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Cross-Sector Partnering

Hosted by Hanniah Tariq (July 2009)

partneringwithgovernments_300.jpgCross-Sector Partnering and the capacity of the Public Sector

‘Partnering for sustainable development’ is a term that is used across the sectors to denote a hopeful way forward in face of the spiraling situation of poverty, conflict and social decline in many developing regions.

Practically speaking, governments in the developing world have a lot to gain from engaging in multi-sector partnerships for sustainable development (extending/improving services, delegating responsibility and accessing more capital among others). Evidence from all over the world suggests that governments in the developing world have much to achieve from partnering and that such initiatives are being used to carry out many important functions including expanding or improving some of the traditionally government specific duties.

However, in order to best avail of this opportunity that brings together the best of every sector for a common goal, each actor will have to evaluate what it brings to the table and how to make it work in a collaborative way.  One of the biggest obstacles to cross-sector partnerships has been observed to be problems relating to the government role in them. This is due to the dual nature of its role in that when endowed with the capacity to partner well, the government as an actor in a multi-sector partnership brings some very important capabilities/legitimacy to the mix; however, when hampered by institutional problems and bureaucracy it can be the one actor that other sectors are the least disposed to partner with.

Conversely, some skills that have been observed to be useful for the public sector in effective partnering with other sectors include:
•    the ability to access the grass roots awareness of the civil society and NGO’s to recognize critical social needs,
•    the faculty and channels to prioritize these societal problems to the private sector, and,
•    the capacity to negotiate and collaborate effectively with other sectors.

However, there are several other skills that the public sector will have to build to be able to capitalize on the partnership model for sustainable development that need to be identified and work done to build capacity on them. 
 
Clearly cross-sector partnerships are one of the most viable ways forward for developing countries, however it is critical to evaluate how ready the sectors are for partnering and what can be done to improve their competence for collaboration in order for cross-sector partnering to fulfill its potential promise.  Hence the questions raised about the government role at this point are:

•    What are the skills that can be counted as Good Partnering Skills for the public sector?
•    Are there any particular desirable skills for Partnering with the private sector?
•    Are there any specific required skills for partnering with the NGO sector/civil society?
•    What can be done to build the capacity of the public sector for effective partnering?

Hanniah Tariq is a doctoral candidate in Economic and Social Innovation at the University of Buckingham Business School, and Integral Enterprise Research Associate for TRANS4M (Four World Center for Social Innovation) in Geneva. Join her in the conversation.

Comments: 30

Why parter, what's to trade?

Posted by Jeffrey Hamaoui at Jul 21, 2009 04:00 PM
Hanniah, I think that this conversation is ripe; the public sector / international development set has been open to this partnership systems thinking for some time and with the new administration seems to be stepping the discussion up to the next level - many social entrepreneurs have already blazed a trail and successfully capitalized on this openness by leveraging resources from government, from the private sector and foundations in an attempt to make complex system opportunities fly... So the question is how to take that model and make it easier and more sustainable...

My work has me sat square in between these various players and discussions (we currently work for USAID, NASA, PEPFAR and the State department as well as some venture funds, foundations and corporations in the global sustainability field) and I'd love to throw out some simple observations that I've made in the last few years;

1. Public money for public goods, private money for private goods - something I stole from Bob Fitch (a clever man at DFID); it is stunning how many people try and apply money otherwise and while possible, always an uphill battle - go with the way money wants to flow...

2. Opportunity leads... before you try any partnership with the public sector you need to understand the nature of opportunity to them; be social or environmental or political you need to be realistic and present it in winning terms.

3. What trades - the three C's - capital, capacity and credibility - its not just about money - the public sector brings a great deal to the table outside of cash - in the field and with a variety of partners and institutions...

4. Build relations in the right places - there are a number of specialized government institutions dedicated to better partnering - USAID has the GDA or Global Development Alliance group - an innovative switch board function connecting potential partners to USAID resources and the Global Partnership Center out of State Department... Many program offices also have partnership folk. Like many institutions there are no simple answers - the international public sector is chok full of doors and windows and so much of this work is about building relationships...

