Partnerships across societal sector are an essential mechanism to deliver the SDGs. However, despite the rhetoric around collaboration, we are still not seeing sufficient impact being delivered compared with the scale of the goals.
Given the significant investment of both time and resources required to develop and manage them, partnerships should only be utilized when they have the genuine potential to create value – both for partners, and in terms of impact, well in excess of their inputs.
While it may seem obvious that the creation of value should be the basis for all partnerships, the issue is often confused both by a lack of definition of what we mean by ‘value’ and by the related question, ‘value to whom?’.
In this new guide developed with UNDESA, Maximising the impact of partnerships for the SDGs: a practical guide to partnership value creation, we aim to demystify the concept of the added-value partnerships can bring, as well as the value organisations can gain from partnerships, and provide a process and tools to help maximise value for all. The guide also offers what we believe is the first attempt at a comprehensive framework to define Collaborative Advantage (the intrinsic power partnering can bring) and the associated Partnership Delta (the extra value partnerships can create).