On September 25, 2015, I had the distinct privilege to announce that all Member States of the United Nations had agreed to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) therein. These SDGs are a global call to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure the well-being of humanity. The nations of the world committed to achieve these goals by 2030.

I believed then, and even more now, that these goals can only be met through multilateral and multisectoral collaboration. This is why SDG 17, which calls for sustainable development through partnerships, is one of the most important of them all.

The rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates how interconnected we are through travel, trade, and communication. To end this pandemic, we need global cooperation and partnerships to treat the sick, develop the vaccine, and rebuild communities and economies damaged by this deadly virus. Like the pandemic, we know climate change threatens lives and livelihoods as warming temperatures lead to more frequent and severe storms, floods, wildfires, and droughts. The governments, businesses, and civil society organizations of the world must work together with great urgency to address these issues and all SDGs, such as ending poverty and hunger, expanding education and health care for all, increasing gender equality, and supporting sustainable and inclusive economic growth.

The Global Green Growth Institute is proud to collaborate with the World Resources Institute on this report, appropriately titled “A Time for Transformative Partnerships.” It details how partnerships can accelerate progress on the SDGs by better aligning the visions and designs to the main characteristics of transformative change, and it identifies the key success factors that are common among partnerships with transformation potential.

I encourage you to study this report and use this knowledge to embrace partnerships to achieve the SDGs. We need bold, decisive, and transformative action to ensure a sustainable future for all.

Ban Ki-moon

President and Chair of the Global Green Growth Institute

Eighth Secretary-General of the United Nations

We live in a world ripe for transformation. In the midst of this global pandemic and the growing climate change crisis, it is imperative that we address these emergencies and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the context of longer-term systems change.

Incremental change is insufficient. Going it alone is inadequate. We need big, bold, and innovative action to tackle our greatest challenges while improving equity and social inclusion in all parts of the world. We need revolutions in green energy, food, transportation, manufacturing, and the built environment to dramatically reduce carbon emissions and ensure a sustainable future for people and the planet.

Attaining these goals requires transformative action that fundamentally shifts global systems, and multistakeholder partnerships can help usher in this critical change. Partnerships are effective when they are clear in their ambitions, are carefully designed to ensure that each member of the partnership contributes an essential element, and when they have a clear and accountable theory of change.

At WRI, partnerships are part of our DNA. We are proud to host P4G (Partnering for Green Growth and the Global Goals 2030), a platform that funds and supports innovative multistakeholder partnerships working across five SDGs in low-income countries.

This report dives deeply into how these partnerships can—and, indeed, do—make progress where less collaborative efforts might fail. A survey of 41 multistakeholder partnerships that work on the SDGs found four success factors that offer a high potential for transformation: joint agreement on vision and goals; clear articulation of what policies and relationships need to change; the ability to leverage existing power structures to advocate for change; and strong mechanisms for monitoring, evaluation, learning, and reporting.

Thank you to the members and sponsors of the P4G community, the Global Green Growth Institute, and the World Economic Forum for their contributions to this report. Thank you as well to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark for supporting this research. Our hope is that by reading this report, partnership practitioners from all sectors will be more equipped to achieve transformative change and contribute to a more just and sustainable world.

Andrew Steer

President and CEO

World Resources Institute

A Time for Transformation

As a global community of nations and some 8 billion people, we share in the desire to achieve the 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—goals that call for no poverty, zero hunger, good health and well-being, quality education, gender equality, reduced inequality, and climate action, among others. The last of the 17 goals is sustainable development through partnerships, the topic of this report.

Since the SDGs were adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015, there have been literally thousands of multistakeholder partnerships A voluntary collaboration among two or more stakeholders, whereby stakeholders are committed through a formal agreement to share resources, accountability, risks, leadership, and benefits to meet a specific SDG-related objective (UN 2015). These are also often referred to as cross-sectoral partnerships. This report focuses on multistakeholder partnerships with transformation potential. That is, partnerships comprising at least one government and one business and/or CSO that aspire to change the system in which they operate. Also referenced as partnerships, or partnerships with transformative ambitions created among governments, businesses, civil society, and other organizations. The work of some of these partnerships and other initiatives has helped contribute to progress on many of the SDGs. For example, sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s poorest region, continues to make great strides in poverty reduction. The global population without access to electricity has declined by over 30 percent in the last decade, and maternal and child mortality has dropped dramatically.

Yet, great challenges remain to meeting all the goals. Further, the COVID-19 pandemic, a global recession, and the climate change crisis are a triple threat that can reverse progress made on reducing poverty and hunger and other important goals.

At this critical time, this report provides a valuable road map to help governments, businesses, and civil society organizations (CSO) Nonprofit or nongovernmental organization. CSOs can range from small community organizations to large international groups assess their role in multistakeholder partnerships and how these partnerships can contribute to transformative change The process of transformation and progress on the SDGs. Although there may always be needs for new partnerships, the real opportunity is how to improve the effectiveness of existing and new partnerships, as they address SDGs, address the urgency for climate action, and ensure greater equity and justice in our world.

About This Report

This report, authored by World Resources Institute (WRI), details how partnerships with transformative ambitions can maximize their effectiveness toward driving SDG action. The findings and recommendations presented in this report reflect nearly two years of research; interviews with 41 multistakeholder partnerships and over three dozen government experts, business sustainability leaders, and civil society leaders; as well as contributions from Partnering for Green Growth and the Global Goals 2030 (P4G), hosted by WRI, the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) and the World Economic Forum (WEF).

This report, funded by the government of Denmark, offers extensive research findings coupled with practical guidance and recommendations for partnership practitioners, governments, businesses, and CSOs working on the SDGs. The report differs from past partnership research in its focus on transformation. This report starts with the premise that partnerships can accelerate transformative SDG action, and much of the content presented here studies partnership formation and effectiveness. Throughout this report, we present dozens of mission-driven partnerships—both those surveyed and beyond—working on issues such as improving health outcomes, reducing global poverty and hunger, and advancing clean energy and water. We adapt the United Nations definition of multistakeholder partnership and define a multistakeholder partnership as a voluntary collaboration between two or more stakeholders whereby stakeholders are committed through a formal agreement to share resources, accountability, risks, leadership, and benefits to meet a specific SDG-related objective (UN 2015).

In this report, we do not explicitly discuss the transformation impacts Measurable transformation outcome of partnerships since most are early in their partnership journey, nor do we set out to highlight failed partnerships. We do, however, discuss partnerships’ progress toward transformation goals, discuss partnership challenges, and provide recommendations for improving partnership resilience.

Key Findings and Recommendations

Partnerships can accelerate SDG action by better aligning their vision and design to the three main characteristics of transformation:

• Transformation is systemic. It helps to first break down the meaning of a system, which is broadly a construct comprising elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose (Meadows 2008). The sustainability of a system is influenced by underlying problems kept in place by certain conditions or barriers like inefficient policies, practices, or power dynamics. Partnerships operate within a system (e.g., energy, water, or food) and operate to address a complex issue underlying the system. Transformation occurs when changes or shifts to system conditions have altered the interrelationships and interdependencies of the system to set it on a sustainable development pathway.
• Transformation is long-term and sustained. Transitions are not immediate. Given its complexities, transformation takes time and patience. Transformative changes must also be lasting if true transformation is to have occurred. 
• Transformation disrupts the status quo. Inherent to transformation is a new way of doing things, such as a different approach that improves upon an existing state, an innovative technology that brings about unexpected change, or a shift in ideology that represents a new framing for action.

  Box ES-1 | A Transformative Partnership

  Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, founded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the World Bank, brings together private-sector vaccine manufacturers, local governments, and civil society actors to provide equitable access to vaccines in emerging countries. By pooling vaccine demand, Gavi disrupted the status quo by removing commercial risks that typically prevent vaccine manufacturers from serving low-income countries. The partnership takes a systemic approach, addressing issues throughout the vaccine life cycle that contribute to low vaccination rates. Gavi works with countries to strengthen local health care systems, engage local communities, and address mental models affecting vaccine access. The partnership’s market-shaping activities are intended to be long term. Nearly all countries that have transitioned out of Gavi support continue to purchase vaccines at the same price negotiated by the partnership.

  Source: Gavi 2020.

Partnerships with transformative ambitions can work toward changing external policies and practices and/or launching commercial products or services that address the SDGs. We propose a continuum on which partnerships with transformation potential exist. While we recognize that it is challenging—or perhaps even impossible—to develop the perfect framework to capture every transformative partnership out there, our hope is that this continuum, based on our research and observations, can help partnerships mark where they are on their transformation journeys and think about potential pathways of transformation as they mature. The continuum broadly features two types of partnerships:

• Enabling Partnerships Partnerships convening stakeholders within an industry, supply chain, sector, or issue area to exchange knowledge, set standards, or influence policy. These partnerships affect transformation by shifting policy or sharing information that shifts an entire sector or group of actors onto a sustainable pathway . These partnerships strive to shift policies and practices to move actors more quickly to a sustainable development pathway. To do so, they may form roundtables or voluntary commitments to set sustainability standards; they may focus on sharing knowledge or advice; or they may look to create market conditions such that commercial investments are feasible in the future. These partnerships fall toward the left of the continuum illustrated in Figure ES-1.
• Market-Driven Partnerships Partnerships creating a new product, asset, service, or business model that can overcome market barriers and eventually find commercial viability. These partnerships affect transformation by launching a new product or service that incentivize other actors in a market operate in line with sustainable practices . These partnerships use the power of market signals and forces to drive sustainable change by launching a commercially viable product or service. Although these partnerships are often motivated by matters beyond making profit (e.g., strengthening relationships with other stakeholders, helping a local community, etc.), these partnerships ultimately strive to develop a model that launches a commercial new product or service and are often reliant on innovative policies or concessions or innovative combinations of both. These partnerships fall toward the right of Figure ES-1.

Figure ES-1 | Transformative Partnership Continuum

Source: WRI Authors.

Partnerships can move along the continuum, or they might remain static. In Box ES-2, we describe two partnerships and where they fall along this continuum.

It is critical for stakeholders to understand why others want to partner with them. This can help to facilitate a smooth relationship among partners, and also ensure that partners are properly sourced. With a clear understanding of what each stakeholder brings to the table, partnership practitioners will be able to better align on a united vision—a critical success factor for transformative partnerships. Figure ES-2 identifies the typical contributions of the stakeholders—governments, businesses, and CSOs—in multistakeholder partnerships. These contributions reflect findings from a detailed review of published academic literature, as well as dozens of conversations with government policy and climate experts and sustainability and partnership leaders in businesses and CSOs. Although the lists may not be all-inclusive, they do provide a helpful starter framing for partnership practitioners looking to better understand one another.

Box ES-2 | Partnerships on the Continuum

The Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) aims to transform the palm oil market by convening business, government, and civil society stakeholders to set industry standards and create an enabling policy environment for sustainable palm oil production. The partnership now has over 4,000 members across the palm oil supply chain that have committed to produce, source, and use palm oil that complies with RSPO social and environmental criteria. The Zero Emission Rapid Bus-deployment Accelerator (ZEBRA) is working to transform public transportation in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil by transitioning public bus systems from diesel to electric. ZEBRA started by engaging government actors to address the public policy barriers preventing this transition. As the partnership has progressed toward its end goal of launching a commercial electric bus service, it has engaged private-sector electric bus suppliers, developers, and operators.

Source: RSPO 2020; P4G 2020d.

Figure ES-2 | Stakeholder Contributions in Transformative Partnerships

Sources: Albani and Henderson 2014; Brouwer et al. 2016; Collison et al. 2014; Enright et al. 2018; G20 2015; GCPSE and UNDP n.d.; GGGI 2019; Gomme and Perks 2018; Hofstetter 2019; Horan 2019; Jenkins et al. 2017; Kamphof and Melissen 2017; KPMG International 2016; Melo 2018; Ménascé 2016; Menden et al. 2019; Pattberg and Widerberg 2016; Podder and Singh 2018; PWC 2017; Poret 2014; Seitanidi 2015; Stibbe and Prescott 2017; Stibbe et al. 2018; UN DESA 2019; UNGC 2013; UNGC, WMB and WRI 2018; Urmetzer et al. 2017; USCIB 2015; Van der Vleuten 2019; WBCSD 2016; WBCSD 2020.

Out of 14 commonly reported partnership success factors, we identified 4 where partnerships with high transformation potential were especially intentional about their implementation, compared to low transformation-potential partnerships. We identified the 14 partnership success factors through a detailed review of dozens of published academic and organizational reports on multistakeholder partnerships. Interested as to which of these 14 success factors may better help partnerships achieve their transformation vision A partnership’s ultimate systems-change goal. This may be the launch of a new product or service, the exchange of key information, or the development of a policy that will shift system conditions , we surveyed 41 partnerships from the P4G partnership ecosystem, to understand the extent to which they embodied these success factors. We established an evaluation The process of analyzing information and data to answer whether a partnership is meeting its objectives. Evaluation is about “sense-making, reality-checking, assumption testing, and answering questions” (FSG and Collective Impact Forum 2020) method (that is fully explained in the report) for assessing these partnerships’ transformation potential to see how those with high transformation potential compared to those with low transformation potential in terms of embodying each success factor. Partnerships with high transformation potential were found to be especially intentional about implementing these four success factors:

1. Clear articulation of the system of interest. Partnerships with high transformation potential are better able to develop a strong understanding of the system they want to influence and in which they operate, as well as the conditions, such as policies or relationships, that must be shifted to move the needle on the problem. Partnerships with high transformation potential that could articulate their system of interest rated themselves as doing this to a great or very great extent (93 percent) compared to those with low transformation potential (60 percent).

   Box ES-3 | IIX Women’s Livelihood Bond Series^TM

   The IIX Women's Livelihood Bond Series^TM (WLB Series) aims to transform the global financial system by mobilizing capital for women’s empowerment through innovative financial instruments. The partnership recognized the importance of developing a holistic understanding of its system from the start and focused on a specific subset of countries in the Asia-Pacific region. This enabled the partnership to create clear boundaries of its activities while ensuring it added value to each market. Initially, WLB Series focused on three South Asian countries. It has since expanded to additional countries and targets specific sectors such as clean energy and sustainable agriculture. The WLB Series successfully closed a US$8.5 and $12 million issuance, demonstrating the scalability, replicability, and overall power of investing in women’s empowerment.

   Source: IIX 2017; IIX 2020.

2. Jointly agreed-upon transformation vision and near-term goals. Partnerships with higher transformation potential tend to excel at establishing a joint transformation vision and near-term goals that are well aligned with the transformation characteristics, a strong systems understanding, and the SDGs. We found that 71 percent of high transformation potential partnerships scored themselves as excelling at establishing a shared vision and goals, compared to only 27 percent of partnerships with low transformation potential.

   Box ES-4 | Africa GreenCo

   Africa GreenCo aims to increase private-sector investment in clean energy in sub-Saharan Africa by acting as a creditworthy intermediary to reduce risk and create a more dynamic power market in the region. The partnership has aligned stakeholders across the power systems, from developers and investors to national governments, to define and align on a partnership vision and goals. Through an iterative and participatory process, Africa GreenCo developed a master vision and goals document that captures the partnership strategy. Updating this document regularly enables partnership stakeholders to stay focused and aligned even as market conditions change.^a

   Note: ^a.Oxby, Cathy. 2020. Interview with WRI authors and Cathy Oxby, Chief Commercial Officer, Africa GreenCo, Surrey, UK. March 3, 2020.

   Source: Africa GreenCo 2020.

3. Strong monitoring, evaluation, learning, and reporting (MELR) Performance-tracking system used to understand progress on goals and learn from successes and failures. MELR moves beyond short-term performance tracking to integrate systems thinking mechanisms with systems thinking. Partnerships with high transformation potential tend to have a robust performance tracking system in place that incorporates systems thinking The ability to see how a partnership is influencing system conditions, how system conditions interact and influence each other, and ultimately how the partnership is contributing to addressing the problem of interest (adapted from Preskill and Cook 2020) into MELR. Systems thinking involves adopting practices to help the partnerships understand their influence on system conditions and their contribution to transformation. Not surprisingly, more partnerships with high transformation potential (64 percent) believe that they have strong to very strong MELR systems in place, compared to 47 percent of partnerships with lower transformation potential that hold this opinion.

   Box ES-5 | Courtauld Commitment 2025

   Courtauld Commitment 2025 is a multistakeholder partnership that has been recognized for its MELR process and success in measurably reducing food loss and waste in the United Kingdom by 20 percent since 2015. Convening stakeholder Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) provides member companies with clear data collection and reporting Efforts to summarize evaluation findings and lessons learned with different audiences. Reporting can come in many forms, including annual reports, quarterly updates, PowerPoint presentations, and webinars protocols and has two dedicated analysts who focus on data cleaning, validating, and aggregating reporting data. An external auditor or peer reviewer then verifies progress against the partnership’s targets.^a

   Note: ^a. Swannell, Richard. 2020. Interview with WRI authors and Richard Swannell, Director, WRAP, Oxford, UK. March 5, 2020.

   Source: WRAP 2020.

4. Capacity to Engage Stakeholders External to the Partnership. Partnerships with high transformation potential are effective at tackling existing power structures and revising them by engaging champions (both internally and externally) and frontline communities to advocate for change. Partnerships with high transformation potential believe they have embodied this success factor to a great or very great extent (64 percent), compared to partnerships with low transformation potential (47 percent).

   Box ES-6 | Energise Africa

   Energise Africa, an impact investing platform by Ethex and Lendahand, has cultivated support from stakeholder networks, investors, and other CSOs to provide affordable finance to solar businesses in sub-Saharan Africa and currently serves nearly half a million people. The partnership has cultivated relationships with grassroots CSOs, collaborating on events and enabling Energise Africa to connect with new investor groups. Creating new opportunities for a first point of contact with investors is critical for building trust among new investors and establishing a sustainable investment pipeline. Once people have invested with Energise Africa, the partnership’s repeat investment rate is above 90 percent.^a

   Note: ^a. Mountain, Rachel. 2020. Interview with WRI Authors and Rachel Mountain, Head of Marketing and Communication, Energise Africa, Oxford, UK. March 4, 2020

   Source: Energise Africa 2020.