On the government capacity side there is a good deal of work to be done; learning how to speak the languages of the various partners, looking outside of the corporate sector for partners, creating new and innovative platforms for partner engagement and dialogue as well as lowering the barriers to engagement and transaction. There is also a real need to allow agencies the flexibility and opportunity to partner by relaxing budgets to allow for a higher degree of creativity... I could go on a great deal here but lets start with this!

Jeff

Why parter, what's to trade?

Posted by Hanniah Tariq at Jul 22, 2009 09:18 AM
Dear Jeff,
Many thanks for starting the conversation off on such pragmatic observations. Agree with so much you say. I really like the point about it not just being about cash (in my humble south Asian experience/opinion the governments rarely bring that to the table anyway). I feel that in the soft sense the government has a very crucial and specific purpose in brokering the idea of collaboration or acting as a facilitator. This is a role that a respected party or one in authority is most likely to be suited to do and a government can often find itself in situations in which it is ideally placed to bring different parties together while keeping the developmental/ big picture in mind. A brokering party has to have the capacity to do this in order for the partnership to function well but this very important aspect of a governments role in promoting multi-sector partnerships is yet to be understood and elaborated on. Learning how to speak the languages of the various partners like you mention is a great starting point for building government capacity to be able to do this.

Eastern Europe

Posted by Jeff Mowatt at Jul 22, 2009 01:58 AM
Hanniah, Our first experience would have been the Tomsk Regional Initiative, before I joined P-CED. There was already a US-Russian development initiative underway and Tomsk became the final project. The role of P-CED was to propose and source the "bottom up" development approach and microfinance bank. It was in itself a collaboration of government, business and NGOs which was then replicated in several other cities.

British government on the other hand have been far less compliant, to the point of obstruction. A closed shop in my painful experience, whixh lead us to return to overseas operation. An interview with a diaspora leader describing obstacles to development may be of interest.

http://www.iccrimea.org/scholarly/economicdev.html

Again, in Ukraine it was a case of putting the ideas in front of government. Our work has focussed on developing strategic proposals. In Ukraine's case, to call on US assistance to develop social enterprise, roll our broadband infrastructure, deliver access to microfinance and tackle the urgent need for action in institutional childcare.

Progress has been made, nevertheless and I describe some of the milestones on our business website.

http://people-centered.net/About.aspx

For social enterprise to partner with government in the UK, one needs access to the mechanisms of democracy. All Party Parliamentary Groups, MPs, Lords, related government departments, who typically disregard what is offered to them for free, by tax paying business and individuals.

Jeff

   

              

Eastern Europe

Posted by Hanniah Tariq at Jul 22, 2009 09:40 AM
Hi Jeff,
Many thanks for your comments and observations on collaborating in different regions. Unpicking your response and experience, where do you think the crucial difference lay in the engagement you experienced in the Tomsk Regional Initiative and what you have encountered in the UK?

Eastern Europe

Posted by Jeff Mowatt at Jul 22, 2009 02:38 PM
Hanniah, I'd have to hand over to our founder Terry to describe the detail of government relationships in Russia. Some of it is described here.

http://www.p-ced.com/projects/russia/

In the UK, the experience begins with both of us being removed from UK immigration in the back of a French police van. Ever since, I've encountered shoulder shrugging or just hostility. I blogged about it not long ago.

http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=131725

Jeff

 

Eastern Europe

Posted by Samuel at Jul 27, 2009 09:07 AM
Dear Hanniah,

What a wonderful thread you have started on partnership. I am actually reviewing the issue of collaboration and the adoption of project management discipline in helping to enhance the delivery capacity of Social Enterprises.

I will like to get my research questionaires to senior managers and the Chief Executives of Social Enterprises in UK. I will like to send the questionnaire to you via email. Please I will appreciate your permission by sending an email to me at sam@bliss4all.com.

