For collaboration to contribute at scale to the SDGs, significant investment in the overall enabling infrastructure, capacity and environment for partnering is required
By Darian Stibbe, Executive Director

Collaboration across societal sectors has emerged as one of the defining concepts of international development in the 21st Century. Initially a response to the limitations of traditional state-led, aid-funded, top-down linear development approaches, partnership has grown to become an essential paradigm in sustainable development: its importance has been recognised fully both by business and by all of the leading institutions in the international development field, and embedded within the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – the blueprint for global development.

The SDGs explicitly acknowledge the interconnectedness of the prosperity of business, of society and of the environment. They represent a fundamental shift, naming all societal sectors as key development actors, and requiring an unprecedented level of cooperation and collaboration among civil society, business, government, NGOs, foundations and others for their achievement.

TPI’s vision is a new era of systematic, complex collaboration that delivers the SDGs.

It is a world in which business becomes a full partner in development working alongside states, NGOs, international agencies and academia; in which collaboration between diverse organisations is the norm rather than the exception; in which all sectors of society appreciate the interconnectedness of their interests and actively seek to align, leverage and combine their energies, resources and investments wherever value can be created; in which the Sustainable Development Goals are not just an aspiration but a real, practical focus for development – development based on innovative and transformative partnerships.

While large-scale international partnerships will continue to play a role, we need a whole range of different forms of collaboration, from those that catalyse financial investment by business to more holistic, multiple-issue partnerships at the country or local level that can address the complexity of interlinked goals. This need characterises a new era in multi-stakeholder collaboration: an era of complex partnering.

Turning the rhetoric into reality

Cooperation across societal sectors, however, is difficult. There are a myriad of challenges from the political to the institutional to the individual that stand in its way.

For partnerships to achieve their full potential, the following ‘building blocks’ need to be in place:

1. Policy: There is strong awareness and supportive international and national policies are in place to enable governments to collaborate with business and other actors as partners in development;
2. Infrastructure: An ‘infrastructure’ is in place that can systematically convene the different societal sectors around key issues and catalyse innovative partnership action, in particular at country and local levels;
3. Partnerships: Partnerships follow good practice around process, transparency, setup and management to maximise their quality and impact and ensure they deliver impact and added value to all;
4. Organisations: Organisations of all kinds are ‘fit for partnering’ i.e. they have the right leadership and strategy, systems and processes, staff competencies and support, and outwards-looking culture to partner with excellence;
5. Individuals: Individuals have the essential competencies to partner with excellence: partnering mindset, understanding of other sectors, human relationship and trust-building skills, and technical knowledge.

While efforts in all these areas are ongoing by TPI and a variety of other organisations, we need to magnify those efforts through cohesion, collaboration and investment to be able to create scale of impact.

Shifting towards a collaborative society will not happen by chance and instead requires a deliberate, concerted and targeted effort to help make it happen. And with the clock ticking quickly towards 2030, there is no time to lose.

Why getting your own organisation behind a partnership is where most of the hard work lies
By Dave Prescott, Senior Advisor

The term ‘intrapreneur’ has emerged to describe people who stimulate innovation within their companies. A similar role describes the people who are able to navigate the various parts of their own organisations to enable them to engage in a partnership. Taking a cue from this recent HBR article, we can suggest the term ‘internal politician’ to describe an organisation’s partnership champion.

Based on TPI’s experience, it appears though internal work can represent a significant part, if not the majority, of the effort required to make a partnership successful. However brilliant an idea for partnership, however strong the strategic fit, however clear the mutually beneficial objectives, most time and energy usually ends up being invested on internal organisational issues.

Building internal alignment is difficult for at least two reasons: structures, and individuals. Organisational structures can either actively support or strongly block collaborative efforts. And then there’s the human beings. Factors such as communication difficulties, power dynamics, jostling for position, risk aversion, job security fears and clashing egos are all present. Add in the presence of an external partner organisation (or two, or more), where organisational structures and human beings differ, and problems can rapidly multiply.

How to get around these problems? As usual there is no silver bullet solution, but some analysis of an organisation’s structure and key individuals can help to provide useful context. One suggestion is to consider a spectrum with a high degree of centralisation of power at one end and a high degree of decentralisation at the other.

