The Partnership Box

The notion of ‘partnerships’ can be seen as a process in which partners commit to long-term, structural interaction based on a shared analysis that every actor suffers from a number of failures, consequently a shared vision of sustainability and a shared ambition that all partners should play a role in its achievement. The underlying idea of partnerships is that by generating additional knowledge and resources, results can be achieved that benefit all parties and which they could not have achieved on an individual basis. Collaborative advantage is achieved if the following equation is reached: 1+1+1=4. The widely-held expectation is that (cross-sector) partnerships provide both organizational benefits to their member organizations and create synergy to achieve effective outcomes for society. Partnerships, thus, have three basic dimensions: analysis, vision, ambition. Together they can be portrayed as a Partnership Box, consisting of eight possible building blocks

Leadership in times of crisis

The economic crisis shows remarkable parallels to a personal crisis in its characteristics and consequences. If that is the case, does this imply that solutions should also run parallel? For sure, such crises provide corporate leaders with many new demands

The Collaborative Paradigm

Mainstream development and sustainability thinking in the past sixty years has largely gone through four phases. In the past sixty years thinking about (sustainable) development has been prone to some intense intellectual and practical turmoil. Especially in the first forty years, thereby, markets and firms were seen rather as part of the development problem than as part of its solution. Since the start of the 21st century however, awareness has grown that the complexity of the worlds sustainability and development problems, asks for joint approaches. Markets and firms, governments and NGOs, as well as firms and NGOs should work together to address those wicked problems

Partnering Skills - The need for an integrated approach

These are challenging times, surrounded by considerable uncertainti es. Issues are complex, interests are high and often conflicting, no convenient paradigms or ideologies exist anymore to guide the actions of people. Solutions to societal problems have to be developed and implemented in collaborati on with other actors. There is need for a partnering society. Effectively operating in the “partnering space” presents four challenges for integrati ve skill development: relevance, reliability, timeliness and sharing

From Platform to Partnership

Increasingly multi-stakeholder processes are being used in response to complex, „tough‟ or „wicked‟ problems such as responding to climate change, hunger or poverty. This development is also denominated as „engaging stakeholders for change‟ (The Broker, blog January 2011). But there is considerable confusion of terms on what „engaging‟ actually means, let alone that there is clarity on the preconditions under which this engagement can be effective in actually bringing about change. The Partnerships Resource Centre (PrC) focuses on (cross sector) stakeholder partnerships as arguably the most sophisticated way to address wicked problems. But not all multi-stakeholder processes can and should be qualified as partnerships, even when actors denominate their cooperation as a partnership. Not every „dialogue‟ deserves that term, whilst combining partnerships‟ and „dialogues‟ leads to considerable confusion. In practice there is considerable confusion even over basic terminology, which is detrimental to the potential of multi-stakeholder processes to actually address complex problems. Any study on partnerships will thus have to solve a number of terminological problems in order to be relevant. This paper elaborates two dimensions: it argues that the ultimate organizational format (Platform or Partnership) and the actual techniques chosen (normal or strategic stakeholder dialogue) need to be crystal clear. Depending on the nature of the actual problem addressed by the multi-stakeholder process, a partnership or a platform can be equally effective – as long as all participants use the same words, have shared goals and consequently have their expectations aligned. The organization fits the problem

Macro Intentions, Micro Realities

The current understanding of Regional Integration is largely macro-economic and political in orientation and has tended to neglect, even ex post, the significance of the Single European Market (SEM) for the spatial restructuring of individual firms. The problem stems largely from a lopsided understanding of Regional Integration. This paper introduces a two-level approach in which integration and its outcomes are studied based on the strategic intent and strategic realities of two types of key actors: governments and core companies. In this contribution it is argued that in advocating the SEM, these actors did not necessarily share the same strategic intent. A new firm-level data set shows also that the expectations of European policymakers did not accurately match actual strategies developed by European core companies

International Regulatory Turbulence: Strategies for Success

Multinational enterprises face a great variance of environmental regulations in the countries in which they operate. How best to confront this challenge? In our research, we set out to develop and illustrate a conceptual framework for understanding the problem and suggest appropriate strategies

Creating Partnering Space

In the policy discourse on sustainable development, the positive role of cross-sector partnerships is increasingly stressed. Governments habitually frame their partnership approach in terms of ‘PPPs’ - Public-Private Partnerships. But it is not very clear whether these initiatives actually are a combination of ‘public’ and ‘private’, whether these initiatives actually represent a partnership and whether they provide solutions for what type of problems. This book chapter addresses these questions and explores the right fit for sustainable development partnerships. It argues that this discourse can be redressed to four questions: (1) what defines the ‘space’ in which partnerships develop to address sustainable development issues and (2) what kind or relevant roles do parties bring into the partnership and (3) what does this imply for the organizational fit of the parties in partnering space and (4) how does the various degrees of fit contribute to sustainable development. Is there an ‘optimal fit’? In this book chapter the authors develop a taxonomy that should help in classifying roles, the resulting relationships and the degree of organizational fit needed to make the partnership meaningful for sustainable development. This exercise should also help to link the meso-level of partnerships to the macro-level (impact) of sustainable development