Many Thanks and Kind Regards.
Sam.

Complicated vs Complex

Posted by Mike Bell at Jul 22, 2009 02:21 AM
On area that I see ripe for capability development is the distinction between issues that are complicated and those that are complex and using the appropriate engagement processes to meet the need.

When different sectors come together the challenge becomes one of greater complexity not necessarily complication. This is what I mean. A computer, for example, is a complicated system. Even though it has many parts, the actions of each are stable and predictable and as long as you connect them all together in the appropriate way, you get predictable and replicable results.

A grouping of people, or any socio-technical system for that matter, is a complex adaptive system.

It is made up of myriad interrelated parts whose interconnected actions are difficult to predict because the parts learn or adapt to their changing environment – think weather systems or rainforests for example. Complex adaptive systems react and respond to changing stimuli and contexts. They can’t be understood in simple linear terms like a computer.

Now if the challenges facing cross sector groups were only complicated then you just need good linear deductive skills and these are likely to be present in the group.

However for a complex system, from my perspective, you need the capability to understand the distinction between the complex and complicated and the ability to sense and respond to the emerging and evolving patterns in the system. Otherwise you run into the many problems created by the Law of Unforeseen Consequences.

Having this capability is also much more cost effective in the long run because you avoid the waste that inevitably comes from trying to treat a complex system like a complicated one. There are just too many expensive examples of this.

Engagement processes that connect minds, engage hearts and harvest the collective wisdom are needed to resolve complex challenges – see Hosting Conversations that Matter:

http://vitalelders.typepad.com/ccse/Our-Services.html#Host

Mike

Complicated vs Complex

Posted by Hanniah Tariq at Jul 22, 2009 10:55 AM
Hi Mike
I have to thank you for some very original thoughts on the topic at at hand. The application of complexity science to the problems of partnering is something that i haven't come across before but makes perfect sense to me in that Dispersed Interaction (i.e. results are determined by the interaction of various diverse actors acting in their own interests and responding to external stimuli) can be thought of as what is happening inside a partnership at any given stage. How "Open Space" as an Engagement process connects these is something that would be very interesting to hear about.

Complicated vs Complex

Posted by Mike Bell at Jul 29, 2009 05:52 AM
The beauty of open space and similar processes is that they are implicitly designed for complexity. By bringing as much of the system together as possible and encouraging people to share and gather around issues that are important to them, a co-created pattern of the system emerges, and through the weaving of often new connections innovative ways forward are found that 'flow with the grain'.

Compare this with a traditional conference where the organisers decide what is important and what the workshop or break out groups should be. This is still valuable for information sharing at some level but not for participation, collaboration or co-creation.

The open space approach assumes the experts are in the room rather than on the podium!

pattern-makers

Posted by jo davidson at Jul 22, 2009 04:01 AM
Perhaps the social entrepreneur's skillset is like (all self-organizing complex organic systems) a myriad of petals unfolding in understanding, awareness, listening and self evaluation, in opening doors and windows.

pattern-makers

Posted by Samantha Given-Dennis at Jul 22, 2009 03:54 PM
Indeed!

pattern-makers

Posted by Mike Bell at Jul 29, 2009 05:48 AM
Brilliant - so the question is what's needed to imbue this capability so that social enterprise becomes the way forward?

What does each partner gain from partnership?