Highly centralised organisations have an obvious hierarchy and clearly delineated roles and responsibilities. Such organisations might be expected to have efficient systems to appoint the right people to a partnership role, and to enable partnerships to proceed efficiently through internal channels. But equally, the desire for centralisation and control can run counter to establishing innovative partnerships, where flexibility is required and decision-making needs to be shared.

At the other end of the spectrum, organisations can be highly federated, with country offices / departments / teams having a high degree of autonomy and their own strong views on partnership working. Some might be ideologically resistant to the idea of engaging business (or NGOs, or others), while others might take a far more pragmatic approach. In these cases, it may be a question of finding the right part of the organisation to work with, and accepting the limits to scale offered by that particular organisation.

Most organisations occupy different parts of the spectrum at different times. They may for example combine extreme hierarchy but have limited clarity on roles and responsibilities; in other cases, a highly chaotic-looking organisation may be very efficiently staffed. The same organisation may at different times demonstrate both types of characteristic, often as a result of who is in charge. And so, while a clear understanding of organisational structure can be useful, it does not in itself imply any particular course of action: it simply helps one to ask the right questions.

Beyond structural factors lurk human beings. As a rule of thumb, people who have worked in more than one sector are normally good allies in progressing a partnership agenda. It can also be useful to consider the length of staff tenure in an organisation. Some long-standing (not necessarily senior) staff with long institutional memories may know short-cuts to getting things done, which overt and covert levers to pull, and so on.

To take a specific case in point: when it comes to the business of getting a partnering agreement developed, it may not be clear whether the procurement department is the first port of call, or the sponsorship department, or the legal department. A sympathetic colleague can cut through the noise and provide clear direction; a suspicious one might do the opposite.

Some seasoned internal politicians bring cross-functional teams along with them to meetings at the early stages of a partnership, to help develop internal traction. Other internal politicians insist on being copied on all correspondence relating to the partnership, so that at least one person knows the whole history of the collaboration, and whenever an issue arises they know the full context and are able to respond accordingly.

Even those with long experience of internal politics find a lot of their time is spent on internal alignment. It is not unusual to spend twice as much time navigating the internal barriers to a partnership agenda (explaining, negotiating, persuading, reframing, insisting, selling, withholding, as necessary), compared to the relatively easy work of external engagement. In fact, if you are expending this ratio of effort, you are probably going along the right lines.

TPI has defined some ‘MUST-have’ competencies for individuals to be effective partnership practitioners. And its ‘Fit for partnering’ framework helps organisations think through the internal structural and cultural issues that enable them to be an effective partner.

How some health NGOs can be bolder in their engagement with business

By Dave Prescott, Senior TPI Associate

I was recently invited to present TPI’s partnering toolkit on NCDs – developed last year in collaboration with Bupa and UICC – at EPHA’s annual conference. The memorable phrase ‘evil puppeteers’ was used in one presentation, in reference to the nefarious and shady activities of corporate lobbyists.

While significant progress has undoubtedly been made in some areas of business / public health relations (notably in the area of infectious disease control), it is surely time to break this us-and-them deadlock when it comes to combatting NCDs. Unless we urgently seek a more productive basis for private sector engagement, we will collectively fail to meet the SDGs.

To be fair to NGOs engaged in combatting NCDs, is not unusual. Each SDG community seems to have its own corporate demons and long and debilitating attacks on both sides over many years has meant that constructive engagement has been very slow. In the education sector, for example, the phrase ‘private sector’ often calls to mind private education providers among the NGO community, rather than the wider corporate sector.

Equally, in the water sector, civil society organisations are often wary of private water companies. They often feel that water should be a basic human right, not subject to the profit motive. The basic tension was summed up by the memorable (and possibly apocryphal) phrase from the head of a water company that ‘God provided the water, but not the pipes’.

It is important not to downplay the valuable watchdog role played by some NGOs whose mandate is to campaign against business, where other tactics have failed to improve practice. But in both of these cases, as well as in the case of infectious disease control, the public-private chasm has been breached.

Among some NGOs tackling NCDs there may be fears of co-option by business, not least when the company is funding its involvement in a partnership. However, it is possible to maintain critical independence while also collaborating with a company, as demonstrated by this example of engagement between Oxfam and Unilever.