How to Use This Report

The findings and recommendations in this report offer practical and valuable guidance for governments, businesses, and CSOs. We note a few ways to apply this knowledge:

• Study the chapter on transformation to understand how to integrate these concepts better into existing or new partnerships’ visions and goals working toward the SDGs.
• Review the chapter on contributions of government, business, and civil society stakeholders to leverage these to better understand one another and to effectively pursue transformative partnerships.
• Explore the seven criteria used to evaluate the transformation potential of a partnership.
• Examine the chapter and appendix on 14 well-established partnership success factors—particularly the four identified as most important for partnerships with transformative ambitions—to maximize operational effectiveness. (We also have provided a section with six guidelines for creating great MELR systems.)
• Learn more about the dozens of partnerships mentioned in this report to see how their work can inform existing and new partnerships with goals to accelerate the SDGs.

The idea of transformation is very alluring. At first blush, transformation suggests a dramatic shift, the unveiling of something new or different from a prior form. In some ways, transformation has become the rallying cry in this Decade of Action. It is a warning, a plea, a necessity.

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Global Assessment, for instance, notes that “the world needs transformative change if life on Earth is to be safeguarded and people are to continue to receive the services and benefits that nature provides" (UNEP and CBD 2019). This sentiment is echoed by numerous other sustainable development–focused publications, including the 2019 Global Sustainable Development Report, which cautions that “much more needs to happen—and quickly—to bring about the transformative changes that are required” (UN 2019), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has stated that, in order to put the world on a 1.5°C climate trajectory, the world will need “fundamental societal and systems transitions and transformations” (IPCC 2018).

What is transformation? Definitions abound across fields of study and sectors (Clarke and Crane 2018; Maassen and Galvin 2019; Mersmann et al. 2014; ICAT 2019; GeSI and Accenture, 2016; UN 2019; TWI2050 2018; WBCSD 2020), and we recognize that interpretations of transformation are diverse and often discussed, especially as of late. However, research on transformative partnerships is still limited, making it easier to offer an early viewpoint. And so, through an assessment of recent research and reports, three key commonalities of transformation emerge:

• Transformation is systemic.
• Transformation is long-term and sustained.
• Transformation disrupts the status quo.

  Box 2 | Transformation Concepts and Characteristics

  Transformation vs. Systems Change: A Clarification

  Transformation and systems change are frequently referenced terms associated with the sweeping transitions required for 2030 action. The first term is often used by the sustainable development community, whereas the second is seen more often in the academic literature. These terms are often conflated. Transformative change is frequently referenced as being systemic (ICAT 2019; Gass 2011; Cummings and Worley 2014), and systemic change is referenced as being transformative (Kania 2018; Clarke and Crane 2018). Some recent publications even make reference to the SDG change required as “systems transformation,” further combining the two terms (WBCSD 2020; GeSI and Accenture 2016). Given the circular relationship between the two terms, this report considers them the same. Overall, transformation is similar to “systems change” in that both refer to an action that happens to a construct, the system, and fulfill the same three characteristics identified in this report.

  What Is a System?

  Broadly speaking, systems comprise elements and interconnections, with a function or purpose (Meadows 2008). Elements can include an array of diverse actors, institutions, and geographies operating across multiple levels and scales that, together, often form a whole greater than the sum of the parts (Holland 1998). Interconnections are the relationships and power dynamics among elements that ultimately define the characteristics of the system or the pathways by which the function or the purpose of the system is achieved.

  Take, for example, the global food system, which aims to feed the world’s 8 billion people. Elements are the actors and institutions operating across multiple scales and levels, such as farmers growing crops; agricultural conglomerates buying, processing, and distributing food products; research labs developing new seed varieties; governments setting agricultural trade policies; consumers purchasing the food; and animals farmed for consumption. Interconnections include the relationships among these various elements, such as the markets and value chains that make connecting consumers with farmers possible (WBCSD 2020).

  A system is also full of complexities. Systems may overlap, nest, and network (Von Bertalanffy 1955; Barabasi 2002). For example, pig farming and soy farming can be independent practices with their own dynamics and markets, although soy is also produced for pig feed, in which case soy farming may also be nested within the animal farming subsystem. Or, consider also that food systems are intricately connected with water systems.

  The characteristics and strength of a system’s elements and interconnections determine how well a system is aligned with a sustainable development pathway. For example, although the food system keeps billions of people on our planet nourished, market and governance failures have resulted in severe issues of malnutrition and/or issues of food loss and waste in many parts of the world.

  A helpful transformation framework is offered by Kania et al. (2018), which discusses three conditions of a system (explicit, semi-explicit, and implicit) that need to be changed for transformation to occur (Figure B2-1). Explicit conditions—that is, tangible changes in policies, practices, and resources flows—are the easiest the shift. Semi-explicit conditions—the interconnections like relationships between actors and institutions or power dynamics among elements—are more difficult to shift. Implicit conditions—mental models or cultural mind-sets—are the most difficult to change. Shifting all three leads to true transformation within a system.

  Figure B2-1 | Three Levels of Systems Change

  

  Source: Adapted from Kania et al. 2018.

  It is important to note that systems can exist at multiple scales (Hargreaves 2010). That is, a food system could refer to a specific country’s system or to a specific commodity. A local food system would also influence a regional and global food system. Given the complexities, it is important for partnerships to establish boundaries in their system of focus.

Three Characteristics of Transformation

1. Transformation Is Systemic.

Earlier, we presented the many complexities of a system. Transformation means that changes have percolated through any given system, altering the interrelationships and interdependencies of its parts to influence new paradigms (Denoncourt 2017; IBRD 2016; Puri 2018). For example, to shift the food system to a more sustainable model, there need to be changes in food production itself, but also in the surrounding ecosystem—that which is related to technology, policies, infrastructure, education, and more. Each of these changes involves different actors at different levels and geographies. Change must permeate through all these layers, adjusting the three layers of aforementioned systems conditions in a way such that society ultimately values and views food in a manner fundamentally different than before. And while one partnership or actor is never solely responsible for driving the entire transformation, it can make contributions to influence a movement. These complexities add an element of unpredictability to transformation; actions at one level can have disproportionate impacts elsewhere (Olsen et al. 2018; Larson 2018).

We will see the immense importance of systems understanding in Chapter 4, which provides guidance to partnerships on how they can better think about transformation by adjusting or building their performance tracking system to include “systems thinking.”

2. Transformation Is Long-Term and Sustained.

Transformation cannot be rushed. Many actors across different roles, levels, and geographies work over time to create positive systemic change (Olsen et al. 2018; Westphal and Thwaites 2016; IBRD 2016). The rate at which transformation takes place also varies. Acceptance of novel technologies, business models, products, or practices can move slowly at first, then leap forward as windows of opportunity emerge or when the adoption of a new approach reaches a tipping point. Some events—such as a rapid change in public opinion, a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, or the overturning of a regime—can create conditions to accelerate this change. Alternatively, there could be moments of lagging even after a point of acceleration. Regardless, true transformational change needs to last if it is to effectively deliver on the goals of this Decade of Action and set the world on a more sustainable pathway.

Understanding this characteristic for partnerships, it will be important for partnerships to identify important windows of opportunity, closed doors, and a potential timeline for how their activities will fit into a larger systems transformation. Chapter 4 and Appendix B explore the importance of this in relation to vision setting.

3. Transformation Disrupts the Status Quo.

Transformation starts with the introduction of something novel into an existing system. This could be represented by a different approach that improves on the existing state, an innovative technology that brings about unexpected change, or a shift in ideology or culture that represents a new framing for action (Puri 2018).

Inevitably, introducing a new way of doing things will result in winners and losers (Dentoni et al. 2018). As such, transformation can encounter resistance, particularly from those who have benefited from the existing system, stand to lose from changes, or perceive that they will be left behind. These tensions are to be expected and must be addressed in order to equitably implement sustainable development transformations in line with the SDGs. Identifying how transformative action will affect different populations, particularly vulnerable groups, and mitigating potential conflict early on is essential.

Disruption of the status quo is evident in greater detail throughout this report. In Chapter 3, for instance, we will discuss the new technologies and innovations that businesses bring forth in partnerships, as well as signals to spur innovation and scale up action brought about by governments. In Chapter 4, we further discuss the role of 21st-century technologies as an enabler of partnerships.

Transformative Partnership Continuum

We have observed that partnerships with transformative ambitions broadly achieve their transformation goals through policy and practices (enabling partnerships) and/or the launch of a commercial product or service (market-driven partnerships). We have developed a continuum (Figure 1) to capture a typology of partnerships in accordance with these intermediate goals. The partnerships found on this continuum are the more complex partnerships that this report is interested in (and also highlighted earlier in Figure B-1)—that is, partnerships comprising multiple stakeholders working together through collective action to tackle complex challenges through systems transformation. Partnerships that wouldn’t fit on this continuum are ones with more straightforward and direct goals without an eye for systemic changes, such traditional development partnerships that focus on a singular, time-bound project, or infrastructure-focused public-private partnerships.

Although we recognize that it is challenging, or perhaps even impossible, to develop the perfect framework to capture every transformative partnership out there, our hope is that this continuum, based on our research and observations, is a starter to help partnerships understand the potential pathways of transformation that they can follow as they mature in their partnership journeys.

Figure 1 | Transformative Partnership Continuum

Source: WRI Authors.

Enabling Partnerships

Enabling partnerships largely work through the power of convening stakeholders within an industry, supply chain, sector, or issue area to exchange knowledge and set standards of practice or commitments to move actors more quickly to a sustainable development pathway. There are a few types of enabling partnerships:

• Those focused on sharing knowledge—collecting, analyzing, and disseminating information —to support activities that advance a more sustainable world.
• Those focused on convening stakeholders to set standards or create new practices that foster more sustainable practices. Often in the form of roundtables and voluntary commitments, these partnerships encourage good governance around the SDGs and help engage businesses in SDG action by reducing risks of being the first mover in a sector.
• Those that create market conditions to transform a system such that commercial approaches or investments are feasible in the future. These partnerships themselves may not have a business model, however.

Market-Driven Partnerships

Market-driven partnerships use the power of market signals and forces to drive sustainable change by launching a commercially viable product or service. Although these partnerships can be motivated by drivers that go beyond making short-term profits, (e.g., strengthening relationships with other stakeholders, helping a local community, etc.), these partnerships ultimately strive to develop a model that launches a commercial new product or service and are often reliant on innovative policies or concessions or innovative combinations of both.

By executing against a successful business model, these partnerships can then work to scale up their solutions to achieve transformative impacts.

Partnership Movement along the Continuum

A partnership’s place on this continuum can be fluid, meaning that it might start off at one place, but end up at another. For instance, a partnership with the goal of launching a commercial product or service may start out as an enabling partnership in order to shape the policy or market conditions needed to operate successfully. A partnership can also remain firmly in place. For instance, a roundtable or voluntary commitment-based partnership may just want to develop the practices and standards to encourage a sustainability, without aim to become commercially viable itself or shape a specific policy. Most partnerships balance some elements of both enabling and market-driven activities.

Placing Partnerships along the Continuum

Platform for Accelerating the Circular Economy: The Platform for Accelerating the Circular Economy (PACE, Figure 2), hosted by WRI, connects public- and private-sector leaders with cutting-edge knowledge on the circular economy and catalyzes new initiatives to pilot and scale best practices that drive the transition toward a circular economy. PACE then captures and translates lessons from these projects into replicable frameworks and approaches. Although new projects and partnerships stem from PACE, the primary goal of the partnership is knowledge sharing, with the long-term aim of transitioning all actors across multiple sectors, including plastics, textiles, and agriculture, to circular practices (WRI 2020).

Figure 2 | Platform for Accelerating the Circular Economy

Source: WRI Authors.

The Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil: The Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO, Figure 3) is a coalition of members across the palm oil supply chain, including businesses, governments, and CSOs. RSPO seeks to transform markets to make sustainable palm oil the new status quo. RSPO operates on principles of commitment, collaboration, and accountability. Among other activities, RSPO works to achieve its transformation objective by creating a supportive policy environment through government engagement, getting businesses (e.g., palm oil producers, processors, traders, manufacturers, retailers, and investors) to align on standards and commitments across the supply chain, and getting CSO support to help develop standards and monitoring The process of systematically and regularly collecting information and data to track a partnership’s progress on its activities and evaluation processes to ensure accountability. RSPO also works to match supply and demand to shore up the long-term security of supply.

Figure 3 | Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil

Source: WRI Authors.

Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance: Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (Figure 4), seeks to transform the vaccine market to increase access to vaccines in emerging economies. Although the partnership’s ultimate goal is to transition Gavi countries out of Gavi support, the partnership itself is not seeking to become commercially viable. Instead, it focuses on market-shaping activities, including bundling demand among countries and working closely with governments and local CSOs to strengthen health care delivery systems.

Figure 4 | Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance

Source: WRI Authors.

Zero Emission Rapid Bus-Deployment Accelerator: The Zero Emission Rapid Bus-Deployment Accelerator (ZEBRA, Figure 5) aims to transform public transportation systems in Mexico City, Medellín, and São Paulo by transitioning public bus systems from diesel to electric buses. The partnership, led by the International Council on Clean Transportation and C40 Cities, started by working with local governments to address underlying policy barriers to electric bus implementation. In Medellín, for instance, these efforts resulted in the city committing to shift to zero-emission bus purchases by 2030. As these efforts have progressed, ZEBRA has become more involved in the commercial aspects of the partnership, working with developers, electric bus suppliers, and operators that meet local needs and are financially sustainable over time.

Figure 5 | Zero Emission Rapid Bus-Deployment Accelerator

Source: WRI Authors.

Africa GreenCo: Africa GreenCo (Figure 6), a partnership among African governments, the private sector, and international financial institutions, aims to address Africa’s energy deficiencies by taking a regional approach to improve the bankability of renewable energy projects. By establishing a creditworthy intermediary offtaker and power service provider, Africa GreenCo will reduce the investment risk and cost of renewable energy projects, attracting private-sector investment, and shifting investment focus from single project development to the regional energy sector as a whole. Africa GreenCo leverages the interconnected nature of the regional electricity grid and demonstrates the benefits of regional trade. The economic and development benefits of this model incentivize public and private stakeholders to coordinate in creating an enabling environment for the partnership. Once operational, Africa GreenCo will allow governments to earn dividends from equity ownership, reduce the need for energy-sector subsidies, and support country governments in attaining their Nationally Determined Contributions and SDG targets. Private investors benefit from reduced risk and shorter development lead times through offtaker arrangements, and utilities reduce their operational costs while increasing installed capacity.

Figure 6 | Africa GreenCo

Source: WRI Authors.

Stakeholder Contributions to Transformative Partnerships

Forming a partnership is not easy. It involves finding the right partners, making commitments, signing legal documents, and allocating time and resources to ensure a fruitful collaboration. Bringing together stakeholders from governments, businesses, and CSOs with ambitious goals for SDG transformation raises the stakes even higher.

This chapter provides a look at the key contributions of each stakeholder to help partnerships identify how best to leverage each other’s skill sets and define partnership roles and responsibilities. Stakeholders must agree on how to reach their partnership goals and who has oversight on the different elements required to get there. (We will discuss again, too, this importance of partnership roles and responsibilities in the success factors presented in Chapter 4 and Appendix B.) Knowing why one stakeholder wants to work with another can help to facilitate a smooth relationship between partners, and also ensure that partners are properly sourced (Dalberg 2020; Stibbe and Prescott 2020). Our hope is that with a clear understanding of what each stakeholder brings to the table, partnership practitioners will be able to better align on a united vision, which is a critical success factor for transformative partnerships.

Research Methods

Our research on the contributions of governments, businesses, and CSOs is informed by a combination of literature reviews, insight from government policy and climate experts at GGGI, and interviews with 30 sustainability and partnership leaders in businesses and CSOs, drawn from WRI’s extensive international network. Each contribution is further illustrated with an example (found in the chapter’s boxes). More details on the methodology and the organizations interviewed are available in Appendix A.

Chapter Flow

In this chapter, we present the three main partnership stakeholders—governments, business and CSOs—and discuss their contributions to partnerships (Figure 7).The discussion here is not intended to be all-inclusive, as it reflects the findings from our research and interviews. We also look at how the stakeholder contributions tie back to the three aforementioned transformation characteristics noted in Chapter 2—systemic, long-term and sustained, and disruptive of the status quo—and provide a few words of caution to consider before entering into a multistakeholder partnership.

Figure 7 | Stakeholder Contributions in Transformative Partnerships

Sources: Albani and Henderson 2014; Brouwer et al. 2016; Collison et al. 2014; Enright et al. 2018; G20 2015; GCPSE and UNDP n.d.; GGGI 2019; Gomme and Perks 2018; Hofstetter 2019; Horan 2019; Jenkins et al. 2017; Kamphof and Melissen 2017; KPMG International 2016; Melo 2018; Ménascé 2016; Menden et al. 2019; Pattberg and Widerberg 2016; Podder and Singh 2018; PWC 2017; Poret 2014; Seitanidi 2015; Stibbe and Prescott 2017; Stibbe et al. 2018; UN DESA 2019; UNGC 2013; UNGC, WMB and WRI 2018; Urmetzer et al. 2017; USCIB 2015; Van der Vleuten 2019; WBCSD 2016; WBCSD 2020.

Government Contributions to Transformative Partnerships

Governments are faced with increasingly complex and interlinked development challenges, many of which can only be overcome by delivering transformative solutions (GRI et al. 2015). Government participation is key to creating an enabling environment for partnerships, coordinating resources, unlocking new funding sources, driving market demand and reducing investment risks through the provision of incentives. In turn, partnerships also benefit governments by helping them break out of bureaucratic stagnation and develop new systems and services to deliver solutions to citizens. Also, as a note, the discussion here has relevance to all governments, regardless of level (local, municipal, federal).