Posted by Nadine B. Hack at Jul 22, 2009 08:52 AM
I agree with everything Hanniah wrote about the necessary components to create sustainable multi-sector partnerships. I strongly advocate that, in addition to the key element of helping each actor evaluating what it brings to the table, you also must help each understand what they will gain from the partnership. I have been creating such partnerships since the 1970s. Some of my more recent efforts have included the following. For a more on my work you can check www.because.net and for more on what I’ve been doing recently, check http://blog.beCause.net – Nadine B. Hack, President, beCause Global Consulting
• Directed the distillation and development of core brand and key message for the public launch of Women Moving Millions, a campaign to exponentially increase philanthropy for women’s programs globally with public and private partners Omnicom Global Group’s G23, Interbrand, Hunt Alternative Funds, the Women’s Funding Network, multiple women’s funds globally and individual funders
• Helped formulate over several years a multi-stakeholder, cross-sector initiative to alleviate child malnutrition in India, with lead global partners Unilever, UNICEF and Synergos, national and local partners including government of India, the Tata Group, ICICI Bank, Hindustan Lever, and multiple other businesses and NGOs; included phased implementation initiated in pilot urban and rural sites
• Helped develop master plan for Coca-Cola Africa to expand its foundation’s HIV/AIDS services throughout the African continent, working with government and NGO partners, to include prevention/protection and testing/treatment programs for their employees and the employees of their affiliated bottlers, including roll-out plan starting with seven pilot projects in key countries and ultimate systematic implementation continent-wide

Private sector intiatives

Posted by Shaun Lindbergh at Jul 22, 2009 10:19 AM
Where does the gorilla sleep? or rather Where do you want the gorilla to sleep?

Looking in from the outside, I believe that inspiration and motivation are the two keys to achieving greater public sector capacity and, from a private sector /civil society perspective, I think there are two distinct approaches here;
1. Activism: Encouraging (or forcing) the gorilla to change its sleeping habits.
2. Selective engagement: Encouraging the gorilla to let you sleep beside it.

Effective activism is really a political process that recognizes the mood and ambitions of the political leaders as well as civil society and then acts within those parameters to effect the change wanted. I've seen it happen very quickly (2 years) with the establishment of an urban renewal project in Cape Town, South Africa. At the time the city officials welcomed private initiatives but a few years later things changed and that window became a great deal harder to open.

Selective engagement is a more flexible process where social entrepreneurs seeks to understand the broad public sector agenda (the game plan), looks for long-term players at the level they want to engage and then formulates initiatives that fit within the game plan and gets the attention and support of the key players.

Personally, I like the second one a whole lot better.

Private sector intiatives

Posted by Hanniah Tariq at Jul 27, 2009 10:13 AM
HI Shaun,
Your metaphor has managed to capture the imagination of much of the community taking part in this dialogue so many thanks for that!
I have to completely agree that the second option is much more attractive and long term....

Patience

Posted by Samantha Given-Dennis at Jul 22, 2009 04:11 PM
As a young, aspiring social innovator, I would like to note that education and understanding of the necessity for cross-sector partnerships is ripe, and that organizations like Sparkseed (www.sparkseed.org) and StartingBloc (www.startingbloc.org) (which focus on the education and empowerment of future leaders within social enterprise) greatly encourage discussion on the topics. These organizations bring students and young professionals from all sectors together. They work towards a common goal and finish with an understanding of the importance of discussions between, say, a Citi dude and an Echoing Green fellow, or a university student and a local politician. My vision is that as efforts continue to incite cross-sector dialogue within rising leaders, the points of collaboration highlighted by Hanniah will not be so mechanical as, well, given conduct--that a generation with a greater vision will work them naturally.

Patience

Posted by Hanniah Tariq at Jul 23, 2009 06:30 AM
I love the enthusiasm that comes with the feeling of new beginnings but we don’t necessarily have to have faith in the future generation. Following on from the thread on complexity above, collaborative efforts (in the context of this discussion partnerships) can be viewed as a complex adaptive system, which would by its nature should respond better to a different set of stimuli to internalize knowledge and then adapt. These need to be both strategic (or mechanical) and evolutionary...
One another thought maybe the organizations bringing the students and young professionals from all sectors together are in fact creating a more permanent larger scale ‘open space’ that Mike mentions above….

building government capacity

Posted by jo davidson at Jul 23, 2009 01:42 AM
Rock on Samantha, yay for "young social innovators leading the way with creative approaches and dynamic business models."

