaration is a call to action to you as leaders and decision makers to:

1. Revise existing policies to maximise the strategic value of multi-stakeholder partnerships.

2. Use your personal leadership to energise a culture of collaboration throughout your organisation and networks.

3. Adopt procurement procedures that stimulate, rather than inhibit, innovative partnerships.

4. Treat the governance of multi-stakeholder partnerships as seriously as you treat other important commitments.

5. Maximise the potential of your staff as partnership practitioners, for example, by revising staff appraisal criteria, investing in skills training and rewarding collaborative risk-taking.

6. Jointly measure qualitative as well as quantitative results, such as relationships, innovation, and new norms and practices.

7. Create a culture of good partnering behaviour by genuinely respecting the contribution of others.

The initial experimentation phase for multi-stakeholder partnerships is over. Growing expertise and evidence can now be channelled more ambitiously to fulfil your organisation’s primary purpose.  Further commitments from leaders in all sectors can create a dramatic leap in our ability to meet sustainable development goals.

Release the Power and Potential of Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships

 

Background to the Declaration

Definition

Multi-stakeholder partnerships involve two or more organisations from across the public, private and civil society spheres that enter into a collaborative arrangement. 
Multi-stakeholder partnerships move beyond unilateral actions and conventional contracts by pooling complementary resources and genuinely sharing the risks and benefits. 

This Declaration, the direct result of The Partnering Event(1) , is a call to action by an international group of 130 partnership professionals from all sectors and all continents.

We believe that multi-stakeholder partnerships have huge potential to create solutions to otherwise intractable local and global problems, including: continuing poverty, conflict and violence, social exclusion, inadequate public health services, environmental degradation and weak governance and accountability.

In our experience, when tailored to specific contexts and used carefully, partnerships can both drive innovative approaches and help each stakeholder group to fulfil its primary purpose.

Realising the Potential of Partnership

In many contexts, multi-stakeholder partnerships have now clearly moved beyond the experimental phase. With attention to the issues below, the potential of partnerships can be released.

Partnerships Require:

What Can Be Done

1) Flexible Public, Corporate and NGO Policies
  • Embed policies and procedures that realise the strategic value of multi-stakeholder partnerships
  • Systematically use partnership results to inform policy

2) Supportive Organisational Cultures
  • Position partnership as a valid way of enhancing core business
  • Build capacity to bridge the gap between partnership policy and operational practice
  • Ensure that organisational procedures do not inhibit partnership innovation

3) Appropriate Resource Allocation and Management
  • Adopt more flexible tendering procedures that encourage multi-stakeholder approaches
  • Give proper weight to all partner contributions (beyond funding)
  • Encourage funders to engage as equal partners

4) Sufficient Attention to Governance and Accountability
  • Specify and regularly review roles and responsibilities of partners
  • Create mechanisms to ensure mutual accountability and ownership of risks
  • Report successes and failures of partnership

5) Sufficient Investment in the Individual
  • Recognise that experienced practitioners can play an essential role in brokering partnerships
  • Invest in building the skills of key staff
  • Reward individuals for innovating and taking risks

6) Clearly Defined Evaluation
  • Create evaluation frameworks from the outset, helping partners to clarify their aspirations and modify their methods as the partnership progresses
  • Take into account both qualitative and quantitative impacts
  • Use evaluators familiar with the challenge of working across stakeholder groups

7) Improved Standards of Partnering Behaviour
  • Appreciate the organisational cultures and contexts in which different stakeholders operate
  • Recognise and respect the value of each partner’s contribution
  • Share responsibilities, risks and rewards

This Partnership Declaration is a call to action.  To have your say and source the evidence, go to: http://thepartnershipdeclaration.org

(1) An event led by the International Business Leaders Forum, the Overseas Development Institute and the University of Cambridge Programme for Industry held in Cambridge, UK, 24-26th September 2006