• Strong Enabling Environment: Governments can facilitate a strong enabling environment by creating the right policy or regulatory environment for change, thereby setting the conditions for other stakeholders to act (Collison et al. 2014). This can have positive run-on effects for society and simultaneously support government priorities and economic growth. Businesses, for example, can align their business models and future strategies according to the signals that governments send (PWC, 2017; World Bank 2020). Governments can also maximize positive ambition loops within their own administrations or foreign governments. Ambition loops are positive feedback loops that enable stakeholders to fast-track action on the SDGs and create impacts that surpass what any party could do alone (UNGC, WMB and WRI 2018; PWC 2017). National governments may establish a regulatory and institutional environment that influences positive action among its local, state, and regional counterparts, or vice versa. Given that governments can be very politically motivated, knowing that other sectors and governments desire a sustainable development pathway can give governments more political leverage to act. Governments may also inspire and motivate other governments to work in partnerships for sustainable development. Equally, when creating partnerships, governments might legitimize the participation of other actors, allowing them to participate in topics where they have little expertise but can contribute to create value.

  
  

  Box 4 | City Support Programme

  In 2011, South Africa established its City Support Programme (CSP), a long-term policy framework to help cities overcome apartheid planning and the spatial inequality hindering urban development and to strengthen collaboration across sectors and spheres of government for inclusive economic growth (National Treasury 2015a). As one of CSP’s beneficiaries and partners, Johannesburg reinforced this national-level plan with its Strategic Development Framework, prioritizing affordable housing and public transportation services and implementing the Corridors of Freedom project, which helped the city overcome apartheid planning schemes (Pieterse and Owens 2018). By aligning goals and working together across different levels of the government, projects like the Corridors of Freedom can lead to transformational changes to a city’s social and economic landscape. In 2015, CSP strengthened its Built Environment Performance Plan, (BEPP) a grant framework to encourage implementation of urban development projects in integration zones with a focus on informal settlements and marginalized areas (National Treasury 2015b). The updated BEPP incentivizes other cities to follow the integrated approach demonstrated by the Corridors of Freedom project.

  

  Source: WRI Authors.

• Platform Initiation: Governments can initiate platforms to build relationships among industry stakeholders, helping them find productive partnering opportunities that are aligned with the government’s priorities for sustainable development (Stibbe et al. 2018). Such platforms create a podium for collaborating in areas where multistakeholder participation is considered most crucial and is a way in which governments can set ambitions on sustainability. These platforms also allow governments to pool resources that can help scale the most effective cross-sector partnerships (Dahiya and Okitasari 2018).

  Box 5 | Alianza por la Sostenibilidad

  The Mexican Agency for International Development Cooperation platform, Alianza por la Sostenibilidad (AxS), creates a space where companies can discuss, promote, and collaborate on projects that support the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda (OECD 2018b; GOB 2020). This exchange can accelerate the speed at which companies pursue sustainability actions with transformation potential. Walmart, for instance, is leading a pilot project as a part of the AxS to cut electricity and refrigeration energy use in three stores in Mexico. The retail giant is sharing its strategy and results with other actors in its supply chain so that it can help to replicate the intervention in other parts of the country (GOB 2018).

  

  Source: WRI Authors.

• Signals That Spur Innovation and Scale Up Action: Governments can deploy capital investments to trigger significant and sustained change (Hofstetter 2019), which, of course, is one of the aforementioned characteristics of transformation. Such strategic investments can accelerate the adoption of sustainable technological solutions that create positive social impact while nudging the behavior of other investors. Investments can take many forms, such as risk mitigation and insurance products, subsidy and rebate schemes, and funds that pool both government and business resources to enhance access to finance for sustainable businesses models (G20 2015; Hofstetter 2019). Moreover, once innovation is present, the government plays a key role in scaling-up its implementation.

  Box 6 | EIT Climate-KIC

  Convened by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the European Union, EIT Climate-KIC is a knowledge and innovation community that identifies and scales transformative products and services that will accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy. The partnership does this by investing in capacity building and providing seed funding to the most promising climate-positive business. Supported by public and private funding, including an annual grant from the European Union, the program incentivizes entrepreneurs to channel innovation toward four focus areas: urban transitions, sustainable land use, sustainable production systems, and financial mechanisms to mobilize capital toward climate action. EIT Climate-KIC programs have supported over 1,000 start-ups and attracted over $500 million in investment (Climate-KIC 2020).

  

  Source: WRI Authors.

• Support for Innovation: Governments are sometimes the masterminds behind the development of new technologies, products, or business models, and even if not, they can help drive innovation in other sectors to meet societal needs. Innovative ideas can help disrupt the status quo and drive transformation. Governments have a bird’s-eye view of different groups' interests, norms, and expectations. Using this information, they can create innovation incentives such as grants, awards, or other recognition, to help the private sector and CSOs set innovation priorities where they are most needed (Urmetzer et al. 2017). Governments may want to advance new ideas or technologies, especially to address the SDGs, to drive innovation (GCPSE and UNDP n.d.; UN DESA 2019).

  Box 7 | Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum

  Comprising 25 country governments, the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF) aims to catalyze the development and deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology by fostering innovation efforts within government, industry, and academia (CSLF 2020). Member governments, including those of Australia, China, India, Korea, Russia, United Arab Emirates, and South Africa, work to support CCS directly through program development and indirectly by working to create an enabling legal, financial, and regulatory environment for CCS innovation. To date, CSLF has supported over 30 CCS projects (Hultman et al. 2016).

  

  Source: WRI Authors.

• Just Transition: The process of transformative change often results in winners and losers. To make transitions just and reduce opposition, governments can use policy instruments to either compensate losers or help them better participate in the transition and come out on the winning end (Horan 2019). Having a government as part of a partnership provides greater leverage for mitigating the losses that may come as a result of the transformative change the partnership seeks (IRENA 2020). When facilitating a just transition, governments are simultaneously changing policies, practices, and resource flows (explicit conditions), shifting relationships and connections (semi-explicit conditions), and encouraging a different mental model and way of doing things—touching on all the characteristics necessary to drive systemic change.

  Box 8 | Powering Past Coal Alliance

  Launched by the UK and Canadian governments in 2017, the Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA) convenes national governments, the private sector, and civil society actors that include academia and labor organizations to identify challenges and outline practical strategies for a clean and just energy transition. Recognizing that social resistance can be a significant barrier to governments transitioning from coal, PPCA established a just transition task force. The task force, co-chaired by the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Welsh Government, aims to share lessons learned, develop best practices, and establish a public policy road map for governments to implement just transition strategies (PPCA 2020). The task force aims to release its first report in December 2020.

  

  Source: WRI Authors.

• Unlocked Access to Finance: Governments can unlock financial sources or add additional resources specifically for achieving the SDGs that require global cooperation. The global agenda for development supports governments, particularly those of developing nations, in accessing different financing mechanisms, such as concessional loans for development assistance, non-concessional international finance from multilateral development banks, and grants from international funds through bilateral commitments between governments. Seeking initial funding from governments can help partnerships build and validate their value propositions as they build support from donors or investors (Enright et al. 2018). Operationally speaking, funding helps to extend the life of a partnership and its activities, aiding the long-term and sustained nature of transformation. Additionally, governments can spark or redirect private-sector investment in non-mainstream sectors like energy efficiency by providing the adequate incentives.

  
  

  Box 9 | Green Climate Fund

  Developing countries can access funds from the Green Climate Fund (GCF) via its accredited entities. The GCF depends on funding from wealthier governments—top contributors over the years include the United Kingdom, Japan, the United States, France, and Germany, with pledges totaling $10.3 billion in 2014, and $ 9.87 billion in its 2019 replenishment, GCF-1. This commitment of public investment is meant to attract and stimulate financiers who may otherwise be wary of sustainable development projects in less stable economies. The GCF relies on its partnership network of national governments, development banks, national banks, CSOs, and other financial institutions to oversee and implement GCF-funded projects (GCF 2020).

  

  Source: WRI Authors.

Look Out for Considerations of Government Contributions

Governments are often hierarchical, bureaucratic, and risk-averse, making them notoriously challenging stakeholders to work with (Kamphof and Melissen 2017; Melo 2018). This structural lack of flexibility can be at odds with the dynamic structural changes required to meet the SDGs (Allas et al. 2018). The layered structure of governments—vertically and horizontally—can prevent collaboration across government ministries (OECD 2017), obstruct the alignment of common objectives under a specific time frame as some government agencies might have competing goals, and ultimately prevent systemic change. In addition to government structure, partnerships can encounter a culture of corruption or private interests within governments that disincentivize SDG action (USCIB 2015; Brouwer et al. 2016). For instance, a state-owned fossil fuel industry may make it impossible for a partnership focused on implementing a clean-energy transition to gain government support. Unsupportive policies or misalignment between local and national regulations can also impede partnership action. Additionally, changes in political leadership or political priorities can negatively affect partnerships. They may be operating under a particular timeline or with certain assumptions, only to have those thoughts derailed with unexpected shifts (GGGI 2019). Even governments that offer support through proper regulations and policies may lack the resources needed to build the infrastructure required for partnership success (GGGI 2018b; Beisheim and Simon 2016).

Business Contributions to Transformative Partnerships

The contributions of business in partnership can help set up partnerships for true transformation. Many business interviewees noted that transformation is key to finding a competitive edge and staying relevant. As global urgency around sustainability grows, more and more companies are incorporating goals aligned with the SDGs and Paris Agreement into their long-term strategies (Gupta et al. 2019; Gomme and Perks 2018; Business and Sustainable Development Commission 2017). When it comes to aligning their activities with sustainable development, some companies interviewed noted that they would be more willing to be patient and take a longer-term approach reflective of one of the key characteristics of transformation, long-term and sustained. Businesses can offer partnerships resources (e.g., avenues for implementation) and efficiency (e.g., operational speed and focus) that are necessary to make a partnership’s mission reality. For businesses, partnerships provide avenues to new markets to more effectively contribute to social and environmental change.

• Technology and Innovation: The businesses and CSOs that we interviewed both noted that businesses have the technical expertise to develop new solutions to tackle sustainability challenges and the capacity to make it happen. This sense of discovery and technical know-how may give partnerships a spark of momentum in times of inertia (WBCSD 2020). Similar to governments’ role promoting innovation, businesses driving innovation can also help to disrupt the status quo and drive transformation.

  Box 11 | The Global Fund, Google Cloud, and the Indian Government

  In 2019, Google Cloud partnered with The Global Fund and India’s Central TB Division to design a system to rapidly identify missing cases of tuberculosis. The partnership leverages Google Cloud’s expertise in artificial intelligence, data analysis, and visualization to help track previously unidentified cases of TB and search for outbreak clusters throughout India. By developing a system that continuously searches for areas with a high-disease burden, Google Cloud provides information needed to deploy timely treatment, an essential step in reducing TB transmission (The Global Fund 2020).

  

  Source: WRI Authors.

• Business acumen and expertise: Interviewees also mentioned that businesses can move faster than other stakeholders. They possess an efficiency and sense of urgency that helps them with problem solving and getting unstuck. Businesses often have operationalized processes and capabilities with systems in place that support these characteristics, and with this sophistication comes the ability to effectively manage projects and stay focused. Businesses also can quickly adapt their approaches when needed (UNGC 2013). Such business assets can even help governments accelerate implementation of sustainability-influenced policies by helping governments avoid bureaucratic processes that might typically hold them down.

Some interviewees also noted that companies are smart about taking a message and spreading a story, amplifying its reach to broad audiences. This can help a partnership rapidly gain attention, whether it be to expand its project mandate, attract new stakeholders, source new funding, or offer a replicable model to others looking to tackle similar problems. Partnerships can grow their influence with the benefit of sophisticated communications (KPMG International 2016).

Box 12 | Last Mile Project

Through the Last Mile Project, Coca-Cola shares its extensive supply chain, logistics knowledge, and marketing capabilities to help rural communities in Africa gain better access to medicines. African governments lean on Coca-Cola’s business expertise to streamline medicine deliveries, improve stock management, and measure performance on the availability of life-saving medicines. The project, in conjunction with partners that include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Global Fund, and The Yale Global Health Leadership Initiative, has developed a unique approach built on the foundation of Coca-Cola’s business success in Africa, donor leadership and collaboration, and the insight and experience of strong local talent and public health experience. (Project Last Mile 2020).

Source: WRI Authors.

• Vision and Scaling: Businesses that value transformation are set up to be forward-looking, hyperaware of industry trends and shifts. Their ambition—and perhaps even impatience, as noted by some interviewees—drives them to dream big, and if they fall short, pivot quickly. As it pertains to sustainability, businesses interviewed mentioned a desire to nurture a better world, whether motivated by an inherent value system that prioritizes the environment, the shifting value system of others in the ecosystem, benefits to business profits, or a combination of all. Even companies primarily incentivized by business interests—such as those with business models that are built on decarbonization, or motivated to secure a license to operate—can’t ignore the growing movement around them that demands greater environmental accountability (Podder and Singh 2018). And a focus on the future of the earth is tied to thinking ahead on business strategy and setting a vision that steers a company. Businesses also have built-in scale. They can see the potential of transforming ideas into commercially viable solutions and can quickly take action to expand their activities – both in a geographic and conceptual sense (KPMG International 2016). This overall sense of vision and scale can help partnerships drive systemic changes, one of the aforementioned characteristics of transformation.

  
  

  Box 13 | Latin American Water Funds Partnership

  FEMSA, the largest Coca-Cola bottler in the world, joined The Nature Conservancy and others in the Latin American Water Funds Partnership in 2011. Initially a payment-for-ecosystem-services conservation tool, FEMSA helped to expand the strategic lens and mandate for the partnership, shifting its focus to water security and developing a systemized process that helped to improve the long-term water prospects of the region through the development of water funds. As of September 2019, the partnership has developed 24 water funds in Latin America (with 15 more in the pipeline), conserved almost 252,000 hectares, and involved almost 37,500 families (FEMSA 2019).

  

  Source: WRI Authors.

• Investment in Local Communities: Some companies interviewed reported that one benefit of partnering is that they can enter new markets by piloting their operations in new geographies. With the globalization of today’s markets, it is rare for businesses with transformative interests to operate in a geographic silo since they often have operations, investments, and end users in other countries. The positive side of this involvement is that communities can receive more resources and investment than they might otherwise (UNGC 2013; Menden et al. 2019). Working at different levels across different geographies, businesses also encourage the systemic nature of transformation, altering the interrelationships and interdependencies among parties to influence new paradigms.

  
  

  Box 14 | Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa

  Local agribusinesses and farmer organizations in Africa partner with the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) to create agricultural solutions that improve income and food security for smallholder farmers. These local partners enable AGRA to coordinate with other initiatives in the region and engage directly with farmers and small businesses to create localized solutions for more efficient and profitable farming techniques (AGRA 2020).

  

  Source: WRI Authors.

• Ability to Move Markets: Businesses have the ability to transform systems for a multitude of reasons: Perhaps they have the technological prowess to unlock solutions that can overcome sustainability challenges, they are more willing to absorb the risk associated with testing a new approach, or they have the organizational capabilities to overcome challenges that governments and CSOs get tangled in. Or, more often than not, businesses’ sheer power and size are enough to influence a change, especially if industry moves together—something that the businesses we interviewed noted as an attractive reason for partnering. If businesses can help to shift entire sectors toward a sustainable mind-set, their business and financial returns will be even greater (Gomme and Perks 2018). Once businesses have galvanized an industry, they have started to shift mental models—the hardest systems condition to change and one that sets them on a path for the long-term, sustained change found in transformation.

  Box 15 | Sustainable Apparel Coalition

  The Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC) includes companies at all levels of the value chain that collectively have the power to shift $500 billion of the apparel industry to sustainable practices. The coalition originated from an unlikely collaboration between Walmart and Patagonia in 2009, both of whom called for the development of an index to measure the environmental effects of their products. The Higg Index was developed shortly thereafter, and the partnership has grown to include companies at every level of the supply chain—from manufacturers to retailers—that use the Higg Index to track the sustainability performance of their products and share best practices. Governments and CSOs like WRI have also joined the coalition to provide crucial research, recommendations for best practices, and an external perspective on SAC’s activities. SAC now includes 10,000 retailers and manufacturers that are actively using the Higg Index worldwide (SAC 2020).

  

  Source: WRI Authors.

• Brand Credibility: Businesses that have cultivated a positive reputation—either through strong sustainability practices or a record of community stewardship and high-quality products or respected leadership—can lend a partnership legitimacy and gravitas that it might not otherwise have (Stibbe and Prescott 2017). Some business interviewees with well-recognized global brands in particular noted the benefits of being associated with a large, reputable company, known for its dedication to sustainability. This affiliation can help the long-term and sustained nature of transformation.

  Box 16 | NextGen Consortium

  The NextGen Consortium grew from the “unprecedented pre-competitive collaboration” between two of the largest food and beverage retailers, Starbucks and McDonald’s (NextGen Consortium 2020). This partnership brings together private companies, trade organizations, CSOs, and municipalities to work to reduce single-use plastics and develop fully recoverable to-go cups. As a founding member, Starbucks brought its reputation as an influential, well-respected company to the partnership. (In 2019, Fortune ranked Starbucks as the fifth most admired company in the world [Fortune 2019]). Following Starbucks, McDonalds became the second founding partner, accelerating the momentum and draw of the partnership (Sustainable Brands 2018). Months after launching the NextGen Cup Challenge, which solicited innovative ideas in reusable cup design and technology, the partnership had received more than 1,000 inquiries from individuals and companies (Global Coffee Report 2018).

  

  Source: WRI Authors.

Look Out for Considerations of Business Characteristics

To stay competitive, businesses need to strike the right balance between pursuing innovative approaches and minimizing risk. In practice, this can mean that even though businesses are well positioned to drive new solutions to the SDGs, social and environmental issues are often overshadowed by more lucrative lines of business. Depending on a business’s capacity and desire to push the envelope, this focus on minimizing risk and maximizing return can make businesses cautious or demanding partnership stakeholders, only pursuing partnerships that are profitable or have clear, measurable results. Although the companies we spoke with noted that adopting sustainable practices is the right thing to do both morally and strategically for long-term success, other businesses may be driven to engage in SDG partnerships by their desire to improve their public reputation or increase their social license to operate (UNGC 2013; WBCD 2016). SDG initiatives are often not considered part of companies’ core business, and partnerships may be siloed as part of a corporate social responsibility or sustainability team, limiting the resources that these initiatives can access (PWC 2015; OECD 2018a). Finally, although the right company can help elevate a partnership’s profile and increase its legitimacy (and was noted as such by some businesses we spoke with), association with a business that has a poor track record on environmental and social issues can in some cases be detrimental to partnership credibility.