Hi Hanniah, for government to broker the collaboration when there is dispersed interactions -actors acting out of their own interests- new rules are needed with the new game so relationships can be built from the bottom up, as Nadine had said, "for the ultimate systematic implementation of the big picture." Government's competence for collaboration lies in its efficient and effective ability to inspire and motivate -what's at stake and what's to gain- as well as its role to monitor and evaluate.

If, in Shaun's metaphor, the gorilla acts as the facilitator- the government indeed becomes it's own biggest obstacle. If government's role is "the bully pulpit" or government plays the role of schoolyard bully, others are less likely to want to play - not just because of the rampant corruption and lack of transparency in some governments, but the way government bureaucracy is also designed to delay action.

You're right, it takes special skills to walk the delicate line to engage and empower all the actors. I think an extra good skill to have, is one Mike mentioned -being able to deal with the law of unforeseen consequences -in understanding complexity. Although it's natural for government to lead with multi-sector partnerships, I think the instinct to come together is an evolutionary one.

Delicate line between the 2 sides of the coin

Posted by Hanniah Tariq at Jul 23, 2009 07:47 AM
Hi Jo,
A good thing taken to an extreme in any relationship (even lovely linear human to human relationships ... actually are they linear i wonder....) can go from Facilitation and Encouragement on one axis to Bullying and Coercion on the other. As you say “Government's competence for collaboration lies in its efficient and effective ability to inspire and motivate” and sticking to that nature of interaction is something that it should be very aware of because in staying on this facilitating side of the axis it can play a very important part in the larger context.

For example the role can be played in Prioritizing issues is something instinctual collaboration cannot fulfill due to dispersed interaction. With multiple actors entering the realm of development there are dangers of efforts being repeated or overlapping as well as wasted effort spent on indicators that might not be a priority for the population. The private sector for example invests vast amounts of monetary and human resources all over the world directly or indirectly through Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives into programmes impacting local communities and environment but remains relatively uninformed about its place in the larger picture of development and what the priorities for the development of the country should be. The Public sector can be observed to be the ideal actor to help priotise the more urgent needs of the population and help to integrate more isolated efforts into a more sustainable picture for development. So perhaps the Public sector can be observed to be an actor that can to help priotise the urgent needs of the population and help to integrate more isolated efforts into a more sustainable picture for development due to the special position it is in.

Desired Skills

Posted by Stephen Jordan at Jul 23, 2009 02:01 PM
Hanniah, thanks for leading this provocative discussion.

Having worked for more years in this space than I care to count, I've also learned that skills that might work really well in one context, don't necessarily work well in another context.

In terms of good parntering skills with the public sector here are a few lessons learned:
1) very desirable to have patience. Government agencies can have long cycle times. They can confuse you needing something immediately and then taking days or even weeks to get to the next step. They have very intricate rules that they have to follow, and you need to bear with them as they follow them.
2) speak "government" -- this is a very different language than private sector. Development means something very different to them. In fact, it can mean different things in different development agencies. They have wonderful and not so wonderful acronyms for all kinds of things.
3) Get a full-time accountant -- the last thing you want to do is get hauled up before a congressional hearing to testify why your time sheets weren't filled out
4) Be judicious. Think long and hard about whether you want to do a joint venture and take Caesar's coin, or if you just want to coordinate and complement each other. One is a lot more difficult than the other.

For more perspectives, visit our website at www.uschamber.com/bclc and check out our global program. Right now Michael Hopkins is doing a series for us on how to work with different multilateral aid agencies.