And it is arguably more important for NGOs to ask themselves not “How can I avoid being co-opted by business when in partnership?” but “How can I ignore a potential source of solutions to the NCD challenge I’m tackling?” For example, around ten years ago the development NGO PACT made the strategic decision to engage more strongly with the private sector. PACT’s CEO Mark Viso argued that, as an anti-poverty NGO, his organisation had a responsibility to explore every possibility to help reduce poverty, including fundamentally shifting its approach to business engagement.

Viso says that: “At Pact, we wholeheartedly believe that a world where poor and marginalized people can exercise their voice, build their own solutions and take ownership of their future. Everything we do is in service of them and delivering on our promise of a better tomorrow. We felt obligated to explore every possibility for delivering on that promise, which is why we undertook this change within the organisation”. (Emphasis added).

Shifting to a more open mindset does not come easily. We all adopt the norms and behaviours of our organisations and sectors, it is hard to critically question unspoken rules, and we are rarely incentivised to consider whether there may be merit in different approaches.

However, when we have empathy for the motivations, strengths and limitations of other approaches, this tends to lead to the kind of integrated approach that is needed to achieve the SDGs.

An initial suggestion to public health professionals would be to begin by searching for alignment of interests, rather than fearing conflict of interests. TPI has developed a practical tool that can help unpick conflicts of interest. What if we started from the assumption that large companies can have a positive impact on human health? How would this change relationships with companies? And what would it look like in practice?

The first task would be to look beyond the politically-charged usual suspects in the private sector. Instead, consider how the rest of the business community is addressing NCDs. Recall the parallel with the water sector: following years of unsuccessful engagement with water companies, parts of the development community have now found constructive engagement opportunities with large food and drink companies such as Nestle and Coca-Cola.

Such companies have identified increasing water scarcity as an existential risk to their business. Recognising this, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) has established ‘Water Funds’ in many countries. We might ask how TNC – a not-for-profit organisation, with high accountability ratings and a large number of scientists and technical specialists within its organisation – has been able to work with a major Coca-Cola bottler and maintain its integrity.

Another example comes from the area of early childhood development (ECD), where an organisation called ReadyNation International offers advocacy tools for business to use to lobby governments to improve ECD policy.

Significantly, ReadyNation focusses work on companies that have fewest direct business interests in early childhood development – instead looking at the general business community. It helps its business members makes a case for policy action on ECD based not on morality or philanthropy, but on an evidence-based combination of neuroscience and economics.  As a result of advocacy efforts to mobilise more domestic resources in Uganda, the government has increased spending on education from 11.1% to 12%.

For public health professionals accustomed to hearing the phrase ‘corporate lobbying’ and assuming the very worst, it is well worth investigating the work of ReadyNation.

Another key question to ask is how NCD challenges look when considered from a business perspective. Might their employees be affected? Do the health challenges pose a business risk (as with the example of water scarcity highlighted above)? Might they create business opportunities?

And we may consider some specific cases:

• why is a company like Nike re-inventing itself as a health and wellbeing company?
• why is Google’s parent company, Alphabet, investing billions of dollars in healthcare?
• why has South African insurance company Vitality set up its own health institute?
• why has Denmark’s Velux, a window manufacturer, decided to invest in two brand new servers to handle all the health data that it was processing?

While each company assesses a risk:reward ratio using its own specific metrics, one theme that is common across sectors is the vast business opportunity presented by the SDGs. This report from the Business Commission on Sustainable Development has identified that ‘achieving the SDGs is estimated to create at least $12trn worth of business opportunities in four key economic systems: food and agriculture; cities and urban mobility; energy and materials; and health and wellbeing.’ Clearly, all four of these economic systems relate to the NCD crisis.

Viewing business activity as either inevitably evil (or inevitably positive, for that matter) is a symptom of thinking in silos. We all do it, we’re often not aware of it; it’s how we make sense of the world. But silos are arbitrary and unnatural, and they prevent the kind of systemic thinking needed to achieve the SDGs. We urgently need to build some bridges.

This blog was first published on Business Fights Poverty 

by Valérie Amato

Two years after the adoption of the Global Goals (also called the Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs), there are still too few champions, ambassadors and implementers of this ambitious agenda. There are also too few partnerships for the goals being showcased, to inspire others and invite further action.

