If you ask a room full of people to rate how good they are at partnering, the chances are that most will rate themselves very highly. After all, it’s a natural human instinct, isn’t it? We do it all the time in our personal relationships, with our colleagues at work, in sports teams.
From The Partnering Initiative’s decade of experience working with business, the UN, NGOs and donors, when it comes to partnerships with those dissimilar to ourselves – such as across continents or across societal sectors – the picture changes completely.
From Rhetoric to Reality: Building an architecture to systematically drive public-private collaboration for development
Last week’s report from the High Level Panel on the post-2015 development, rightly puts cross-sectoral collaboration squarely at the heart of achieving sustainable development, and reiterates the vital role business can and must play as a partner in development: “each priority area identified in the post-2015 agenda should be supported by dynamic partnerships”.
Partnering for Inclusive Business
Inclusive business (IB) projects, by definition, tend to sit in areas outside of companies’ traditional comfort zones. Whether providing incomes to disadvantaged people by including them in the company’s value chain, or developing new markets with pro-poor products or services, they are rarely business as usual, requiring a much stronger interaction with ‘society’ than traditional business.
Driving effective and systemic multi-sector collaboration
Nearly two decades ago, the UN’s Rio Declaration had the goal of “establishing a new and equitable global partnership through the creation of new levels of cooperation among States, key sectors of societies and people”. And then a decade ago, the major outcome of the Johannesburg follow-up Summit (Rio+10) was around the launching of 350 ‘partnerships for sustainable development’.
Many healthy returns: a role for business in reducing lifestyle disease
What may once have been seen as a problem for individuals now threatens whole societies, and the threat is as great in developing as in developed countries. Although personal responsibility must play a role, good intentions are easily overcome by a world which is more and more unsupportive of living healthily: high-fat, high-salt foods are an easier choice for reasons of taste, cost, accessibility and preparation time; urbanisation and a built environment militate against physical activity; social networking and video-games are taking over from sport-based leisure activities; and jobs are increasingly desk-based and stressful.