Desired Skills

Posted by Hanniah Tariq at Jul 27, 2009 05:48 AM
Hi Stephen
Many thanks for contributing so much hands-on inter-organisational collaboration issues to the conversation. Indeed Cross-Sector partnering in practice, even where the will to work together exists can be a challenging way to work towards sustainable development due to the completely different organizational structures that will have to work together.
Typically the Public sector, NGOs and business have completely different ways of working, managing, delivering and reporting and your example of long cycle times and intricate rules are a perfect illustration of something that a partnering organization needs to be aware of when working collaboratively with a government organisation.
Many organizations involved in such partnerships have also pointed to the human resources load that a joint venture can put on the organization and your suggestion of an accountant is another practical manifestation of that. Summing up I feel that your suggestion of “Being Judicious” is particularly crucial to the discussion. As put by The Partnering Initiative
“a partnership approach is neither a quick fix nor an easy option. The transaction costs can be high and all too often time and energy is wasted on a process of partnership building and management that is not well thought through and / or not professionally undertaken”. (www.thepartneringinitiative.org)

The other gorilla in the room

Posted by Michael Gordon at Jul 24, 2009 12:08 PM
This is a great dialogue; I appreciate everyone sharing their POV and experience. Personally, I'd love to also discuss how to better engage with the private sector - public and private companies, in particular - who have a great deal to offer and as much at stake as the rest of us. But they demur, they incrementalize their support.

An example: I went to a discussion about non profit / public sector partnerships in San Francisco a month or so ago. The Treasurer of the city of SF said this: They receive $21M in Community Development Block Grants annually, and dole out ~25% of that to approximately 500 non profits. I was sitting there, fresh my my corporate life driving change management programs at a large multi-national company and recall a project where this company (rhymes with Risko) spent $30M in less than 18 months trying to develop a new parts management system. The project was poorly run, it was eventually scrapped, and the $30M went down the drain.

Something wrong with this equation...

I also went to a meeting of ~40 corporate foundations in Silicon Valley last week and they appear to have little or no idea how to transform their role, though they understand full well that the non profit sector is in crisis right now. Net, I see little long-term perspective, little sense of responsibility, and even less creativity in how to engage all THREE sectors in the right dialogue.

I hope I haven't offended anyone here, but I'd sure love to hear some other opinions.



The other gorilla in the room

Posted by Hanniah Tariq at Jul 27, 2009 09:42 AM
Hi Michael,
I don’t imagine that pointing to potential problems offends anyone as it helps illuminate the steps that can be taken to rectify them. Multi Sector Partnerships as a vehicle for sustainable development has not been a mainstream/ conventionally utilized approach for all that long. While many actors have been placing their faith in collaborative solutions for some time the turning point for collaborative solutions to development issues appeared at the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development – the Rio Earth Summit – which positioned multi-sector partnering for development as the critical element to sustainable development. Post 1992 development actors are increasingly observed to be placing their faith in collaborative solutions.
I believe that as this field evolves it will begin to accumulate enough experiential and practical knowledge to be able to accrue “long-term perspective, a sense of responsibility, and creativity in how to engage all THREE sectors in the right dialogue”. There are also many organisations that are working hard to build this body of knowledge and encourage debate. Perhaps the other gorilla in the room can change its ways if it has the right information and understands that change will mean it will have a better place to sleep for a sustained and continued time.

rattling cages

Posted by jo davidson at Jul 25, 2009 05:35 PM

Good question Michael, how to engage all three sectors in the right dialogue- having had 20 years of ideas yourself, in transformational cross-sector collaboration, you sound like just the right person to tell us.

If the endeavor was as simple as getting the right people together in the right environment to have the right conversation, it would have been done by now. If government is setting the priorities in coordinating the effort, nobody wants that conversation to be simply a monologue in the presence of witnesses, or for the gorilla to be beating its chest while everyone else works for peanuts. There's an old African proverb "do not teach the paths of the forest to an old gorilla." The goal in accessing more capital to prioritize societal problems and urgent needs of the population, isn't about getting the best government money can buy (gorillas have big nostrils because they have big fingers) but focusing on social investment through new platforms of engagement and strengthening the principles of democracy while improving government's traditional duties without ensuing turf wars. What the private sector offers, best practices in relation to their core businesses, capital, expertise and the dual nature of whether they are able to capitalize on leveraging resources, the right dialogue would allow all to unplug from their prerogatives without feeling they have to.

