At the invitation of the President of ECOSOC, in February 2025, TPI’s Darian Stibbe addressed 85 countries at the ECOSOC Partnership Forum about the promise and challenges of multi-stakeholder collaboration and the need for a targetted investment in collaboration skills, organisational readiness, and innovative funding mechanisms to unleash their power to deliver the SDGs.
Read the summarised speech below:
I’ve been working in multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) for nearly 25 years now, and I run an organisation, The Partnering Initiative, which has pioneered the theory and practice of collaboration. We’ve worked with pretty much every UN agency, with multinational companies, foundations, all the major international NGOs, countries etc. And the conclusion we’ve come to is that multi-stakeholder partnerships are bloody difficult.
Bringing together different sectors of society—each with its own ways of working, cultures, and interests—is incredibly challenging. Creating a partnership that truly meets everyone’s needs and delivers for the public, private sector, and people is no easy task.
So we decided, with UN DESA and with GIZ, to study the barriers to collaboration, and what we need to do to overcome these barriers so that we can have far more, and far more effective, multi-stakeholder partnerships. What we found was really interesting. A holistic approach is required, with targeted investment needed at every level.
The individual
Firstly, we need to invest in individuals. Individuals need the professional partnering skills and competencies to be able to work across sectors, to have a collaboration mindset, to understand how to work with unfamiliar partners, and across cultures. Every organisation can invest in these partnering skills for their employees. Unfortunately, our survey found that only 13% of people said that public training was accessible in their country. This needs to change. We need to get people’s professional partnering skills up and running.
The organisation
Currently, our organisations are not set up to be fit for partnering. There are too many blockages inside organisations. We need to adjust the strategies, the internal systems and processes. We need to be braver and take more measured risks. We need to build a culture of collaboration within our organisations.
The partnership
Too often, we hear that partnerships, are simply not delivering. Our research found that only 12% of partnerships had the critical building blocks in place to allow them to thrive, however, 73% of partnerships that were supported by a neutral specialist reported high effectiveness. The evidence is clear, organisations need to find these independent, neutral partnership facilitators to help these partnerships through the process, to build them to good practice standards.
The platform
The next level is about platforms. How do we bring all these sectors together? We need platforms—mechanisms at both the country and global levels—that unite sectors around specific development or business sustainability issues to facilitate new partnerships. This process must become far more systematic. All of society must contribute to the SDGs, with governments and the UN playing a key role in fostering collaboration. Additionally, we need far more partnership-supportive policies, in particular with governments developing clearer strategies for engaging effectively with the private sector.
Funding mechanisms and enabling environment
And then finally, on funding of partnerships. We need new ways of funding MSPs. We need longer-term funding. We need to fund the development process of MSPs. We need to adjust accountability rules to ensure that MSPs are allowed to iterate and adjust and engage those on the ground most effectively. And we need the policies in place to encourage and support all societal sectors to step up and work together.
Only by collectively investing in all of these different areas, can we genuinely unleash the power of MSPs to deliver on the SDGs.
Watch the full speech here [47:51].
