Collaboration across business, governments, the UN, donors and NGOs is fundamental to delivering sustainable development and tackling climate change. Only by understanding our shared interest – a prosperous economy, a thriving society and a healthy environment – and by collectively applying the scale and diversity of resources brought by all sectors – from policy and investment through to capacity development and technical innovation – can we hope to ensure widescale, transformational change.

The essential need for multi-sectoral, collective action was institutionalised into both development and business agendas by the launch of the 2030 Agenda in 2015. Since then, global threats including climate breakdown, the energy crisis, societal inequality, pandemic and ill-health from obesity have further demonstrated how interlinked, complex and urgent are the challenges the world faces, and how all-of-society approaches are needed to tackle them.

The case for collaboration has been made and won. However, implementation still lags far behind the rhetoric. Partnering across societal sectors is extremely challenging, and in general takes far too much time compared with the urgency of the threats our people and planet face. While there are thousands of partnerships, these are dwarfed by the scale of action required to deliver the SDGs, tackle climate change, increase resilience and reduce inequality. And even where there are partnerships, many are not operating efficiently and effectively or delivering the results they need to.

The barriers to success

TPI has identified many of the barriers to more systematic, and more effective collaboration. These include:

• an unsupportive enabling environment such as a lack of trust across societal sectors or unhelpful government/funder policies
• insufficient mechanisms and platforms to convene stakeholders
• a lack of norms and standards for effective partnership
• misaligned incentives within organisations and multiple process and cultural internal barriers preventing them from being ‘fit for partnering’
• individuals lacking the key professional partnership competencies.

TPI is internationally recognised as a pioneer and leading authority on the theory and practice of partnering. We work to break down these barriers, developing standards for professional partnering and building the capacities and supportive structures to unleash the power of partnership to deliver transformational sustainable development.

We do this through:

• Best practice and policy influence: we develop and disseminate opensource best practice guidance and policy papers and directly input into international policy forums;
• Services and Training: we offer professional capacity development, as well as direct support to organisations and to partnerships to ensure they thrive and deliver maximum value
• Pathfinder Programmes: we conduct longer term, cutting-edge research and practice programmes to develop the very latest theory and good practice on specific partnering issues and topics and influence sector practice
• Global Impact Initiatives: we lead long term initiatives with other partners, taking proven approaches to building individual and organisational capability and delivering them at significant scale