Civil Society Contributions to Transformative Partnerships

There has been a growing desire to better recognize the expertise of communities and civil society (Dalberg 2020). In our conversations with CSOs and also desk research on CSOs, we see that CSOs can provide credibility and link partnerships to support networks and subject-matter expertise. They also can serve a crucial coordination role within partnerships, helping manage stakeholder communication and partnership governance. CSO interviewees noted that they appreciate the opportunity to build mission alignment with other stakeholders in partnership, helping to drive forth sustainable development solutions.

• Credibility: Similar to how CSOs can benefit from the positive reputation of companies, the CSOs that we interviewed mentioned that they also offer the same credibility in return. Companies in particular may need permission from different stakeholder groups, such as governments, communities, and consumers, in order to do business in different geographies (Poret 2019).

  Box 18 | Marine Stewardship Council

  World Wildlife Fund (WWF) together with business partner Unilever set up the Marine Stewardship Council to enable consumers to choose seafood products from well-managed fisheries. WWF’s involvement gave Unilever the credibility that it truly cared about providing its consumers with more sustainable seafood, while the backing of a large consumer goods company helped WWF expand its reach with both consumers and suppliers (MSC 2017).

  

  Source: WRI Authors.

• Knowledge and Expertise: CSOs interviewed for this report said that they tend to be well aware of the interconnectedness of sustainability issues and are often well equipped to engage in activities like policy advocacy, which may help to shape and influence the broader business environment. Thanks to their intimate knowledge of a topic and their proximity to important stakeholder groups, CSOs can also flag issues that businesses otherwise might have failed to identify (Ménascé 2016). Building a solid foundation based on CSO expertise can help a partnership be long-term and sustained, one of the characteristics of transformation noted in Chapter 2. CSOs can also be a bridge between stakeholders, facilitating the flow of information and other offerings among different entities and providing a vehicle for effectively accessing and engaging with those groups (Poret 2019). This can prove extremely valuable to companies looking for a channel to make their voice heard with local governments and to parties who want to directly contribute to a valuable cause, such as disaster relief, or to identify and train marginalized groups, such as entrepreneurial women’s networks (Albani and Henderson 2014).

  Box 19 | Clean Energy Investment Accelerator

  Jointly led by WRI, Allotrope Partners, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Clean Energy Investment Accelerator (CEIA) mobilizes clean energy investment across commercial and industrial sectors to help companies meet their clean energy targets. Through its work with the Renewable Energy Buyers Alliance (REBA) and other networks, WRI helps CEIA bring corporate buyers together to aggregate clean energy demand and lower the price of renewables. In Vietnam, for instance, CEIA leveraged WRI’s REBA network to form a working group of corporate buyers, developers, and government officials to identify market barriers, recommend solutions, and test innovative clean-energy procurement models (CEIA 2020).

  

  Source: WRI Authors.

• Community and Business Access: Through the trust that a CSO inspires, it can gain deep access to and develop close ties with certain communities of citizens, consumers, or entrepreneurs (Menden et al. 2019). CSOs can play an integral role in representing the interests of vulnerable groups without decision-making power (Jenkins et al. 2017). CSOs can also serve as an entry point to access new markets for companies exploring inclusive business opportunities, whether through the CSOs' networks, local knowledge, and on-the-ground infrastructure such as regional offices or by acting as a trusted mediator between business needs and potential supplier offerings or customer needs (Menden et al. 2019; ODI and FDC 2003). In this way, CSOs can help others gain a commercial understanding of the local marketplace which is a risk mitigator when considering new market entry, which can ultimately help support the long-term and sustained nature of transformation.

  Box 20 | Sustainable Food Partnership

  Arla Foods, a leading Danish dairy producer, entered into a partnership with DanChurchAid, Novozymes, and others to establish the Sustainable Food Partnership, which targets populations in and near refugee camps. The partnership helps Arla to expand its operations in Africa, which has a large and untapped dairy market. As a result of this, it is now introducing a food product targeted at malnourished families in Ethiopia (P4G 2020b).

  

  Source: WRI Authors.

• Externally Vetted Tools: Affiliating with a trusted partnership can relieve partner stakeholders from the need to build their own partnership tools. Many CSOs translate their deep knowledge into company guidance, as well as methodologies, frameworks, and tools for companies to adopt (Seitanidi 2015; Poret 2019). This guidance can often involve new approaches that disrupt the status quo. By using CSO-endorsed methodologies and playbooks, as well as engaging with CSO-managed networks that have third-party credibility, both businesses and local governments believe that they can more readily put their confidence in these products and services (Ménascé 2016).

  Box 21 | We Mean Business

  The CSO We Mean Business (WMB) convenes leading companies to commit to bold climate action through various WMB initiatives. One of its primary activities is to strategically engage with businesses that have joined the partnership, and provide them with WMB-endorsed guidance, tools, and clear playbooks to follow in their journeys to zero-carbon transition (WMB 2020).

  

  Source: WRI Authors.

• Trust and Confidence: CSOs that we interviewed also noted that they bring together like-minded organizations in collaborative networks aimed at learning The ability to take evaluation results and integrate them into a partnership’s approach to improve its effectiveness at meeting its objectives, to plan ahead, and to take risks , exchanging best practices, or accelerating business models. As a result of the implicit or explicit screening process that the CSO applies before it starts engaging with a specific community or granting prospective participants membership status in a network, network members benefit from the CSO’s due diligence, saving them valuable time and effort and ensuring that they interact with like-minded peers. Trust and confidence go a long way in driving the longevity of transformation when CSOs can nurture strong relationships among partners.

  Box 22 | Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance

  The Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance is a knowledge-sharing and collaboration network that brings together highly ambitious cities from North America and Europe, plus Rio de Janeiro, each with a goal to reduce their city’s carbon emissions by at least 80 percent by 2050. Prospective member cities were subject to rigorous selection criteria: they had to formally adopt a community-wide carbon neutrality goal across all main sectors (electricity, thermal, transportation, waste) as well as implement a plan, set a dedicated budget and staff to manage it, and commit to active participation in the alliance. The high entry bar ensures prospective members that their time spent engaging with the network will see them exchange and collaborate with the most ambitious of their peers (CNCA 2020).

  

  Source: WRI Authors.

• Coordination and Streamlining: Some businesses mentioned that they see CSOs as an independent partner, unburdened by corporate competitiveness or political ideologies. Many business or investor-oriented networks and platforms are organized through CSOs, which provide a pre-competitive environment to exchange and collaborate and can also help untangle the complexities associated with the many layers and actors within a system. A multistakeholder, multi-CSO platform is easier to engage with instead of disparate CSO parties, each with its own messaging and offerings (C&E Advisory 2018). Networks or platforms can promote information sharing (such as knowledge products, plans, and strategies) and support a shared understanding among target audiences of strategic priorities for the topic at hand. CSOs can help to disseminate scientific analyses from academia to better reach their intended audience, thereby ensuring greater percolation of relevant and trusted data (Seitanidi 2015) and can also use data to encourage transparency.

  Box 23 | Clean Cargo Working Group

  The Clean Cargo Working Group (CCWG), convened by BSR, aims to reduce the environmental impact of shipping by bringing together cargo carriers, freight forwarders, and companies, including Amazon, Nike, BMW, and Volvo. The partnership helps level the playing field among brands that may otherwise be competitors as members work together to agree on an industry standard. Now accounting for over 80 percent of global container cargo, CCWG members follow a proprietary benchmarking methodology to track the carbon performance of their ocean freight carriers (Clean Cargo 2020).

  

  Source: WRI Authors.

Look Out for Considerations of CSO Characteristics

Many CSOs are chronically underfunded and under-resourced, making it challenging for them to devote the necessary time and operational resources to the partnerships in which they participate (Podder and Singh 2018; Pattberg and Widerberg 2016). This is particularly tricky when CSOs are often looked to as conveners and connectors, a weakness magnified when CSOs participate in multiple partnerships without a framework for decision-making and prioritization. Stakeholders enter into partnerships with varying levels of power, depending on their size, wealth, and political capital (Brouwer et al. 2016). These power imbalances most often disadvantages CSOs, whose interests can be easily overshadowed by business and government agendas (Pattberg and Widerberg 2016). In market-driven partnerships in particular, CSOs may feel overshadowed by business and may find it difficult to shift to a business-oriented approach while keeping their own interests relevant (Van der Vleuten 2019). Power asymmetry can also lead to the exclusion of smaller CSOs with valuable local knowledge (Hazelwood 2015), in favor of larger organizations that bring greater name recognition and reputational benefits. Prior to partnering with a CSO, it may be useful to consider its fund-raising capabilities and track record with other partnerships (Menden et al. 2019). CSOs may also be driven by donor mandates, weighed down with their own reporting burdens that incentivize quantitative metrics and partnership participation over actual impact (Peterson et al. n.d.).

In this chapter, we focus on partnership success factors that can help partnerships improve their effectiveness, both in terms of their operational efficiency and their ability to reach their transformation objectives.

Our research indicates that there are 14 commonly reported success factors (Table 1) that we have drawn from recent academic and expert reports covering multistakeholder partnership best practices, complexity and transformation theory, and systems change evaluation (see Appendix B). Adoption of these success factors may not guarantee transformation but can be viewed as an indicator of how well a partnership may operate. Although many of these success factors may seem self-evident and well-documented, partnerships surveyed for this report have stated that they still face challenges in actually implementing them and are eager to get advice from experts and partnerships that are farther along their partnership journey.

With this in mind, we focus this chapter on the top four success factors (highlighted in Table 1) out of the set of 14 that were identified based on a survey and analysis of 41 partnerships drawn from the partnership accelerator P4G, hosted by WRI, in which partnerships that were evaluated by the research team as having high transformation potential excelled, compared to those with low transformation potential.

In this chapter, we share the stories and advice from our surveyed partnerships and present a series of tangible and implementable recommendations. Recommendations are further highlighted through best-in-class partnership case studies, which showcase some of the partnerships with high transformation potential. And while the focus of this chapter is on the top 4 success factors, we recognize the importance also of highlighting the remaining 10 success factors. Appendix B provides descriptions of these, along with implementable recommendations and partnership examples. We also provide an overview of our survey approach and evaluation methodology for assessing a partnership’s transformation potential below and full details in Appendices C and D.

Partnering is inherently complex, especially when working with multiple partners, across multiple geographies and in dynamic systems. Although there is no one right way to partner, our research indicates that the guidance in this chapter can help partnerships to maximize their effectiveness at meeting their transformation objectives and adopting the transformation characteristics identified in Chapter 2 into their vision. And with clarity around stakeholder contributions as noted in Chapter 3, partnerships are better equipped to pursue these success factors. Partners may agree that these success factors are important, but just as important is agreement on how to approach each success factor and the role and responsibility of each partner.

Evaluating Transformation Potential

This chapter presents findings on success factors based on research conducted on a unique cohort of 41 multistakeholder partnerships from around the world. Participating partnerships include P4G’s first two cohorts of funded partnerships, as well as a short list of partnerships that had applied for the P4G SOTA awards, which recognize mature, best-in-class partnerships. All partnerships have been pre-identified by the P4G team as having transformation objectives related to five SDG areas—food and agriculture, water, energy, cities, and circular economy—and in line with the requirements of P4G partnerships. These partnerships also include at least one stakeholder to represent government, business, and a CSO.

The participating partnerships were surveyed using the survey instrument provided in Appendix C to understand the extent to which they exhibited the 14 aforementioned success factors identified through a literature review. Partnerships scored themselves on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 = “not at all”; 2 = “to a small extent”, 3 = “to a moderate extent”,4 = “to a great extent”, and 5 = to “a very great extent”).

Because our interest was to understand the relative importance of success factors through the lens of transformation, our research team also evaluated these partnerships to assess transformation potential, defined as their success to date in achieving their intermediate and transformation objectives and/or the likelihood that the partnership would achieve its transformation objective. Our evaluation approach is based on Maassen et al. (2019), and it is important to note that in terms of transformation potential, partnerships were scored against their own transformation or systems change goals and the strength of their strategic plans (e.g., if they highlighted a connection between the partnership’s action(s) and their transformation vision). At this stage, we are not able to definitively state whether each partnership’s transformation objective is ultimately the right one needed to achieve the SDGs.

Partnerships were scored on a scale of 0–5 against seven evaluation criteria, using the scoring matrix outlined in Appendix D. The seven criteria included partnership level of innovation, strength of the strategic plan, strength of and progress against intermediate goals and transformation objectives, scalability, financial sustainability, and resilience to internal and external challenges. These criteria were developed through a review of academic literature (see Appendix B) and award programs for transformational partnerships and initiatives (see Appendix D) and are well-linked to the 14 success factors as demonstrated in the conceptual model in Figure 8.

Partnerships were scored based on a thorough review of each partnership’s application to P4G, any provided reporting materials on their progress and challenges, as well as any other available and relevant documentation, such as publicly available videos, publications, and media references. Partnerships were then grouped as having either a high, medium, or low transformation potential, based on their average score across the seven criteria. Appendix D provides further information on the evaluation approach, including more details on the evaluation team, how we addressed identified biases, and additional details on scoring.

Figure 8 | Conceptual Model of Relationship among Success Factors, Transformation-Potential Evaluation Criteria, and Transformation Characteristics

Note: Arrows are indicative of the main connections among success factors, evaluation criteria, and transformation characteristics, although it should be noted that success factors are not mutually exclusive and are interconnected.

Source: WRI Authors.

On average, P4G partnerships within our sample felt like they were embodying all 14 success factors at least to a moderate extent (>3). This signals that P4G partnerships agree with the literature on the importance of adopting these success factors for partnerships. When we divided partnerships into their high, medium, and low potential groupings, we also saw that for 12 out of 14 success factors, high transformation-potential partnerships, on average, scored themselves higher than medium-potential partnerships and low-potential partnerships.¹ Medium- and low-potential partnerships scored themselves relatively the same across all success factors. We chose to highlight the four success factors where the scoring discrepancy was highest between high- and low-potential partnerships. Figure 9 shows the variability in how partnerships scored themselves on the top four success factors, compared to the remaining success factors relative to their transformation-potential scores.

Figure 9 | Success Factor Score by Transformation-Potential Score Comparison

Source: WRI Authors

We believe there is great potential for application of our scoring methodology in the future, as partnership practitioners look to understand their progress toward transformation. Additionally, these scoring criteria and success factors could easily be adopted into a partnership’s own performance tracking system to gauge their transformation potential and ability to implement these factors. This is discussed more in depth in the text that follows.

Topline Results

Overall, the 14 success factors can be used as indicators of a partnership’s effectiveness and can be used to help assess a partnership’s transformation potential. Partnerships can use the evaluation methodology identified in Appendix D and the success factors to help put themselves on the right track.

However, it is important to note that these success factors need not all be implemented at once. Choosing which to implement first likely depends on the specific context of each partnership. The analysis for this report found that partnerships with high transformation potential are particularly intentional in four of these success factors: developing a clear articulation of the system of interest, which helps determine a jointly agreed-upon transformation vision and intermediate goals. These partnerships also are able to strategically leverage external stakeholders, as compared to other partnerships, and have strong monitoring, evaluation, learning, and reporting mechanisms that incorporate systems thinking in areas that allow them to not only track whether they are achieving their targets within the system context but also to be adaptive and resilient in the face of dynamic system changes.

Together, these top four success factors are reflective of the previously identified transformation characteristics: systemic, long-term and sustained, and disruptive of the status quo. For a partnership to understand its contribution or potential contribution to systems change or a transformation, it must first understand the complexities of the system of interest and its place in that system, as well as external stakeholders that are key influence targets or potential partnership champions. Partnerships must also be able to track how their activities lead to outputs, how those outputs lead to outcomes, and how those outcomes lead to impacts. All of this requires a strong MELR system that integrates systems thinking.

Given these findings, partnerships may find it useful to begin with these success factors and follow the guidance that follows, based on leading literature and the P4G community.

Review of Top Four Success Factors

Clear Articulation of the System of Interest

Description:

One of the main characteristics of transformation is its systemic nature: Change must percolate through the elements and interconnections of a system to move it toward a more sustainable paradigm, as discussed in Chapter 2. Clear articulation of a system of interest means that a partnership has a clear conceptual understanding of where it is placed in the system to ensure that its activities are unique and additive (Dalberg 2020; Enclude 2019; Stibbe and Prescott 2020). A partnership that has successfully embraced this trait will be able to define the system of interest’s boundaries; its overall function or purpose; the key elements, actors, and interconnections of relevance; the underlying problem of interest that is keeping the system from moving toward a more sustainable development pathway; the system conditions that are holding the problem in place; and historic and current initiatives that have tried to address the problem.

It is important to remember that systems are dynamic, and so partnerships should aim to understand their contribution to transformation of those systems. This requires establishing a baseline understanding of the system and then tracking changes over time. For more details on understanding how to track changes over time and a partnership’s influence or contribution, see Success Factor 4. Additionally, it is important that a systems understanding be developed in a participatory manner with relevant stakeholders.

A systems understanding is critical because it guides partnerships in adopting many of the other success factors, such as

• designing innovative, bold, and creative solutions that are additive and reflective of the three transformation characteristics (systemic, long-term and sustained, and disruptive of the status quo);
• identifying the right stakeholders to engage both as partners as external stakeholders;
• aligning partners on a transformation vision;
• adapting and responding to the external changes such as changes in political administrations or natural disasters; and
• evaluating whether or not the partnership is actually contributing to a system’s transformation.

