The 2030 Agenda is built on a fundamental shift in approach to international development: engaging the unique roles and resources of all sectors of society and requiring extensive collaboration across sectors to achieve its ambitious goals.
‘Partnership platforms’ are important mechanisms to convene stakeholders around key development or business sustainability issues, and to systematically catalyse partnerships for the SDGs.
This report has been produced for decision-makers and their advisors within governments and the UN system who are looking to more systematically drive partnerships for the SDGs, potentially through national-level, multi-stakeholder partnership platforms for the SDGs. Secretariats of global multistakeholder partnerships which have an aspiration of country-level action and engagement may also find the report useful in thinking through what is needed to support in-country platforms. The report may also be of interest to those who are leading, coordinating and managing these platforms.
National multi-stakeholder ‘partnership platforms’ are being developed around the world, and appear to have great potential to accelerate progress towards the SDGs. However, the term is used in a wide variety of ways to reflect a range of forms, structures and mechanisms. And despite the large overall number of such entities, there is a relatively small number of platforms that have been operating over a sufficient period of time, with sufficient evidence of impact, to be able to draw out lessons about what makes them effective. This makes it hard to learn from the hard-won experience of those few pioneers that have achieved breakthrough impacts.
This report attempts to respond to these challenges in the following ways:
Presenting a basic partnership platform typology, to help provide a shared basis for knowledge and experience exchange;
Providing a brief review of experience of different types of platforms using existing public evaluations, toolkits and reviews; also drawing on TPI’s own direct experience of supporting the development of these platforms; and
Presenting a set of characteristics of a transformative partnership platform, based on examples drawn from existing practice.