I agree with Jeff, it's about building "relations in the right places, and speaking the languages of the various partners" or as Stephen said "speak government." So when that government is acting like a gorilla- with political resistance to change - it's not about feeding it or giving it what it wants but instead embracing a common vision that seeks common development and deepens mutual understanding, rather than contributing to the growing divisiveness within a society. The alternative, failure to communicate, just leads to more distrust and non-cooperation in seeking to understand a broader public sector agenda.

rattling cages

Posted by Hanniah Tariq at Jul 27, 2009 10:15 AM
I think that where we might be heading in a slightly unproductive direction is the presumption that the government as an actor always has to be berated into partnering with other sectors. This might or might not be that case from context to context. You have to understand that what the gorilla needs in this context, how he feels about sleeping with you and how that relates to what you need to begin to be able to decipher and then eventually speak his language.

rattling cages

Posted by Stephen Jordan at Jul 28, 2009 02:28 PM
I have a number of UN stories in this regard -- one time in New York we staged a small working group meeting and one of the companies asked, "if we want to partner with you, who do we contact?" to which one of the UN agency representatives said, "you won't, but if you keep trying, you will be able to get to the right person within 5 or 6 tries." This answer just about killed some of our more customer-service oriented folks.

Another time, we were at a European UN confab, and one of the senior directors got up and said, "you know 10 years ago, we used to think of you [private companies] as part of the problem. But now we think of you as part of the solution in helping us achieve our objectives." I thought the guy was very well-meaning, so I went up to him afterwards, and asked him how he would have felt if one of the companies had said something like that to him. He said, "well I would have been offended of course." and then he stopped for a moment. "Hmmm."

I guess what I'm saying is that we don't just have to be tolerant and judicious and learn to speak each other's languages, we also have to decipher the intentionality behind the words. We have to get over some of the silos and perceptions and prejudices of earlier eras.

sustainable development

Posted by jo davidson at Jul 28, 2009 02:39 AM

All excellent points Hanniah, and with each context in the art of acting together, government's role can not be underestimated. Yet, the sleeping gorilla can also represent bloated inefficiency and waste and like the sleeping dragon, can wreck havoc while awake. Shaun's right, inspiration and motivation should be government's priority in creating working partnerships while working in with different organizational structures, styles and agendas, especially if competing visions are eliminating special interests. In coming together to catalyze public-private investments -like the end of King Kong's days- a way through is to shoot down the gorilla, if social justice is indeed the best economics.

Skills for partnering

Posted by Sam Moskwa at Jul 28, 2009 05:50 PM
Hi Hanniah, I am a master research student researching international philanthropy and their health investment to remote and rural indigenous people. I am a long term community development worker and my comments on your skills and capacity building questions correlate to my research findings that speaking the language of your partners values and principles is basic in forwarding partnerships. At the International Funder of Indigenous People (IFIP) Conference New Mexico 2009, we developed Four Shared Indigenous Giving Prinicples: as Reciprocity, Respect, Responsibility and Relationship. (See website) As always, successful partner efforts start with the meanignful conversation and the meaning for each stakeholder comes using/ relating to the stakeholder's particular 'shared' language and 'shared' beliefs. So the government stakeholders will need to hear parnteships that ensures governance(safety) , Private sector will want to hear about the business outcomes and outputs(risk)and the non profits will want to hear about social change(social capital) Building capacity across these sectors needs the team building skills that uses the diversity of the sectors.

Local, national or international?

Posted by Kabura Zakama at Aug 11, 2009 03:10 AM
I have read the contributions here and I must say they are illuminating!

As someone who supports local partners in community settings, it would be useful if there are some comments as well on partnering at the local level. My question: where is the best point for partnering to start? Could be to scale down from the top or to scale up from the bottom? I am currently involved in supporting partnership for improved accountability and effective service delievry at local government levels, so your comments on this will be very useful for my work.

Local, national or international?

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