Setting the Scene

Our complex, interconnected and fast-changing world requires new ways of thinking and working, new approaches to shaping the future.

As shown by the new social, economic and political realities affecting us all, within and beyond national borders, our world is increasingly complex. For the many years to come, there will be multiple factors which will continue to disrupt efforts of numerous actors to deliver effective positive change. Key issues at hand are messy and interlinked. How to secure essential access to food, energy and water to a growing population? How to tackle stubborn inequality? What about climate change, a key threat to both people and the planet? We know that there will be more and more people living in cities; what are the implications in terms of infrastructure and health? How can we make sure we don’t carry on wasting precious, finite natural resources? How to put an end to conflict and violence?

These issues, with their global and interlinked ramifications, represent both threats and opportunities to effective transformational change. Individual lives are increasingly interconnected, facing the same risks. We only need to look at the long-term impact and systemic nature of the financial and refugee crises. There is also now a convergence of worlds, with businesses being asked to play an increasingly important and positive role in society, and NGOs now looking at innovative business models and ways of engaging with business. Cross-sector conversations are now becoming broader and more strategic – well beyond traditional CSR and fundraising concerns.

It is against this backdrop that the Global Goals for Sustainable Development were adopted in September 2015. The successors to the Millennium Development Goals are both highly ambitious and transformative. They have also been designed to integrate the three key dimensions of sustainable development: social, economic and environmental. Reflecting an inclusive and universal approach to development, the new goals were defined as a result of multiple level conversations and extensive consultations among numerous stakeholders, over a period of over three years. The new sustainable development agenda invited citizens to imagine and design a new world.

Indeed, the new Global Goals are aimed at a much larger and diverse audience, and calls for urgent individual and collective action – at scale.

Development, previously reserved to a close, exclusive circle of experts, has now become everyone’s concern, due to the scope and scale of the new agenda to be delivered by 2030. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (“SDGs”) include and integrate cross-cutting issues like peace, inequality, sustainable consumption and production patterns, cities and climate change. They are ambitious in nature and envisage the eradication (as opposed to the significant reduction) of key human development challenges such as hunger, poverty and preventable child deaths.

Managing complexity and diversity through systems thinking and multi-stakeholder partnerships

If the Sustainable Development Goals are now clearly universal, since they tackle issues of a global nature, affecting all countries, all people and the whole planet, and transformative (because of the sheer magnitude and ambition of the agenda), what about the need for a full integration of these multiple dimensions of development, to avoid the fragmented approach that was so criticised in the review of the Millennium Development Goals?

The views of the scientific community have been invited on this thorny issue. Looking in detail at the 17 SDGs and their 169 targets, they offered this representation as a complex, interlinked system.

This picture shows the extent to which actions on a specific goal or target are intrinsically linked to other goals and targets – making the case for continuing to think and act in silo, in a fragmented manner, very weak.

The Global Goals’ scope, scale and interlinkages raise some key questions about the effective means of implementation.

How can we ensure that the multiple agents of positive change can effectively support each other and move in the same direction? How can we measure the impact of collective action? The emergence of new actors in the development space (with an increasing role of the private sector) may introduce new competition and tensions. How can we best manage this diversity of intentions, interests and actions?

SDG 17, which addresses the “how to” question, focuses on creating an enabling environment for sustainable development. This includes the mobilisation of and widened access to key resources (through trade, finance, technology…). The goal also recognises and seeks to address both capacity-building and systemic issues, with multi-stakeholder partnerships representing a key means of effective implementation. Working in partnership with a wide range of stakeholders, across various cultural, disciplinary and sectoral boundaries requires specific competences and skills, including open-mindedness, empathy, listening, influencing, negotiation, brokering, alongside strategic and critical thinking.

In order to attain the Goal Goals for a prosperous, equitable and sustainable world, we need to invest time and energy in accelerating learning and dialogue on what works and why, think at the systems level and in the long-term, and work together – across multiple boundaries.