Recommendations and Partnership Insights:

Although it may seem daunting to fully understand the complexities of any given partnership’s system, especially when multiple stakeholders and geographies are involved, those who can wrap their heads around it say they experience greater success and efficiency as it adds clarity to what each stakeholder aims to achieve. While most partnerships scored themselves at 3 or above on this success factor (82 percent), partnerships with high transformation potential more often rated themselves as doing this to a great or very great extent (93 percent), compared to those with lower transformation potential (60 percent). To understand the system in which a partnership operates, partnerships can take the following actions:

• Define system boundaries. To make the exercise of articulating the system of interest more manageable, partnerships need to start small and focus on a specific subsystem or geography (Latham 2014; Hargreaves 2010; Stibbe and Prescott 2020). For example, rather than trying to tackle the entire global food system, a partnership may narrow its focus by looking at the food system for a particular country or a particular segment of the food supply chain. Partnerships should be careful to consider the trade-offs in setting boundaries. Setting boundaries too broadly can make establishing a partnership’s vision and activities too unwieldy; while setting boundaries too narrowly can mean that the partnership is missing important information on system interactions (e.g., between countries or between two different systems) that may impede a partnership’s progress. It may be beneficial to initially choose the smallest possible system that can be sustainably transformed and meet the partnership’s objectives and then scale as necessary (Stibbe and Prescott 2020). This reduces the amount of research that is needed. The process of defining system boundaries should be participatory and inclusive—that is, partnerships should think about defining the system’s boundaries in coordination with key stakeholders, which include those who have an interest in or are affected by the issue, as well as those who have influence over the issue (Hargreaves 2010). Using a participatory and inclusive process can help ensure that the systems boundaries are scaled appropriately.
• Break it down. Although developing an understanding of the system requires up-front research, it needn’t be overwhelming. Research can be spread out over time and across partners and other external stakeholders to reduce the research burden. In fact, given the dynamic nature of systems, developing a systems understanding should be viewed as a continuous exercise that aligns with a partnership’s resources. Reflecting on how system conditions are shifting over time is important for allowing partnerships to adjust course as needed, as well as understanding key windows of opportunity (or closing doors that should be avoided) (Preskill and Gopal 2014). Partnerships should also think about spreading the workload by leveraging each stakeholder’s unique knowledge and network. Stakeholders likely already know about some parts of the system and may have a research team that can help facilitate developing a common partnership-systems understanding. Partnerships that have excelled at this have emphasized the importance of creating a strong culture of trust for promoting knowledge and data sharing, with one partnership stating, “Our [stakeholders] help educate each other on the issue. When someone has questions, our collaborative and open-source culture compels them to reach out to others who have struggled with similar issues in the past and seek answers collaboratively. If there are collective questions or issues we do not have the answers to, we create a working group to collectively address the issue and learn together.”²
• Use systems mapping tools. Several systems mapping tools and methods are available to help build a systems understanding, and most of these tools and methods promote participatory exercises to develop conceptual diagrams or models of the feedback loops between system elements and interrelations including actors, resources, concepts, and data. Using a participatory approach to systems mapping can help ensure that the equity of policy, process, and impacts of the partnership’s activities is kept front and center. Some systems mapping methods (e.g., actor maps and social network maps) focus on exploring actor roles and relationships. Causal loop diagrams are conceptual diagrams of relationships and feedback loops. Issue mapping is a method used to lay out the political, social, or economic issues that underlie a system. Multiple online tools have also been developed, several of which combine mapping methods. Insight Maker, for example, is a free tool that combines causal loop diagrams with systems dynamics and agent-based modeling. Kumu is a tool that can map actors, social networks, and community assets and can create causal loop diagrams. Systems mapping outputs can vary in their complexity, ranging from a simple conceptual diagram to complex webs. As an example, the Rocky Mountain Institute recently worked with WRI, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the ClimateWorks Foundation to develop a joint map to better understand variables that influence the ability to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles in India. The map helped facilitate conversations on how best to develop solutions to address these barriers.

Figure 10 | Electrification of Mobility Assets in India Systems Map Using Insight Maker

Source: https://insightmaker.com/insight/200888/India-Electric-Mobility.

Each method or tool has its own focus, strengths, weaknesses, and degree of technicality, so key considerations for partnerships include answering the following questions: What are the partnership’s learning priorities and what methods and tools are best suited? How might the partnership combine different methods and tools? Does the method or tool require an expert to facilitate? How participatory does the partnership want its mapping approach to be? It is important to note that many of these tools are also adaptable to a partnership’s resources. In some cases, partnerships have developed their own unique mapping approaches. The best-in-class example of the IIX Women’s Livelihood Bond Series describes such a partnership:

Best-in-Class Example

The IIX Women’s Livelihood Bond Series^TM (WLB Series) partnership aims to transform the global financial system by mobilizing capital for women’s empowerment through innovative financial instruments (Figure 11). The $150 million WLB Series securities are the world’s first impact investing and gender lens investing securities listed on a stock exchange. They pool together high-impact, women-focused enterprises to create a multi-country, multistakeholder portfolio that is sold to private-sector investors and listed on a stock exchange. The instruments will unlock large-scale private capital to support 3 million underserved women in transitioning from subsistence to sustainable livelihoods. The WLB Series defines women’s empowerment as improving the ability of women to access the constituents of development, including resources and opportunities to participate in the labor force. The partnership recognized that a core issue underlying women’s empowerment is gender-based exclusion from finance and that this exclusion denies the world the economic and social benefits that gender parity could bring across all 17 of the SDGs. Currently, IIX is scaling the proven WLB Series and working to advance COVID-resilient and gender-empowered green economic growth in Indonesia and Africa. Prior to that, IIX successfully closed an $8.5 and $12 million issuance, demonstrating the scalability, replicability, and overall power of investing in women’s empowerment.

Figure 11 | Placing IIX Women’s Livelihood Bond Series^TM on the Continuum

Source: WRI Authors.

The WLB Series brings together 12+ leading impact investing firms, law firms and banks, government, and civil society stakeholders. The partnership is led by IIX, a pioneer in impact investing.

IIX initially established system boundaries by focusing on underserved women in the Asia-Pacific region. While constructing the issuances of the WLB Series, IIX assesses each country individually and all the countries holistically to ensure the creation of a well-diversified portfolio that adequately balances risk, return, and impact. Establishing system boundaries has helped IIX to keep its activities manageable in light of the extreme complexities of the global finance system, while also ensuring that the WLB Series is creating additionality in each market. One of the innovative features of the WLB Series is that each new issuance of the bond has built on the success of the previous issuances by expanding to include more countries and new sectors. For example, the WLB1 initially focused on three Southeast Asian countries. The WLB2 then expanded to include more countries like Sri Lanka and Indonesia, as well as new sectors such as clean energy and sustainable agriculture. The WLB3 will continue to expand to support COVID-resilient, inclusive green growth in Indonesia, Kenya, and South Africa.

IIX’s understanding of the financial system and how to change it draws from its practitioner experience across the value chain of sustainable investing and over a decade of expertise bridging the gap between the supply and demand side of capital. The WLB Series has been very strategic about breaking down the workload to reduce up-front research time by engaging a range of resources and partners. For example, IIX used its network in each target country to connect with and gather intelligence from knowledge experts on government regulations of securities, law and foreign investments into the country, legal and regulatory frameworks associated with lending to local enterprises, and investor interests. By engaging strategic experts within each country, the partnership could more quickly act to build a pipeline of investor interest. IIX also conducted a thorough review of publicly available market intelligence from reliable data sources, both internationally and locally within each region. Finally, the IIX team was also able to build from past experiences with structuring the WLB Series and unlocking capital in target regions through its Impact Partners Platform, the world’s largest crowdfunding platform for impact investing. IIX used data insights from the Impact Partners Platform to review country preferences of more than 1,200 accredited investors. Additionally, IIX drew on experiences investing in countries from the WLB1 and WLB2 portfolio, including Cambodia, Sri Lanka, India, and Vietnam. Having invested in these countries previously, the team was aware of the capital markets’ regulatory barriers, the availability of pipeline entities, and the interest of investors in these countries.

IIX has found that in terms of mapping the system, a key gap is mapping the beneficiaries and understanding their point of view on the problems they face and the effects they get from impact investing. To address this, IIX developed IIX Values, a tool that uses mobile technology to collect impact data from women beneficiaries in a scalable, cost-efficient manner to verify effects on the ground and to ensure that investors get access to transparent, timely impact reports. This ensures that women, as the end beneficiaries, are given a voice and a value and are taken into account across the investment process.

Jointly Agreed-Upon Transformation Vision and Near-Term Goals

Description:

Because transformation-seeking partnerships are working on complex issues in complex systems, partnerships can benefit greatly from jointly agreeing on a transformation vision and near-term goals to keep partnership stakeholders aligned and on track.

A clear transformation vision should serve as a strategic guide for the partnership and should build from the understanding of the system as explained in the previous success factor. The vision should specify the challenge at hand and the ultimate partnership transformation objective or vision.

Near-term goals encompass the objectives that the partnership aims to accomplish in the next one to five years; whereas intermediate actions A partnership’s immediate next steps or the activities needed to achieve its near-term goals and, ultimately, its transformation vision outline next steps that the partnership plans to take. Both near-term goals and intermediate actions should link back to the partnership’s transformation vision—that is, they should address the conditions that the partnership will aim to shift to address the challenge at hand. Aligning on a clear vision statement enables partnerships to later establish the scope of partnership activities, set phased goals and targets, and establish achievable timelines through, for example, a theory of change or business plan (Stern 2017; KPMG International 2016). Additionally, establishing a strong vision statement helps guide day-to-day behavior and helps each stakeholder see how its specific interests are being met by the partnership and understand the value that it adds to partnership activities (Enclude 2019; Bos et al. 2016). Establishing a strong vision statement also enables partnerships to balance different stakeholder priorities when setting intermediate goals, which keeps partners focused on and committed to a collective goal (Oorthuizen et al. 2018; Kuruvilla et al. 2018; Stern 2015; Enright et al. 2018).

Recommendations and Partnership Insights:

Most partnerships (85 percent) believe that their stakeholders have been successful in aligning on a transformation vision and goals to a great or very great extent. However, 71 percent of high transformation-potential partnerships scored themselves as embodying this to a very great extent, compared to only 27 percent of partnerships with low transformation potential.

Naturally, partnerships find the process of defining a transformation vision easier when they strategically work with stakeholders that have similar values and missions to that of the partnership. With this foundation in common, they have greater ease co-developing plans, such as theories of change, work plans, business plans and/or reporting frameworks, that keep them true to their original missions. For most partnerships, however, vision and goal-setting are rarely straightforward processes. Partnerships can pursue the following strategies:

• Articulate the partnership vision and the steps to get there. Although a partnership’s vision may encompass the less tangible elements of its objectives, such as reducing food waste or loss or improving access to water sources by shifting system conditions, mental models, and setting near-term goals grounds the partnership to deliver measurable outputs. To start, stakeholders should agree on exactly what transformation success looks like. Perhaps this means launching a new product or service that achieves market saturation, like a renewable energy technology. A successful partnership may also be one that becomes unnecessary once it achieves its end goal, like changing a key policy or activating a new market. Once an end goal is established, setting near-term goals is essential to fulfill the end goal and defining intermediate actions, key milestones, or next steps helps keep partnerships on track. These objectives should be measurable and enable stakeholders to establish a timeline linking partnership activities with the partnership’s broader theory of change and systems change goals (Stern 2015). This should be a dynamic and iterative process involving all stakeholders (Collison et al. 2014; Oorthuizen et al. 2018; Stibbe and Prescott 2020).
• Maintain a master vision, goals, and activities document. Partnerships find it helpful to keep one vision or strategy document. This can be used both to keep current stakeholders aligned and to engage new partners or investors. One partnership emphasized that having this document was a particularly useful way to keep its activities on track in its early stages when exact next steps were unclear. Overall, these plans should be living documents that are updated periodically to reflect changes in understanding of the system of interest and amended as partnerships inevitably course-correct to lessons learned over time. Several partnerships, for instance, host a yearly team strategy workshop to do things like “take stock of progress against [its] vision and reassess goals and priorities,”³ with one partnership specifically noting that it has built an annual review process into its governance structure. A vision document may take many forms, such as a theory of change or strategic plan or business plan or something simpler that can later feed into a more complex strategy document.
• Prioritize a participatory approach with open conversations. If done well, partnerships can harmonize the desires of multiple stakeholders in a way that maximizes their strengths. One partnership with high transformation potential notes that “the solutions we commonly developed are bound by existing resource constraints, but with a clear goal, it is clear how each partner’s expertise adds up to the common goal.”⁴ More frequently, however, it is challenging to reconcile different viewpoints and agree on which goals and targets to prioritize, even if everyone agrees on the broader issue (Ayala-Orozco et al. 2018). High potential partnerships are particularly skilled at incorporating feedback from internal and external stakeholders into their partnership strategies, using different, and at times conflicting, perspectives to sharpen their long-term plans. These partnerships also prioritize open discussions through workshops, in-person meetings, or calls that invite every stakeholder’s perspective. It is worth taking the time to do this early on. When all partners feel like they are being heard and can collectively iterate on the partnership’s purpose, there is greater chance that the team will understand each member’s priorities and find alignment on a shared approach. This is especially useful as a strategy to help navigate the power dynamics at play within a partnership and an opportunity to identify and minimize any potential negative impacts of a partnership’s approach. Intentional participatory discussions up front help ensure that partnership stakeholders—particularly those representing the local community, unrepresented groups, or smaller organizations—have an equal voice in setting the ambitions of the partnership (Dalberg 2020). Additionally, prioritizing open conversations can also help potential partners assess the benefits and risks of joining the partnership before fully committing their time and resources (Oorthuizen et al. 2018; Collison et al. 2014).

Best-in-Class Example

Africa GreenCo (Figure 12), a partnership aiming to increase private-sector investment in renewable energy projects in Africa, has developed a joint transformation vision and worked with internal and external stakeholders to establish partnership near-term goals. Africa GreenCo operates on a portfolio basis, purchasing power from multiple independent power projects and then selling that power to multiple purchasers through power supply agreements and also trading on the regional electricity markets. By acting as a creditworthy intermediary, the partnership reduces investment risk and promotes a more dynamic power market.

Figure 12 | Placing Africa GreenCo on the Continuum

Source: WRI Authors.

From the start of the partnership, Africa GreenCo has maintained a master vision and goals document that keeps stakeholders focused on the partnership’s end goal while breaking it down into more manageable near-term goals and actions. This document has also been a helpful tool to articulate the partnership’s mission to new stakeholders and potential investors. Africa GreenCo has prioritized building a strong base of energy-sector support, and the evolution of this document reflects the value of the partnership’s rigorous feedback process.

The partnership’s first step was a feasibility study to understand the validity of the partnership concept. The study involved research on the technical energy capacity in countries of interest, exploration of alternate approaches to unlocking power investment in sub-Saharan Africa, consideration of legal and financial structuring options, and modeling of cost and profit margins. The study also weighed costs and benefits of different partnership structures by looking at other organizations, including African Risk Capacity, a natural disaster insurance organization that relies on funding from member states, and the Africa Finance Corporation, an infrastructure-focused multilateral financial institution. Throughout this process, the partnership connected with and consulted key energy-sector actors, including project developers, lenders, government stakeholders, and contacts at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Understanding gained from this study informed fundamental decisions around the partnership’s approach and structure. For instance, the founders originally thought the partnership would be treaty-based but determined that this setup would make it challenging to bring in new investors and achieve commercial viability in the long run.

The feasibility study was a significant time investment and took around nine months to complete. Throughout this process, the Africa GreenCo core team networked relentlessly, leveraging existing contacts and building new relationships with key actors across the African power ecosystem, including government stakeholders, national utilities, energy regulators, and investors. This enabled the partnership to facilitate open conversations among a range of stakeholders, using the feasibility study as a basis for these discussions. The partnership held a three-day workshop, bringing together diverse sector actors to provide feedback on the Africa GreenCo concept. Additionally, this workshop enabled the partnership to build early support across the system.

Africa GreenCo built on lessons learned from the feasibility study to develop a business plan that articulated the partnership vision and steps to achieve it. Specifically, the business plan outlined a step-by-step approach, clarified legal elements, broke down the partnership budget, and detailed technical components. In June 2017, the partnership held an investor roundtable with developers, lenders, development finance institutions, and government representatives from Africa GreenCo’s pilot country. Feedback from this session became the basis for the current investment memorandum, which was issued to a small group of investors to detail the investment opportunity.

Bringing diverse network actors together has been an essential component of this process. Accounting for different perspectives has enabled Africa GreenCo to strengthen its plan, and the master document has been a valuable conversation starter as the partnership has expanded its network. Keeping this document updated has also kept the current partnership team aligned on Africa GreenCo’s vision and goals, even as unexpected challenges have emerged.

Strong MELR Mechanisms with Systems Thinking

Description:

Success factors 1 and 2 allow a partnership to understand the system of interest so it can set its overall transformation vision and near-term goals and ensure that its objectives are unique and additive to addressing a problem of interest. Strong MELR mechanisms (often referred to as performance-tracking systems) allows a partnership to understand whether it is achieving its near-term goals, how it is contributing to transformation or achieving its transformation vision, and how effectively it is operating.

Most entities, whether a corporation, government agency, or CSO, use performance tracking to understand if they are accomplishing their goals, as well as report on and learn from their successes and failures. But coming together in partnership requires establishing a unique performance-tracking system and a high level of coordination among partners. Focusing on large systems transformation also requires moving beyond more traditional short-term-oriented performance tracking to integrating systems thinking into the design of MELR elements. We define these elements as follows:

• Monitoring: the process of systematically and regularly collecting information and data to track a partnership’s progress on its activities.
• Evaluation: the process of analyzing information and data to answer whether a partnership is meeting its objectives. Evaluation is about “sense-making, reality-checking, assumption testing, and answering questions” (FSG and Collective Impact Forum 2020).
• Learning: the ability to take evaluation results and integrate them into a partnership’s approach at regular intervals to improve its effectiveness at meeting its objectives, to plan ahead, and to take risks.
• Reporting: efforts to summarize evaluation findings and lessons learned with different audiences. Reporting can come in many forms, including annual reports, quarterly updates, PowerPoint presentations, and webinars.
• Systems thinking: the ability to see how a partnership is influencing system conditions, how system conditions interact and influence each other, and ultimately, how the partnership is influencing system conditions and contributing to addressing the problem of interest (adapted from Preskill and Cook 2020).

