Transnational multistakeholder partnerships for sustainable development: Conditions for success

Ambio 2016, 45:42–51 DOI 10.1007/s13280-015-0684-2 PERSPECTIVE Transnational multistakeholder partnerships for sustainable development: Conditions for success Philipp Pattberg, Oscar Widerberg Received: 3 March 2015 / Revised: 29 April 2015 / Accepted: 23 June 2015 / Published online: 23 July 2015 Abstract This perspective discusses nine conditions for enhancing the performance of multistakeholder partnerships for sustainable development. Such partnerships have become mainstream implementation mechanisms for attaining international sustainable development goals and are also frequently used in other adjacent policy domains such as climate change, health and biodiversity. While multistakeholder arrangements are widely perceived as a positive contribution to addressing global change, few studies have systematically evaluated the existing evidence for their positive performance. This poses an urgent and important challenge for researchers and practitioners to understand and improve the effectiveness of partnerships, in particular since their popularity increases despite their past track record. The recommendations presented are based on own research, a literature survey and discussions with a large number or international Civil Society Organizations at two occasions during 2014. This article proceeds as follows: first, we define multistakeholder partnerships, outline their rational and summarize available assessments on partnership success; second, we provide a set of concrete recommendations based on lessons-learned from over 10 years of scholarship; and third, we conclude with some reflections on the future of multistakeholder governance for sustainability. Keywords Multistakeholder partnerships
Sustainable development
Climate change
Global governance
Sustainable development goals INTRODUCTION As decision-makers continue to struggle with providing adequate solutions to pressing global environmental challenges 123 such as climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, and natural disasters, calls for innovative approaches to ‘navigate the Anthropocene’ (Biermann et al. 2012), which challenge the hierarchical state-led model of governance (Hajer et al. 2015) are getting louder. Proponents argue that coalitions and cooperation between government agencies, business actors, and civil society will increase the likelihood to stay within a ‘safe operating space for humanity’ (Rockström et al. 2009) as new collaborative arrangements are expected to forge more efficient, effective, and inclusive responses to global policy problems. In the area of climate change, for example, recent scholarship has scrutinized the emergence of a loosely coupled regime complex (Biermann et al. 2009; Keohane and Victor 2011; Zelli 2011) that shows features of a polycentric governance architecture (Cole 2015). A particularly popular arrangement within this broader trend has been multistakeholder partnerships, which have played a crucial role in implementing sustainable development goals ever since the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. More than 340 partnerships for sustainable development were consequently registered at the United Nations (Andonova and Levy 2003), and the ‘partnership approach’ is currently being emulated in many other issue areas of global governance, such health, water governance, and climate change. While bottom-up transnational multistakeholder arrangements are widely perceived as a potential contribution to addressing global change, recent studies find little evidence for positive performance. This poses an urgent and important challenge for researchers and practitioners to understand and improve the effectiveness of partnerships, in particular, since their popularity only seems to increase despite their mixed track record. It is also a particularly timely quest given that the year 2015 comprises high-profile negotiations taking place on the Post-2015 Development Ó The Author(s) 2015. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com www.kva.se/en Ambio 2016, 45:42–51 43 Agenda: the Hyogo Framework of Action on natural hazards and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Within the context of the latter, demand for a more structured engagement of the UNFCCC with bottom-up transnational arrangements is building up (Chan and Pauw 2014; Widerberg and Pattberg 2015). In this perspective, we argue that lessons learned from evidence-based assessments of transnational multistakeholder partnerships should urgently be taken into account when designing or re-designing existing transnational multistakeholder arrangements. We identify nine conditions for improved performance arranged across three overarching themes: actors (leadership, partners); processes (goal setting, funding, management, monitoring); and contexts (metagovernance, problem structure, and sociopolitical contexts). The nine conditions have been identified by carrying out a systematic review of research on transnational multistakeholder partnerships in the field of sustainable development. The nine conditions have been distilled from the literature by clustering the explanatory factors for success or failure in transnational multistakeholder partnerships identified from the scholarly literature. The review has been complemented by input from some of the world’s largest Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), to which we presented our study and discussed the results at two separate occasions during 2014: first at a workshop with CSO Strategy Directors collaborating under the umbrella of the International Civil Society Center (ICSC); and second, during the 2014 Global Perspectives conference arranged by the ICSC in collaboration with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). This article is structured as follows. The first section defines transnational multistakeholder partnerships, provides a brief history of their emergence, and assesses their performance to date. In the second section, we identify nine conditions for success of multistakeholder arrangements and provide policy-advice. The final section concludes with some reflections on the future role and relevance of polycentric bottom-up governance for sustainability. TRANSNATIONAL MULTISTAKEHOLDER PARTNERSHIPS: DEFINITION, RATIONALE, AND PAST PERFORMANCE Definition Identifying the precise unit of analysis when assessing the performance of transnational partnerships is challenging. Practitioners and scholars have used the term ‘partnership’ to describe just about any type of collaboration between state and non-state actors. Also the vast and growing literature on public–private partnerships suffers from conceptual confusion, competing definitions, disparate research traditions, and a normative and value-laden agenda of promoting partnerships. This state of conceptual vagueness has led some scholars to describe the term partnership as ‘‘conceptually empty and (...truncated)