By Dr. Stuart Reid, Trustee, The Partnering Initiative

As experts in the field of partnership for sustainable development, my colleagues and I spend a lot of our time helping our partners and clients master what we call the ‘art and science of cross-sector partnering’. In a world where partnering now sits at the very heart of international efforts to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, few organisations can afford to ignore the culture, mindset and skills required to build and manage great collaborations. In recent years, however, I’ve noticed a gradual shift of emphasis: the organisations we work with are thinking less about how to partner and more about how to select the right partnering opportunity. In a world of plentiful opportunities, the challenge is to assess those opportunities and select the ones that are going to deliver maximum added value to your work. It’s not just about getting partnership right, but about getting the right partnership.

Why has this concern with assessment and selection risen up the agenda? Firstly, it’s about volume of activity: more projects and programmes are now delivered through multi-stakeholder partnerships; more organisations are ready and equipped to work in partnership; more funding is going to the creation of initiatives and platforms which are characterised by complex collaboration.  Decision-makers need guidance to support their choices on where to make commitments of time and resource. Secondly, it’s about strategy: partnerships need to deliver value in line with organisational strategy. They need to fit with long-term aspirations. They need to establish or strengthen ties with the right allies. Finally, it’s about cost. Partnering is a difficult and time-consuming process which can be resource-hungry: senior managers quite rightly want to get the best possible return on that investment of time, money, reputation and capacity.

Making the best choices on when and where to partner means putting in place a process that allows you to assess the available opportunity against a number of concerns which will be of high importance to your own organisation. Some of these concerns will be quantifiable, such as financial cost or time requirements, but others will be much more subjective such as the likely impact on reputation or the potential access to new networks and markets. An issue which is often underestimated, for example, is the question of whether an organisation has enough people with the appropriate skills to deliver a particular partnership. It’s easy to be beguiled by the promise of an innovative collaboration with high-profile partners but do you have the right people to shape it, manage it and bring home the value that it potentially creates?

As each organisation has its own strategic priorities, internal working culture and resource profile, there can never be a one-size-fits-all process for assessing and selecting partnerships. Any process has to be guided ultimately by the needs, aspirations and capacity of the organisation. Nevertheless, there are certain issues which will commonly be included in any partnership assessment process. We can divide these between issues relating to the the proposed partnership and issues relating to potential partner(s). This distinction may seem pedantic but, in practice, it can be very useful: it’s quite possible to have great potential synergy with an organisation but not yet have the right opportunity to exploit that synergy. Similarly, there may be a partnership opportunity that is strategically important but different partners would be needed to achieve the maximum impact.

Issues to be assessed relating to the partnership include capacity (what skills and resources will we need to deliver effectively in this partnership?); leadership (how will the partnership be led and managed?); culture (can we create an effective partnership culture to deliver collaboratively?); and value (can we clearly define the value that will be generated by this collaboration?). Of these, it is the issue of value that has overriding importance: before any consideration of the practicalities of making a partnership work, we have to understand how it can generate significant net value to the partnering organisations and their beneficiaries.

Issues to be assessed relating to the potential partner(s) can broadly be categorised as alignment (do our organisations have similar values, principles and aims?); resources (can the partner bring complementary resources?); and reputation (will partnering with this organisation impact negatively on our standing with donors, supporters or other partners?). TPI has supported many organisations to explore these issues around specific partnerships and to develop in-house tools and processes to support systematic assessment of future partners and partnerships.

Putting in place a robust and transparent process for assessing the potential of a partnership – and of individual partners – is a sensible commitment for any organisation operating regularly in cross-sector collaboration. Not only should it ensure that you select the right partnership opportunities with the right partners but the process itself will help staff internally to explore the strategic and practical value of the partnership – leading to better understanding and commitment. Finally – though crucially – it makes it easier to decline inappropriate opportunities: an inability to say ‘no’ is often an organisation’s greatest weakness.

We are all familiar with the situation of new partnerships being announced based on one enthusiastic conversation between respective chief executives, regardless of how practicable or effective these partnerships might be in the field. My colleague Darian Stibbe’s coining of the term ‘Davos syndrome’ to describe such partnerships has rapidly gained common currency – evidence that these arrangements are still far too frequent!  Generating real value from partnering means getting the right partnerships with the right partners for the right reasons. A proper assessment and selection process means that this is more likely and, when you really need to, it’s easier to say ‘No’!

This blog was originally published on Devex