Below, we refer to the combination of these elements as an MELR system. Having a strong MELR system that integrates systems thinking means that the partnership integrates its baseline understanding of the system into its MELR approach, tracks changes to the system over time and even expands it as the partnership scales, and works to understand the partnership’s influence or contribution to changes in the system.

Having a strong MELR approach with systems thinking is vital not only for tracking transformation impacts and improving a partnership’s adaptability and resilience to dynamic system conditions, but also for achieving several other success factors. The ability to state a partnership’s progress and what it has learned with confidence is especially important for building partnership credibility and trust and attracting partnership champions and investors.

Recommendations and Partnership Insights:

Interestingly, while 75 percent of partnerships in our survey pool report having an MELR system in place, less than half could demonstrate having clear systems thinking. That is, they do not believe that they can adequately track their contribution to transformation or their impact, and/or this was not adequately demonstrated in their partnership targets, metrics, or reporting during the research team’s evaluation of their transformation potential. For example, many partnerships use metrics that tend toward predetermined performance indicators like “number of beneficiaries” or “amount of investment” that are often short-term-oriented and do not reveal much about the partnership’s role in driving long-term systemic change. Not surprisingly, partnerships with high transformation potential believe that they have embodied this success factor to a great or very great extent—64 percent, compared to only 47 percent of partnerships with low transformation potential.

Partnerships listed several challenges related to MELR. First, many believe that they do not have the time to set up a sufficiently robust performance-tracking system because they have to prioritize mobilization and implementation activities. Second, partnerships are struggling to understand ambiguous concepts around transformation and systems change and believe that they lack the technical MELR expertise to set up appropriate mechanisms (Hargreaves 2010; Larson 2018). And no wonder. The literature on complexity and systems theory is extensive, confusing, and spread across multiple fields. Additionally, there is not a generally accepted approach for partnerships to track their impacts, and there are very few examples of evaluation to learn from (Latham 2014; Maassen et al. 2019). Third, partnerships often receive funding from more than one funder and are beholden to funder reporting requirements. If these requirements do not promote transformation-savvy practices, then it can be time- and resource-intensive to add another layer of MELR. Finally, it can be difficult to merge divergent points of view on what a joint MELR approach should look like among stakeholders.

Despite these challenges, one thing we hope that partnerships will take away from this section is that having a strong MELR system in place that incorporates systems thinking is doable and necessary, whether or not it is a well-resourced partnership. Several partnerships who had not set up MELR mechanisms up front expressed regret at not prioritizing this. One partnership has even stated, “Partnerships that are successful have MELR at their absolute core. Partnerships get a bad name in part because people aren’t doing a good job in this area.”⁵

Partnerships in our sample pool provided several recommendations. Interestingly, these points aligned very well with guidance from leading systems-change evaluation experts. It is important to note that there is no standardized MELR framework or one-size-fits-all approach that will work for all partnerships. Instead, evaluation experts have focused on providing principles or guidelines for partnerships and other networks and initiatives to track their transformation impact. Given the challenges listed above associated with setting up a robust MELR approach with systems thinking, as well as the importance of having strong MELR to understand partnership impacts, we present more detailed guidance on how to do this in the following special section. These guidelines can be adopted when creating an MELR system or to help make an existing MELR system integrate better systems thinking.

Special Section: Six Guidelines for Great MELR

In this special section, we synthesize and elaborate on six MELR guidelines that are relevant for transformation-seeking multistakeholder partnerships. We also present three case studies of partnerships that have successfully incorporated these six guidelines in their MELR practices.

Guideline 1:

Designate roles for MELR to ensure accountability

Having staff with designated MELR responsibilities helps ensure ownership of tasks and that information is passed on in a systematic way. A partnership may choose to house MELR tasks internally or with a third party (or a hybrid approach) and can match the strength of the MELR system to its partnership resources. Either way, this requires that some funding be set aside for MELR. For many of the partnerships in our survey pool, MELR is handled by one full-time or part-time staff member with expertise in data collection and evaluation. Some partnerships employ a third-party auditor to help ensure credibility of findings and build trust with stakeholders. A key role for this staff member should be to establish a knowledge management system that can be accessed regularly to support learning (Latham 2014).

Guideline 2:

Develop a strategic plan that aligns with the partnership’s shared vision, targets, and systems understanding

We define a strategic plan as a conceptual mapping of how a partnership’s specific activities, near-term goals, and transformation vision will shift system conditions and result in transformative outcomes. This can be the same as or different from the vision statement as specified in success factor 2, but a strategic plan should move beyond just identifying the activities and goals to outlining underlying assumptions about the system that make a partnership’s vision realistic and grounded in realities of the complex system in which it operates.

Theories of change (TOC) are becoming more commonplace as strategic plans for social change initiatives but may still be a new concept for some partnerships. TOCs move beyond simple results frameworks to provide hypothesized causal connections among interventions (inputs), outputs, outcomes, and impacts. There is a risk that a theory of change may still be too linear with cause-and-effect thinking (Preskill and Gopal 2014), but experts advise that TOCs should be thought of as navigational tools instead of strict planning tools. Components of a strong TOC include the following elements (based on van Tulder and Keen 2018):

• An articulation of the system (see page 54 on how to articulate a systems understanding) and the conditions that are holding the problem in place
• A shared vision for the partnership, including its activities, near-term goals, and transformation vision
• An identification of the possible pathways among a partnership’s activities, near and intermediate goals, and transformation vision
• Detailed assumptions the partnership is making about the system to identify pathways
• A risk assessment of potential changes or challenges that the partnership could face and methods for addressing those changes and challenges

Importantly, because systems are dynamic, TOCs need to be revisited on a regular basis, alongside the vision statement, through a partnership’s MELR system.

Guideline 3:

Develop a set of evaluation questions to define the partnership’s data collection and evaluation approach

When setting up an MELR system, partners should ask one another, “What do we want to learn about?” A good starting point is to think about partnership dynamics or operating efficiency (How well is our partnership functioning?) as well as impacts (Are we achieving our near-term and intermediate objectives? Are we contributing to shifting any system conditions?) (Larson 2018). Evaluations should serve to answer questions that will increase a partnership’s ability to take risks, learn from its success and failures, and ultimately achieve impacts.

Partnerships can begin by agreeing on a set of questions that they would like to answer over time and then identifying measures like indicators of success for each question and data collection methods by which they will answer them. The questions could be answered at regular intervals to see how far the partnership has progressed on each factor over time.

Guideline 4

Use a mixed-methods design for evaluation

A mixed-methods approach to transformation evaluation means using a combination of quantitative and qualitative evidence. This is helpful because understanding a partnership’s transformative impact requires understanding both the quality of change, especially related to relationships, as well as the quantity of changes in depth and scale (Caboj 2019).

Guideline 5

Focus on contribution, rather than attribution

Understanding a partnership’s specific contribution to transformation or shifting a system condition can be extremely difficult as there may be many other influences on the system. For the Courtauld Commitment 2025, for example, understanding its attribution would entail understanding how packaging and food waste in the United Kingdom would have been reduced without the influence of the partnership. This type of exercise can be complex and expensive. Partners should ask themselves how this information would benefit the partnership and if understanding its contribution to addressing a problem would provide enough information to achieve its objectives.

Some partnerships may have resources for this; most don’t. Either way, it is valuable to think about evaluation through the lens of contribution: How did a partnership contribute to a particular outcome? Several tools are available to help partnerships, including contribution analysis and, more simply, stakeholder interviews (Caboj 2019). For example, if a partnership wanted to understand whether it influenced a specific government agency, it could interview staff from that agency through structured interviews.

Guideline 6

Design MELR to be adaptive, flexible, and iterative

By nature, systems are dynamic and difficult to predict, which makes it a good idea to conduct periodic refreshes of an MELR system (Preskill and Gopal 2014). This can mean rethinking partnership targets; activities; the vision statement; data collection activities; and evaluation, learning, and reporting design. For example, a shift in political regime may mean that a government agency that supported a partnership may no longer do so, and as a result, the partnership will need to reorient and find a new government champion or implement different activities to reach its objectives. Subsequently, the partnership’s MELR system may need to change by, for example, collecting new data or using different data collection methods or creating a new reporting deliverable better suited to a new partner.

Figure SS-1 | Placing Nextwave Plastics, Transform, and Courtauld Commitment 2025 on the Continuum

Source: WRI Authors.

Capacity to Engage Stakeholders External to the Partnership

Description:

To be most effective, transformative partnerships must actively engage with the network of actors relevant to their system of interest external to core partners, signatories, and other internal partnership stakeholders. Figure 13 and Box 25 provide a broad overview of a typical partnership’s external universe, based on the authors’ understanding. Cultivating support from these external actors enables partnerships to engage new champions, access external resources and expertise, and better navigate the local context. This cultivation also adds a neutral perspective to the partnership strategy. Engagement with this external network can take many forms, depending on partnership activities. Partnerships may find it most valuable to build on an existing network, such as an industry association or national platform, that can broker new and useful relationships and facilitate knowledge sharing between peers (Treichel et al. 2017). For all partnerships, connecting with relevant local actors is essential, especially vulnerable and underserved communities that would be affected positively or negatively by the project. Engaging with these local networks, formal or not, can help inform partnership implementation to ensure that it is equitable and tailored to the local context (Dalberg 2020).

Figure 13 | Multistakeholder Partnerships’ External Actor Map

Source: WRI Authors.

Special Section: Forecast the Future: SDG Partnerships for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Our modern era of technology is witnessing the fusion of the physical, biological, and digital worlds through technologies like the Internet of Things, 3D printing, machine learning, blockchain, and precision agriculture. Often referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) The fusion of physical, biological, and digital spheres through technologies such as the Internet of Things, advanced energy storage, 3D printing, precision agriculture, and autonomous vehicles (Schwab 2016) , technology is a critical enabler for external stakeholders looking to accelerate SDG action. Technologies of the 4IR are increasingly being used by partnerships in all sorts of ways to accelerate their progress, such as reaching more communities, working smarter and faster, unlocking new solutions to known problems, and more. Given the relevance of advanced technologies in the 21st century, here we present a special section on 4IR technologies.

Technology as the Enabler: How Partnerships Are Using Technology in Practice

Partnerships with transformative SDG ambitions look to 4IR technologies as a boost: Seventy percent of the 169 indicators underlying the SDGs can be fast tracked by 4IR technologies (Herweijer et al. 2020). Technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and blockchain are being used by partnerships in all sorts of ways: to reach more communities, work smarter and faster, unlock new solutions to known problems, and more. Big challenges, previously daunting and unwieldy, are now more accessible.

In the absence of quality ocean data, effective ocean management, for example, has always been tricky since only 5 percent of the ocean has been fully explored. Through the Friends for Ocean Action partnership, however, business, international organizations, and CSOs are working together to build out a comprehensive, open-source digital platform that can inform decisions on ocean resources (Friends of Ocean Action 2020). This partnership uses data to support decision-making, fast tracking solutions for a healthy ocean. Through its Liberating Ocean Data project stream, the platform will be built based on new technologies, data processing, sensors, and satellites. Unique to this partnership are the technology companies and ocean conservationists, who historically don’t have many shared commonalities, that are now collaborating to unlock solutions. Together, they are building shared values, agreeing on the objectives, and applying a method that respects both the agile, pioneering tech world and the rigors of academic and explorative work of ocean CSOs and academia.

In the energy sector, several fascinating partnerships are emerging in support of expanded energy access in Africa, many of which are using 4IR technologies in innovative ways. Africa GreenCo, mentioned elsewhere in this report, is currently looking to create sophisticated algorithms to automate lending to African solar energy companies, a concept new to the space. Energise Africa, a partnership that works as a crowdfunding platform to deploy off-grid solar systems in Africa, is also looking to incorporate blockchain technologies for transaction tracking and accounting. We discuss Energise Africa further in the special sections that close out this chapter.

There are also partnerships that work to accelerate the confluence of 4IR technologies used by others to attain the SDGs, such as the newly formed initiative, 2030Vision. Founded by the WEF, Arm Holdings, and the United Nations Development Programme, 2030Vision is convening leaders across all sectors to share cutting-edge research on the role of technology in accelerating the SDGs, as well as the market opportunities unlocked by 4IR technologies. The initiative will also encourage the formation of new partnerships with specific industry ecosystems to lead on critical issues. Already, 2030Vision has identified 300 technological applications to accelerate the SDGs and is currently working with leading technology experts and governments across the world to build leadership principles that support the use of these technologies for the global public good.

Considerations of Advanced Technologies

Serving the global public good is a critical aspect underlining 4IR technologies. Although the SDGs provide a powerful aspiration for a sustainable world, transitions are often accompanied with trade-offs. And while advanced technologies hold great promise for transformative SDG outcomes, any associated socioeconomic and governance challenges cannot be overlooked. 4IR technologies may be challenging, for instance, for governments to regulate in a fair and equitable manner. As such, the true costs and benefits of these technologies and how they affect frontline communities may not be known until after the fact.

For example, the outputs of artificial intelligence can have bias, exacerbating issues of social justice and societal exclusion (Johnson 2019, Crawford et al. 2019, West et al. 2019). This possible bias urges us to consider questions of ethics, values, and inclusion in both the development of new technologies and their deployment for societal good. Access to advanced technologies is not always equitable: Thirty-three percent of the world’s population does not have access to a mobile phone, 41 percent does not use the Internet, and 51 percent is not active on social media, which has an important data-gathering function (We Are Social 2020). This considerable global technology gap prevents a significant proportion of the world’s population from partaking and, likely, even benefiting from new technologies. Partnerships like Friends for Ocean Action, Africa GreenCo, Energise Africa, and 2030Vision, however, that use these technologies can extend the accessibility of these solutions. With their longer-term timeline that comes with a focus on transformation, these partnerships and others with transformative ambitions can drive toward the sustainable solutions needed to tackle the SDGs. Each stakeholder’s contributions is integral: Companies’ high level of innovation and technology, coupled with governments’ regulatory oversight and support, coupled with CSOs’ equity and social justice focus, may help ensure that new technologies are adopted with consideration of their externalities and frontline communities.

Recommendations and Partnership Insights

Partnerships rely on support from a wide range of actors, from trade associations and academia to CSOs and the private sector. These organizations add value by connecting partnerships to technical resources, external expertise, partnership champions, and new funders. As may be expected, partnerships with high transformation potential believe that they have embodied this success factor to a great extent, compared to low transformation potential partnerships (64 percent compared to 47 percent). To effectively build a support network, partnerships can take the following actions:

• Map relevant initiatives and actors. High potential partnerships know their strengths and weaknesses and when they need to reach outside of their immediate partnership network for additional subject matter expertise, technical assistance, or implementation support. They also understand how their partnership fits into the broader system. Partnerships find that establishing a local support network is particularly useful. One partnership emphasizes this, saying it “benefits from local partners in the region who are part of the civil society or who are based in government,” another identifies community partners as key to “keeping the partnership aligned with other local efforts.” Partnerships can start by mapping relevant initiatives in the region or sector they are working in. This exercise can help partnerships engage the right groups, identify regional or sectoral gaps, and position efforts as complementary rather than duplicative (Dalberg 2020). This can be part of a systems mapping effort identified in he success factor, "clear articulation of the system of interest," and partnerships could use methods like actor mapping or social network mapping.
• Leverage existing partner networks. High-profile or well-networked stakeholders have a lot to offer. They build partnership credibility, increase partnership name recognition, and open doors to resources and contacts that would not otherwise be accessible. One partnership, for instance, notes that one key stakeholder enables it to “access technical and political support systems essential to partnership operations.”⁶ Another partnership relies on a stakeholder’s strong connections to sector specialists. Partnerships view the reputational and network benefits that these stakeholders bring as invaluable but warn that these relationships must sometimes be carefully navigated. For example, well-connected partners tend to be large and support multiple initiatives contemporaneously, in some cases making it difficult for partnerships to fully capitalize on network resources. One partnership explains that while two well-connected organizations are core partners, “with competing priorities and [regulatory] hurdles, accessing and utilizing networks has been a challenge.”⁷ To better access these resources, partnerships find that communicating partnership progress regularly and finding a champion within the organization are particularly helpful strategies.
• Prioritize networking. External support often comes down to individuals, rather than organizations. Partnerships with high transformation potential cultivate this by “actively participating and networking with local, regional, and national organizations,”⁸ demonstrating proof of concept, and prioritizing “continuous engagement with new supporters” at every opportunity. These partnerships also seek out and join more formal networks, such as P4G, that can support partnership development and facilitate useful partnership contacts. Partnerships emphasize that building these support networks takes time, trust, and persistence but agree that efforts are worth it in the long run. As one partnership explains, “[F]inding solutions to complex problems requires co-operation, not competition.”⁹

Best-in-Class Example

Energise Africa, a partnership between impact investing platforms Ethex and Lendahand, uses crowdfunding to provide affordable finance to solar businesses operating in sub-Saharan Africa (Figure 14). These businesses then sell small solar systems to households on a pay-as-you-go basis. Individual investments are structured as fixed-term bonds and conditionally guaranteed for first-time investors on the platform. Since its inception, projects funded through Energise Africa investments have enabled 452,000 people across Africa to replace kerosene with solar electricity. Energise Africa has done an exemplary job establishing its external support network from the top down and bottom up, leveraging stakeholder networks and building support from grassroots CSOs. This network has been critical for raising awareness of the partnership, building partnership credibility, and attracting new investors.

Figure 14 | Placing Energise Africa on the Continuum

Source: WRI Authors.

Energise Africa investments are innovative in their approach. Without a track record, the partnership initially found it more difficult to build its investor base at the rate initially anticipated. To map relevant initiatives and actors, Energise Africa conducted research to better understand why investors were hesitant and to identify possible solutions. Ethex research revealed that UK investors are interested in impact investing, but do not know all of their investment options and perceive impact investment as inaccessible and high risk. Investors also thought that sustainable development investments lacked transparency and were skeptical of their actual impacts. Energise Africa addressed these barriers by experimenting with several approaches to attract new investors, including different advertisement strategies, various investment matching approaches, the first-time investor guarantee, and vouchers for first-time investors. Each of these approaches had different levels of success in attracting new investors, and the exact findings are detailed in Energy 4 Impact’s recently released “Energise Africa—Investment and Impact Report” (Energy 4 Impact 2020).The research shows that the promise of match funding led to an increase in investment and that the first-time investor guarantee focused on increasing the participation of smaller investors and also boosted investment, especially around the £100 level, the level of the guarantee.

