Interesting report.

Ken Caplan, Director of the London-based Building Partnerships for Development’s Water and Sanitation Cluster, shares his thoughts on the need for more rigorous use of language in discussing partnerships.

Christiana Atako examines the public sector rationale for partnerships in Nigeria through research in the Niger Delta community of Akassa. Her findings show that although the
government has a role to play in partnerships for sustainable development they have not fulfilled this potential and a number of recommendations are made for encouraging them to engage more deeply in such collaboration.

Building on the idea of a ‘licenceto operate’, Joerg Hartmann, explores the idea of a company’s“licence to co-operate” as the business case for engagement cross-sector partnerships and social reporting. This licence, he asserts, involves a company’s ability to co-operate with all sorts of stakeholders, something that is crucial as competitiveness increases in the age of globalisation.

Kishan Khoday suggests that partnerships have emerged as a form of “negotiated rule-making”. A partnership approach has developed, he argues, in order to manage
conflicts between the mandates of public agencies, the interests of business and the values of civil society groups in defining the rules and boundaries of the new global economy.

The capacity for a strategic bodiversity partnership btween Rio Tinto, a ultinational mining company, and BirdLife International, a global network of environmental non-governmental organisations, is assessed by Jonathan Stacey. He provides a sample of an experimental Strategy Matrix as a tool to identify and rate existing and potential partnerships in order to give broad indications of where the partnership programme should concentrate time and funding resources. Rio Tinto have already expressed an interest in the matrix and discussions
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