In the four months after the launch of the first-time investor guarantee in July 2019, there was a 65 percent increase in first-time investors compared to the previous four months before, with an 80 percent increase in investments of $125.

In 2019, the partnership employed an external consultant to conduct additional research on investor demographics and behavior and analyzed what kind of communication channels were most effective in acquiring new investors. The results showed that traditional communication channels like advertising (TV, London Underground, radio), public relations, and events were much more effective than digital channels in persuading people to invest. In addition, Energise Africa supporters (UK Aid, Virgin Unite, P4G, and Good Energies Foundation), media articles, and Trustpilot reviews were critical in building trust with potential investors and giving them the confidence to go ahead and invest. Furthermore, digital and social media channels, although not important in acquiring new investors, were very important in building out the Energise Africa community and encouraging repeat investment.

In response to this data and insight, Energise Africa focused on building an external support network that enables the partnership to reach new groups of investors. One way the partnership had done this is by leveraging its partner networks. To start, Ethex provided access to a community of over 15,000 individual impact investors. This enabled partnership to market Energise Africa to a large group of potential investors as soon as it launched. Stakeholders UK Aid and Virgin Unite also brought large and diverse network resources. UK Aid’s support and engagement allowed Energise Africa to promote the platform at a number of UK government events, such as a 2018 ministerial trade mission to Africa, through a UK Aid research report released at the 2019 UN General Assembly meeting, at the 2020 UK Africa Investment Summit, and through several UK aid-related news stories. This has been very important in building the partnership’s credibility, building brand awareness, and enabling Energise Africa to acquire a broad demographic of new investors. A February 2020 press release, for example, explains the partnership’s strategy, framing Energise Africa as integral to the UK Year of Climate Action in advance of COP 26. Virgin Unite, which is focused more on the entrepreneurial aspects of Energise Africa investments, also regularly promotes the partnership through social media and blog posts, enabling the partnership to reach investors who may not otherwise consider investing in sustainable development.

Energise Africa has prioritized networking, working with grassroots CSOs on events to connect with potential investors and promote the partnership. The partnership has collaborated with several organizations, including Friends of the Earth, Ashden, Power for All, Global Citizen, and the UK Sustainable Investment Forum’s Good Money Week (an annual event). Creating opportunities for this first investor touchpoint is invaluable and a critical component of building a sustainable investment pipeline. Once people have invested initially, the partnership’s repeat investment rate is above 90 percent.

A Call to Action

Multistakeholder partnerships among governments, businesses, and CSOs are increasingly thought of as an essential element to drive transformative change and accelerate progress on achieving the SDGs and addressing climate change. Despite the growing number of transformation-focused partnerships that have emerged to address the SDGs, most are still early in their partnership journeys where there is little empirical analysis of actual impacts. Additionally, these partnerships are operating in complex and dynamic systems where the research landscape is constantly evolving across multiple fields of study and investigative angles. Yet we have just under a decade remaining to meet the SDGs. Partnerships and those thinking about engaging in partnerships need support and resources.

This report aimed to synthesize the rich and multi-disciplinary literature and knowledge available to address knowledge gaps around transformative partnerships. These knowledge gaps include lack of a common framing and clear definitions for transformation and systems change as it pertains to partnerships, lack of clear information on when partnering is the right approach and how to maximize the motivations and offerings each sector has to offer, and lack of empirical evidence of partnership success factors and how they should be implemented.

Chapter 2 described three key characteristics of transformation identified in the literature to help clarify partnerships’ understanding of transformation, how it relates to the concepts of systems and systems change, and a typology of transformative partnerships. A greater understanding of all these factors can help partnerships think about and be more deliberate in how they plan for their transformation journeys. Chapter 3 provided readers with detailed information on offerings of each major sector in partnership and a better understanding of why these sectors seek to partner. This is useful because we heard that partners don’t always fully understand each other, and we know from our research that partnership roles and responsibilities are an essential ingredient to the success of partnerships. Chapter 4 identified 14 common success factors related to partnership operations and relationship management and took a deep dive into four that may have a greater bearing on reaching transformation objectives, based on an analysis of 41 partnerships in the P4G ecosystem, most of which are still in operation. Using guidance from leading literature and high transformation-potential partnerships from the P4G community, partnerships can learn how to better embody these 14 success factors to improve their effectiveness. We also provided guidelines to help partnerships better track their contribution to systems transformation, with the hope that this will help improve the empirical evidence base needed to help researchers better understand partnerships. Integrating systems thinking concepts into performance tracking is integral for transformation-seeking partnerships. Chapter 4 also took a glance at the 4IR, providing evidence of how partnerships are harnessing the power of new technologies to advance change.

Looking Forward

With the stage set, we must continue to learn from partnerships on their transformation journeys to better understand when and where partnerships are needed and how to tap into critical moments of opportunity.

More investigation is also needed to further explore the role of advanced technologies, as well as the role of finance and frontline communities as partnership stakeholders. We must also learn how external networks can better support partnerships. Recommendations and insights from this report have largely been focused on what partnerships can do to maximize their effectiveness. But what can others—the national platforms, the partnership accelerators, the investors and grantees, and national governments—do in practice to better enable transformation? Additionally, more investigation is needed into partnership impacts related to the SDGs, to better understand when partnerships are most needed, and which types are best suited in different contexts.

Future WRI research will continue to target and explore the information gaps like those identified as most critical by partnerships and track lessons learned from the P4G and wider partnership community.

Appendix A. Stakeholder Research Methodology 

To understand stakeholder motivations for partnering, their contributions, and interest in transformation, we conducted stakeholder-specific literature reviews, consultations, and interviews. All are described in this appendix.

Literature reviews

Government

The government literature review was performed using Google Scholar and University E-libraries. The search was limited to articles published between 2016 and 2020. The search was divided into two stages. The first stage was focused on the barriers and the benefits of developing partnerships among government, the private sector, and CSOs; as well as the characteristics of a transformative partnership from the government perspective. The second stage was focused on successful case examples.  

The main search terms for the first stage were government transformations for development, government partnerships to achieve SDGs, barriers for SDG partnerships, examples of sector and government partnerships, innovative government partnerships, cross-sectoral collaboration for SDGs, and unlocking investment through partnerships. Articles from development institutions and consultancy companies were prioritized. The main research points included in the government report were validated and discussed with GGGI experts.

The second phase of research was performed using project database and Google search. GGGI case examples on government and private-sector partnerships were selected based on the project impact achieved and certain project characteristics compatible with the scope of the report. Interviews with project managers and country representatives from GGGI were held to gather project details and feedback on the barriers for developing partnerships between the government and the private sector. 

All other examples were retrieved mostly from development partners’ project databases such as the UN and the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Business

Information on businesses as partnership stakeholders was sourced through two literature reviews. The first examined the business case for business participation in the SDGs more broadly, looking at how and why companies engage in sustainable development initiatives. The second more specifically addressed businesses as partnership stakeholders, focusing on business motivation to partner and business contributions to partnerships.

For both lines of inquiry, literature was sourced through searches on Ebsco Discovery Scholar, Google, and Google Scholar. Literature was restricted to work published between 2015 and 2020. Search terms for the first literature review included business, business case, business participation, SDG or Sustainable Development Goal, and sustainable development. Search terms for the second literature search included business, public-private partnership, multistakeholder partnership, SDG or Sustainable Development Goal, participation, stakeholder, offering, and contributor.

CSO

The CSO literature search was conducted using Google and performed after the research team settled on a search strategy for the government and business sections. As such, it was limited to one search, which included terms like CSO partnerships, NGO partnership, multistakeholder partnerships, public-private partnerships, CSO/NGO partnerships offerings, CSO/NGO partnership motivations, CSO/NGO coalitions, CSO/NGO collaboration, multistakeholder collaboration, CSO/NGO partnership barriers, CSO/NGO partnership challenges, and CSO/NGO partnership success factors.

Interviews

We also supplemented our literature reviews with expert knowledge, as we noticed that available literature on stakeholder contributions to partnerships was limited and did not typically address partnerships interested in transformation. For the government expertise, report co-author GGGI consulted in-house government experts to review and validate research and case studies presented in the government stakeholder section. Experts consulted include GGGI’s country representative for Thailand, country representative for Mexico, country representative for Hungary, head of Green Cities Teams, head of the Climate Action and Inclusive Development Unit, and expert within its Investment and Policy Solutions Division. 

For businesses and CSOs, we conducted a few dozen interviews with leaders in both sectors. These leaders had deep experience with sustainability and/or partnerships and were sourced from WRI’s extensive international network as well as WRI’s Corporate Consultative Group. In sum, we spoke to a total of 30 parties. See Box A1 for a complete list of organizations interviewed.

After completing all interviews, we extracted key themes around each stakeholders’ contributions to partnerships and reasons why they were interested in partnering. These are presented in Chapter 3. We supported each theme with an example, often drawing from the in-house expertise of WRI and GGGI, which have both been engaged in or are aware of myriad partnerships across all sectors. To fill in the details of the cases, additional literature searches were conducted, and these are cited as appropriate throughout Chapter 3.  

Interview Discussion Guide 

The following document is the discussion guide that we used for businesses and CSOs. The interview questions are at the end of the guide. 

State-of-the-Art Report Discussion Guide  

Background

Report Review

• This informal, off-the-record discussion is in support of the WRI State-of-the-Art Report, which explores how multistakeholder partnerships with transformation potential maximize their effectiveness toward driving SDG action. 
  • For the purposes of the report, we are interested in partnerships that comprise at least one commercial and one noncommercial partner and are aiming for scalability, looking for commercial viability, and aiming to overcome market barriers.
  • For the purposes of the report, we consider the following four characteristics of transformation: systemic, nonlinear, deviates from the status quo, and long-term or sustained. 

Report Rationale  

• The global sustainable development community has developed a heightened interest in transformative action, especially as it pertains to the SDGs. 
• Part of the hope in fulfilling the SDGs hinges on the effectiveness of transformative multistakeholder partnerships in their quest to accelerate SDG action. 
• While we cannot yet speak to impacts because this type of transformative partnership is relatively new—for the last five or six years—there is great interest in how they are progressing. This is our report focus. 

Discussion purpose and other notes

• We are interested in discussing three topics today to understand businesses' or CSOs' offerings to partnerships, businesses' or CSOs' shortcomings, and businesses' or CSOs' motivations for partnering. 
• This is an informal, off-the-record conversation. 
  • We can share a draft of the section so you are comfortable with what is being shared, if you would like. 
  • We would be happy to thank you in our contributor’s section, if you would like. 
  • Please speak from your broader business or CSO experience—that is, any reflections or examples need not be related to your current organization (although if they are, that is perfectly fine). 
  • Your insights will be aggregated into themes, drawn from all of our team’s calls with business or CSO leaders like you. 

Discussion questions  

We are most interested in the first four questions. If time permits, we can discuss the last one. For each query, we would appreciate any examples in support. The examples can be kept confidential if you would prefer, or conversely, we are also happy to share any as examples in the report. 

1. Why are businesses or CSOs interested in transformation? What does transformation mean to your organization? 
2. When businesses or CSOs think about transformation, does it change how they approach partnering? 
3. What do businesses or CSOs offer in partnerships, especially those aiming to drive transformative change? Said another way, what are the assets of businesses in a partnership?  
   • For example, if we were interviewing a different stakeholder—for example, governments—governments might say that they offer an enabling environment and the ability to set policy or send signals in support of various initiatives. Or they may say that they provide infrastructure investments that are necessary backbones to sustainable development. 
4. What do businesses or CSOs lack when it comes to advancing transformative partnerships? Thought of another way, why are businesses interested in partnerships?
   • For example, governments might say that they have coordination challenges and slow capacity to change, both of which are typical characteristics of a bureaucracy.
5. What are businesses' or CSOs' motivations for partnering?
   • For example, governments might say that they are fulfilling their mandate to grow economies and increase societal well-being, and partnerships can help them be more effective at doing so.

Appendix B. Partnership Success Factors Review

Partnership success factors have been well-researched, and there is general consensus around which characteristics are most important (Brouwer et al. 2016; Jenkins et al. 2017; BCSD 2017; Oorthuizen et al. 2018; Pattberg and Widerberg 2016; Stibbe et al. 2018). These factors range from establishing a partnership vision and strategy to setting up partnership governance to partnership culture. However, even if partnerships know that certain factors are important, it can be hard to know where to start.

Table B1 summarizes 14 success factors mentioned frequently in existing research and provides concrete examples and recommendations based on what is working for partnerships in our research pool, according to answers provided through two workshops and our partnership survey. (See Appendix C for survey methodology.) Success factors were identified based on a literature review, including publications from two workstreams: literature sourced from P4G partners and other relevant organizations and a systematic literature search using Ebsco Discovery Scholar, Google, and Google Scholar. The literature search was restricted to works published between 2015 and 2019 by CSOs, governments, businesses, and academia. Search terms included multistakeholder partnerships, multi-actor partnership, multistakeholder collaboration, multistakeholder initiative, public-private partnership, SDG or Sustainable Development Goals, success factor, enabling factor, lessons learned, best practice, challenge, barriers, transformation potential, and systems change evaluation.

Analysis of top enabling partnership conditions synthesized information from both workstreams by identifying high-relevance articles, which were selected based on their discussion of transformative partnerships targeting the SDGs, their analysis of multiple partnerships, and their specific relevance to the overall P4G and State-of-the-Art Partnership Awards research universe.

Appendix C. Survey Methodology and Instrument

The findings in this report supporting partnership success factors are largely based on a survey conducted with multistakeholder partnerships between November and December 2019. The objectives of the survey were to gather lessons learned on commonly reported partnership success factors and to determine if any partnership characteristics or success factors may lead to having a higher transformation potential. This necessitated having a methodology in place for scoring a partnership’s transformational potential.

Selection Approach

Our team had unique access to the P4G ecosystem of partnerships. These partnerships had already been prescreened as having transformation potential, and we further screened partnerships to ensure they met our criteria:

1. Must include at least one commercial and one noncommercial partner.
2. Must have a transformation goal and address one or more of the following SDG areas: food and agriculture (SDG 2), clean water and sanitation (SDG 6), energy (SDG 7), sustainable cities (SDG 11), and circular economy (SDG 12).
3. Must not be a partnership platform.

P4G supports three types of partnerships that represent different stages of maturity (see Table C1 for a description): start-up, scale-up, and state-of-the-art. Of the start-up and scale-up partnerships, we selected only those that had been awarded funding. For State-of-the-Art Atward partnerships, we included the winners for each SDG category as well as short-listed finalists.

Response Rates

Our questionnaire was sent to a total of 69 partnerships, out of which 47 partnerships responded. Out of those 47, only 41 were ultimately eligible for inclusion in our analysis. Table C1 provides an overview of our participant sample and response rates by partnership type.

Data Collection Strategy

Survey Format

We used a self-administered web-based survey. We also provided partnerships with a PDF and Word version of the survey and offered to complete the survey via a phone interview, to address instances of poor Internet connectivity. Overall, all but one partnership used the web version. For each partnership, we requested that the survey be completed only once by a designated representative to avoid creating too much additional time burden as these partnerships also have other reporting requirements. We also suggested that these leads collect recommended reporting materials and speak with other partners as they deemed necessary. The survey design included multiple reminders and deadline extensions to accommodate as many respondents as possible.

Incentive Structure 

Participants were provided with an option for their partnership to be featured in this report as a contributor or as a potential case study.

Questionnaire Development and Testing

The survey was informed by several rounds of feedback from internal experts from WRI, including those from the Sustainable Business Center and the Ross Center Prize for transformative urban initiatives. The survey was also tested with external partnership and systems change evaluation experts from the Geneva Graduate Institute, FSG, TPI, and IDH The Sustainable Trade Initiative. Finally, the survey was piloted in two rounds with the following partnerships: Courtauld Commitment 2025, the Sustainable Food Platform, and Platform for Accelerating the Circular Economy (PACE).

2020 State-of-the-Art Report Survey Instrument

Thank you for participating in the State-of-the-Art Report survey. Through this survey, we aim to understand your partnership’s path to accelerating action toward the Sustainable Development Goals. There will be many opportunities in this survey to share your insights, and we encourage you to provide as much detail as possible in the spaces provided. Your reflections on your partnership goals, progress, and characteristics will contribute to a deeper understanding of multistakeholder collaboration, from which we hope partnership practitioners and researchers can learn.

Recommended approach for filling out the survey: For each partnership, we request that the survey be completed only once by a designated representative. It may be useful to collect reporting materials and any other documentation that reflects partnership goals, milestones, or progress experienced by your partnership. The survey comprises seven sections. Please see the attached PDF to view the survey in its entirety. We estimate that the survey will take about 60 minutes to complete.

Instructions for navigating this survey:

1. If you hover your mouse over the blue underlined text, definitions and examples of the text will appear.
2. You may complete this survey in more than one sitting by clicking the Save and Continue Later button in the top right corner.
3. Please be sure to navigate between survey pages using the “next” and “back” buttons at the bottom of the survey page, NOT the “back” arrow in your browser as this will erase unsaved progress.

   Privacy and confidentiality: Survey responses will be kept confidential and will not be made publicly available or attributable to the respondent or partnership. We will collect identifying information for each partnership so that we can categorize lessons learned on what is working and what is not by different partnership characteristics.

   As this is an online survey, your confidentiality will be kept to the degree permitted by the technology being used. We cannot guarantee against interception of data sent via the Internet by third parties.

   Taking part is voluntary. Your participation in this survey is voluntary. You may refuse to participate before the study begins, discontinue at any time, or skip questions that may make you feel uncomfortable with no penalty to you or your partnership.

   If you have questions or feedback on this survey, please feel free to contact Erin Gray, economist, World Resources Institute: erin.gray@wri.org

   Questionnaire

   Section A: Respondent Information

   1. Name:
   2. E-mail:
   3. Phone Number:
   4. Position and organization:
   5. Briefly describe your role and responsibilities in the context of the partnership:

Section B: About the partnership

1. Partnership name:
2. In what year was your partnership established?
3. Partnership country focus:
4. Please list the names of all key partners involved in the partnership and their relevant sector:

   PARTNER NAME	SECTOR (government, business, civil society organization)

   Please list additional key partners and sectors here:

5. Which statement best applies to your partnership?
   1. MARKET-DRIVEN: Our partnership is driven by the commercial business case; that is, we aim to deliver commercially viable solutions that contribute to profitable sustainable development.
   2. MARKET-GENERATING: Our partnership is not driven by immediate commercial prospects, but we aim to enable commercially viable sustainable solutions in the future by tackling some essential market barrier (e.g., by altering incentives or addressing drivers of unsustainable trends).
   3. DEVELOPMENT-FOCUSED: Our partnership is not driven by immediate commercial prospects; rather we focus more squarely on development objectives to which a commercial partner can contribute as part of its corporate sustainability policy.
   4. NONE OF THESE APPLY.

Section C: Partnership Goals and Activities

1. What are your partnership’s near-term goals (e.g., your one- to five-year goals related to building a strong foundation for your partnership)?
2. What are your partnership’s systems change goals (e.g., your 2030 goals related to the SDGs. That is, progress on shifting conditions of the system and removing barriers that are blocking a change to a more sustainable system)?
3. How would you describe your partnership? Please select more than one if applicable.
   1. We aim to transform an entire sector, industry, or supply chain.
   2. We aim to address a specific problem (e.g., reduce nutrient pollution; improve food security, etc.).
   3. We aim to create a pioneering innovation, such as a new technology or improved distribution of products or services or showcase and support innovative approaches in a marketplace.
   4. We aim to remove a barrier or barriers that are blocking systems change, such as creating or modifying policies, improving the regulatory environment, or improving networks of actors.
   5. Other type of collaborative effort (please describe):

Section D: Tracking Partnership Progress

1. Does your partnership have a performance-management system to track progress against your goals? [Yes/No/Don’t know] If no, skip to Section E.
2. Is your performance-management system managed internally (that is, owned and operated by partnership members), or do you use an external evaluator?
   1. Internal
   2. External
   3. Hybrid (internal and external)
3. Do you believe that your partnership is able to track success beyond near-term goals to understand progress against systems change goals? [Y/N/Don’t Know]
   1. If yes, describe how your partnership does this.
   2. If no, why not?
4. What key metrics (qualitative and/or quantitative) have you set that are the most important in tracking your partnership’s success toward achieving your near-term goals and systems change goals?
   1. Near-term

      No.	Near-Term Goal	Key Metrics for Tracking Success

   2. Systems change

      No.	Systems change	Key Metrics for Tracking Success

Section E: Progress on Systems Change Goals

This section aims to assess your partnership’s progress on your near-term and systems change goals.

As a reminder, survey responses have no bearing on P4G funding or State-of-the-Art Award consideration, and answers will not be attributable to your partnership. We recognize that many partnerships are still in the start-up or scale-up phase of maturity and thus may have limited evidence of scaling or impacts to date. We encourage you to select the answer that best reflects your partnership’s current stage of development.

Directions: Please rate your partnership for each evaluation question on a scale of 0–5, where:

1. I do not know or cannot answer
2. Not at all
3. To a small extent
4. To a moderate extent
5. To a great extent
6. To a very great extent

Please provide any additional information on your ratings as you see fit using the comments box in question E5.

Section F: Partnership Characteristics

This section aims to understand what factors or partnership characteristics have influenced your partnership’s success or hampered your progress. Learning about what has worked and what has not worked for other partnerships can help speed the learning journey for both new and existing partnerships, so it may be useful to reflect on what advice you would give to other partnerships based on your experience.

Directions: Please consider the below statements and rate how well each applies to your partnership. Rating scale is as follows:

1. Not at all
2. To a small extent
3. To a moderate extent
4. To a great extent
5. To a very great extent

Where relevant, elaborate on how each characteristic has or has not applied to your partnership in the columns to the right under each heading (see following table). Describe challenges that your partnership has faced related to relevant factors and how you were able to or are working to overcome them. If possible, describe the impact the factor had on achieving your partnership goals (near-term or systems change). Elaborating on all characteristics listed is not necessary. You may find it useful to think about your partnership’s top three to four strengths and challenges and answer these questions, keeping those factors in mind. Please see examples below:

Section G: Concluding Questions and Contact Information

1. What are the top three key lessons you have learned from your partnership experience so far?
2. Is there anything else you’d like to mention about your partnership that would be useful for others aiming to improve the effectiveness of their partnership or to initiate a partnership aiming to address the SDGs?
3. Did you consult other key partners from your partnership in filling out this survey? [Y/N/I don’t know].
4. May we contact you if we have additional questions about your partnership? [Y/N].
5. We may include your comments in our final report, and to provide more context, we may be interested in attributing them. Please indicate if you are comfortable with being identified [Yes/No/Contact Me First].
6. Would you like to be featured in the report as a contributor or as a case study? We would like to thank all partnerships that have contributed to our study by listing their partnership names in a “Contributions” section at the end of the report. [Yes/No].
   1. Comments?

Appendix D. Transformation Potential Evaluation Methodology

An objective of our survey and research was to determine if we could provide any insights into which partnership success factors may be more important for transformative partnerships or more difficult to address than other factors. As a result, we needed a way to rate partnerships in terms of their transformation potential—that is, the success to date in achieving its intermediate and transformation objectives and/or the likelihood that the partnership would achieve its transformation objective so that we could differentiate survey responses based on whether a partnership’s potential was high, medium, or low. We focus on transformation potential as opposed to transformation impacts as our partnerships are still largely early in their maturity.

Our transformation potential evaluation methodology is described below. It is adapted based on Maassen and Galvin (2019), and it is important to note that, in terms of transformation potential, partnerships were scored against their own transformation or systems change goals. At this stage, we are not able to definitively state whether each partnership’s transformation objective is ultimately the right one needed to achieve the SDGs.

Evaluation Challenges

Partnerships, even SOTA partnerships, are still quite new, which makes evaluating their transformation impacts challenging. In addition, the exercise for rating partnerships according to their transformation potential faces multiple challenges:  

• Evaluator selection and bias: It is common to use multiple evaluators in an exercise like this to avoid bias. However, anyone attempting to score a partnership for transformation potential will likely not have complete knowledge of the partnership nor the entirety of the system in which it is operating. Evaluators may also have their own biases, depending on their relationship to the partnership.
• Methodological: There are no generally accepted methodologies for evaluating transformation potential for partnerships. 
• Managing consistency and comparability among partnership types: Partnerships in our sample differ in terms of their phase of maturity, partnership composition, objectives and SDG-focus, governance structure, and activities. Additionally, partnerships vary in terms of their reporting requirements and data collection and reporting capacities. Reporting documentation provided by partnerships to P4G is self-reported and not consistent across partnerships in terms of the use of targets and metrics, use of baseline data, etc. 

Transformation Potential Evaluation Criteria and Scoring

We determined that partnerships would be evaluated based on their score against a set of transformation potential criteria. To identify these criteria we conducted a desk review of existing recognition and funding awards programs for transformative and systems change initiatives and partnerships where criteria were developed for selection, as well as a literature review of studies covering systems change or transformation evaluation and indicators of partnership success. (This literature review is the same as that described in Appendix B.) A summary of the recognition and award programs is provided in Table D1.

Based on this review, we identified seven evaluation criteria shown in Table D2 (matrix structure based on Maassen and Galvin 2019). We also developed a scoring system using a rating scale of 0–5, and provided a description of what each rating number means for each criterion to support scoring consistency by evaluators. To address the issue that our survey participant pool includes partnerships at different phases of maturity, we also devised the criteria rating scale to range from no potential for impact to having achieved impact. Partnerships with a longer history of implementation that were successful in achieving near to intermediate goals, such as the non-P4G SOTA partnerships, would be expected to score higher on impacts and overall across the criteria compared to start-up and scale-up partnerships that are only a few months to a couple years into their operations.

Evaluators scored partnerships against each of the seven criteria using the matrix provided in Table D2. Because some criteria had more subcriteria than others (e.g., Impacts has three subcriteria while Vision and Planning only has two), they had a greater weight toward the overall assessment of transformation potential. This was by design. For each partnership, an average score was taken across all evaluators for each criterion, and then a final average was taken across all criteria to arrive at a final score between 0 and 5. To finalize each partnership’s score, we gathered data on the scoring variance across the evaluators to determine if there were major scoring discrepancies between evaluators. In instances where the variance was greater than 1 point, we held a discussion to assess the evidence considered in the evaluator’s decision to determine if scores should be adjusted.

After the final scores were determined, we divided partnerships into terciles: high, medium, and low transformation potential partnerships. Partnerships with an average score equal to or over 3.24 were rated as high potential; partnerships with a score greater than 2.50 and less than 3.24 were rated as medium potential; and partnerships with a score equal to or less than 2.50 were rated as low potential. This scoring distribution aligned nicely with our rating scale, where a score of three for any criteria generally equated with having strong potential and a five is equated with ability to demonstrate success in that area. It is important to note that low potential, for our purposes, can mean that the partnership either has demonstrated low transformation potential or is early in its partnership journey and thus has not been able to demonstrate outputs, outcomes, or impacts.

We note that we tested this evaluation and scoring approach with several reputable non-P4G multistakeholder partnerships and compared their scores to those in our sample pool, including the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, Gavi the Vaccine Alliance, the Clean Cooking Alliance, and AGRA. Evaluators agreed with how these partnerships ranked compared to our 41 partnerships.

Evaluator Selection

To address the evaluator bias, we identified two teams of evaluators. Although each team would have inherent bias based on its personal relationship to the partnership, the evaluation design is based on taking an average score for each criteria on across the two teams of evaluators.

• Research team: This team includes the three primary researchers behind this report. This team has expertise in economics and social science research methods, as well as monitoring and evaluation best practices. This team is responsible for reviewing in depth the reporting documentation of each partnership, previous scoring reviews of each partnership for earlier P4G selection of start-up and scale-up winners and SOTA award finalists, survey results, and additional web research.
• P4G team: This team includes the three primary P4G staff responsible for partnership selection and communication. This team worked with external consultants to define P4G’s own criteria for partnership selection, and is familiar with each partnership’s progress. As such, they are viewed as being more in touch with the challenges and successes of each partnership at least at a quarterly reporting level. We asked this team to score using a best-judgment approach. As they have previously reviewed all application, reporting, and scoring information, we asked that they judge to the best of their ability and refer back to partnership documentation when they deemed necessary to make a proper judgment call. This was designed as a time-saving measure.

We initially considered having the partnership itself be a third category of evaluator and had asked partnerships to rate themselves in the survey according to our seven transformation potential criteria. However, we were not able to provide the full evaluation matrix in the survey, and an assessment of partnerships’ scores revealed that partnerships seem to overestimate how well they do against each criterion; so this was ultimately excluded from the scoring.

Comparison of Transformation Potential Groups

As stated earlier, partnerships were divided into different groupings, based on their transformation potential, to compare their average self-evaluation scores for our 14 success factors. The success factors that demonstrated the greatest scoring differential between high and low transformation-potential groups would be indicative of where high-performing partnerships are doing better at implementation, compared to low-performing partnerships. Partnerships scored themselves against success factors on a scale of 1–5, based on the extent to which they embodied each success factor (where 1 = not at all and 5 = to a great extent).

We grouped partnerships into terciles representing low, medium, and high transformation potential. The tercile distribution corresponded roughly with the evaluation criteria score scale, which is on a scale of 0–5, where for each criteria, a score above 3 indicates a high performance. The top tercile partnerships had an average transformation potential score of 3.24 or greater, medium tercile partnerships had a score between 2.50 and 3.24, and bottom tercile partnerships had a score of 2.50 or below.

Table D3 provides a summary of the average scoring differential between all high (top tercile) transformation-potential partnerships and all low (bottom tercile) transformation-potential partnerships. As the success factor “bold and creative approach and activities” was considered to overlap significantly with “Jointly agreed-upon overarching vision and goals," we integrated the two into our final definition of “Jointly agreed-upon overarching vision and goals” in Chapter 4. To determine which success factors should be included in the report, we selected those where the scoring differential was >0.5.

Appendix E. Partnerships Referenced thoughout Report

• Business: for-profit organization. Also referenced as the private sector.
• Civil society organization (CSO): nonprofit or nongovernmental organization. CSOs can range from small community organizations to large international groups.
• Contribution analysis: methodology to assess how a program, partnership, or organization contributes to a particular outcome.
• Enabling partnership: partnerships convening stakeholders within an industry, supply chain, sector, or issue area to exchange knowledge, set standards, or influence policy. These partnerships affect transformation by shifting policy or sharing information that shifts an entire sector or group of actors onto a sustainable pathway.
• Evaluation: the process of analyzing information and data to answer whether a partnership is meeting its objectives. Evaluation is about “sense-making, reality-checking, assumption testing, and answering questions” (FSG and Collective Impact Forum 2020).
• External stakeholder: an individual or organization outside of a given partnership that has interests in or is affected by said partnership.
• Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR): the fusion of physical, biological, and digital spheres through technologies such as the Internet of Things, advanced energy storage, 3D printing, precision agriculture, and autonomous vehicles (Schwab 2016).
• Government: governing body, agency, or ministry at the national, regional, or state level. Also referenced as the public sector.
• Intermediate actions: a partnership’s immediate next steps or the activities needed to achieve its near-term goals and, ultimately, its transformation vision.
• Learning: the ability to take evaluation results and integrate them into a partnership’s approach to improve its effectiveness at meeting its objectives, to plan ahead, and to take risks.
• Market-driven partnership: partnerships creating a new product, asset, service, or business model that can overcome market barriers and eventually find commercial viability. These partnerships affect transformation by launching a new product or service that incentivize other actors in a market operate in line with sustainable practices.
• Monitoring, evaluation, learning, and reporting (MELR): performance-tracking system used to understand progress on goals and learn from successes and failures. MELR moves beyond short-term performance tracking to integrate systems thinking.
• Monitoring: the process of systematically and regularly collecting information and data to track a partnership’s progress on its activities.
• Multistakeholder partnership : A voluntary collaboration among two or more stakeholders, whereby stakeholders are committed through a formal agreement to share resources, accountability, risks, leadership, and benefits to meet a specific SDG-related objective (UN 2015). These are also often referred to as cross-sectoral partnerships. This report focuses on multistakeholder partnerships with transformation potential. That is, partnerships comprising at least one government and one business and/or CSO that aspire to change the system in which they operate. Also referenced as partnerships, or partnerships with transformative ambitions.
• Near-term goals: a partnership’s one- to five-year goals related to building a strong foundation to implement its approach. Goals could include securing stakeholder commitments, piloting an approach, securing funding, or collecting data.
• Reporting: efforts to summarize evaluation findings and lessons learned with different audiences. Reporting can come in many forms, including annual reports, quarterly updates, PowerPoint presentations, and webinars.
• Stakeholder: an organization (business, government, or CSO) that is participating in a partnership.
• Success factor: a partnership behavior or structural component, identified in existing literature on multistakeholder partnerships as critical for, but not a guarantee of, partnership success.
• System mapping: process of identifying and understanding the components (i.e., actors, institutions, graphics, relationships, power dynamics) of a given system. Tools to do this include social network analysis, actor mapping, timeline mapping, and appreciative inquiry.
• System: interconnected elements, including diverse actors, institutions, and geographies, with a function or purpose (Meadows 2008; Holland 1998). Systems can operate across multiple levels and scale and are characterized by the relationships and power dynamics among elements.
• Systems change: often used in academic literature to refer to sweeping changes to an existing construct or system. For the purposes of this paper, we consider this the same as transformation.
• Systems thinking: the ability to see how a partnership is influencing system conditions, how system conditions interact and influence each other, and ultimately how the partnership is contributing to addressing the problem of interest (adapted from Preskill and Cook 2020).
• Theory of change: articulates how a partnership’s strategy and actions will lead to its transformation goal. A complete theory of change requires an understanding of the system of interest and the underlying assumptions about how partnership actions will change system conditions.
• Transformation: the outcome of transformative change or action, which can be thought of as the transformational impact; a drastic shift in the way a system operates whereby change percolates throughout a system’s elements and interrelations. This report characterizes transformation as change that is systemic, nonlinear, disruptive of the status quo, and long-term and sustained.
• Transformation impacts: measurable transformation outcome.
• Transformation maturity spectrum: a partnership’s progress to date on fulfilling its full transformation potential.
• Transformation potential: a partnership’s predicted ability to effect transformative change based on seven criteria across four categories: innovation, impact, scaling, and implementation viability. See Appendix D for partnership evaluation methodology.
• Transformation vision: a partnership’s ultimate systems-change goal. This may be the launch of a new product or service, the exchange of key information, or the development of a policy that will shift system conditions.
• Transformative change: the process of transformation.
• Transformative partnership: multistakeholder partnership that results in transformation. Also referenced as transformative multistakeholder partnership or transformative collaborations.

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Serena Li. Research Lead, WRI Sustainable Business Center.
Contact: Serena.li@wri.org

Erin Gray. Environmental Economist, WRI Economics Center.
Contact: Erin.gray@wri.org

Maggie Dennis. Research and Report Coordinator, WRI Sustainable Business Center.
Contact: Maggie.dennis@wri.org

1. 1. The two exceptions were the extent to which your government provides a supportive environment and the extent to which, before you commenced partnering, you confirmed that partnership was the best approach and had engaged the right stakeholders. For these success factors, low transformation-potential partnerships scored themselves slightly higher on average than high transformation-potential partnerships with a difference of 0.14 and 0.09, respectively.
2. 2. Partnership quote provided as part of A Time for Transformation Report survey, conducted December 2019. For information on the survey instrument and methodology used, see Appendix C.
3. 3. Ibid.
4. 4. Ibid.
5. 5. Ibid.
6. 6. Ibid.
7. 7. Ibid.
8. 8. Ibid.
9. 9. Ibid.