Partnership Governance and Sustainable Dev

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Partnerships, Governance and SustainableDevelopment







© Pieter Glasbergen, Frank Biermann, Arthur P.J. Mol 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored ina retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the priorpermission of the publisher.

Published byEdward Elgar Publishing Limited

Glensanda HouseMontpellier ParadeCheltenhamGlos GL50 1UAUK

Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.William Pratt House9 Dewey CourtNorthamptonMassachusetts 01060USA

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Partnerships, governance and sustainable development : reflections on theoryand practice / edited by Pieter Glasbergen, Frank Biermann, Arthur P.J. Mol.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.1. Sustainable development. 2. Public-private sector cooperation. I.

Glasbergen, P. II. Biermann, Frank, 1967– III. Mol, A.P.J.HC79.E5P3575 2008338.9′27—dc22

2007029865

ISBN 978 1 84720 405 9

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall



Contents

List of fi gures vii

List of tables viii

List of boxes ix

Contributors x

Preface xiii

1. Setting the scene: the partnership paradigm in the making 1

Pieter Glasbergen

PART 1 PARTNERSHIPS AS COLLABORATIVE

ARRANGEMENTS: THE ACTOR PERSPECTIVE

2. The process of partnership construction: anticipating

obstacles and enhancing the likelihood of successful

partnerships for sustainable development 29Barbara Gray

3. Sustainability through partnering: conceptualizing

partnerships between businesses and NGOs 49

James E. Austin

4. Partnership as a means to good governance: towards an

evaluation framework 68

Jennifer M. Brinkerho ff

PART 2 PARTNERSHIPS AS GOVERNANCEMECHANISMS: THE INSTRUMENTAL

PERSPECTIVE

5. Enabling environmental partnerships: the role of good

governance in Madagascar’s forest sector 93

Derick W. Brinkerho ff

6. Environmental partnerships in agriculture: reflections on the

Australian experience 115

Neil Gunningham

v



7. Partnership as governance mechanism in development

cooperation: intersectoral North–South partnerships

for marine biodiversity 138

Ingrid J. Visseren-Hamakers, Bas Arts and Pieter Glasbergen

PART 3 PARTNERSHIPS AND THE LIBERAL-DEMOCRATIC

GOVERNANCE STRUCTURE

8. Partnerships for sustainability: an analysis of transnational

environmental regimes 173

Philipp Pattberg

9. Democracy and accountability: the challenge for

cross-sectoral partnerships 194James Meadowcroft

10. Bringing the environmental state back in: partnerships

in perspective 214

Arthur P.J. Mol

PART 4 THE FUTURE OF PARTNERSHIPS

11. Multi-stakeholder partnerships for sustainable development:

does the promise hold? 239Frank Biermann, Man-san Chan, Aysem Mert and

Philipp Pattberg

12. Multi-stakeholder global networks: emerging systems for

the global common good 261

Steve Waddell and Sanjeev Khagram

13. Conclusion: partnerships for sustainability – reflections

on a future research agenda 288

Frank Biermann, Arthur P.J. Mol and Pieter Glasbergen

Index 301

vi Contents



Figures

3.1 The collaboration continuum 58

4.1 Causal chain for partnership’s contributions to

good governance 70

5.1 Typology of ENR policy strategies 94

5.2 Governance framework 98

7.1 Transactional model for partnership analysis 14211.1 Issue areas of WSSD partnerships 243

11.2 Countries of implementation 249

11.3 Lead partner governments 251

11.4 Sectoral distribution of lead partners in 2003 and 2007 253

11.5 Number of partners from diff erent sectors and major groups 254

vii



Tables

3.1a Collaboration motivation action framework: companies 52

3.1b Collaboration motivation action framework: NGOs 53

5.1 Elements of good governance 100

10.1 Two categories of partnerships 221

12.1 Organisations versus partnerships versus networks 268

12.2 Types of change in problem-solving initiatives 27112.3 Indicators of third order change for individuals 272

12.4 The emerging global action norms 283

viii



Boxes

4.1 Partnership contributions to governance eff ectiveness 73

4.2 Partnership contributions to governance legitimacy 77

4.3 Accountability mechanism assessment targets 78

4.4 Partnership contributions to managing competing interests

and conflict 83

ix



Contributors

Bas Arts is Professor and Chairman of the Forest and Nature

Conservation Policy Group at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

He is also Visiting Professor at the Europe College in Bruges, Belgium. His

current professional focus is on new modes of governance in global en-

vironmental politics (mainly regarding biodiversity, forests and climate

change).

James E. Austin is the Eliot I. Snider and Family Professor of Business

Administration, Emeritus at the Harvard University Graduate School of

Business Administration. He was the Co-founder and Chairman of the

Harvard Business School’s Social Enterprise Initiative and a Co-founder of

the Social Enterprise Knowledge Network.

Frank Biermann is Professor of Political Science and Professor of

Environmental Policy Sciences at the Vrije Universiteit (Free University)Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is Head of the Department of En-

vironmental Policy Analysis at the university’s Institute for Environmental

Studies, and Director of the Global Governance Project, a joint research

program of ten leading European institutes.

Derick W. Brinkerhoff is Senior Fellow in International Public Management

with RTI International (Research Triangle Institute), and has a faculty asso-

ciate appointment at The George Washington University’s School of Public

Policy and Public Administration.

Jennifer M. Brinkerhoff is Associate Professor of Public Administration

and International Aff airs at The George Washington University in the

United States. She is Co-founder of GWU’s multidisciplinary research

program on NGOs, and Director of GWU’s Diaspora Program (a research

program on diasporas, policy and development).

Man-san Chan is a PhD researcher with the Department of Environmental

Policy Analysis of the Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit

(Free University) Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is a political scientist

specializing in transnational environmental governance. His doctoral

x



research is part of the PARTNERS research project on the emergence,

eff ectiveness and legitimacy of transnational public policy networks.

Pieter Glasbergen is Professor of Environmental Studies, Policy andManagement at Utrecht University and the Dutch Open University. He

chairs the research programme Governance for Sustainable Development

at Utrecht University and the Utrecht-Nijmegen programme on partner-

ships (www.unpop.nl).

Barbara Gray is Professor of Organizational Behavior in the Management

and Organization Department and Director of the Center for Research on

Conflict and Negotiation at the Pennsylvania State University. She is also

a trained mediator.

Neil Gunningham is Professor in the Regulatory Institutions Network and

the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National

University. He is an interdisciplinary social scientist working primarily in

the areas of environmental regulation and policy.

Sanjeev Khagram is Professor and Faculty Director of the Lindenberg

Center for Humanitarian Action, International Development and Global

Citizenship at the Evans School of Public Aff airs, University of Washington,and Co-Lead Steward of Global Action Network-Net (GAN-Net: www.

gan-net.net).

James Meadowcroft is Professor in the School of Public Policy and

Administration and in the Department of Political Science at Carleton

University in Ottawa. He holds a Canada Research Chair in Governance

for Sustainable Development.

Aysem Mert is a PhD researcher with the Department of EnvironmentalPolicy Analysis of the Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit

(Free University) Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She is a political scientist

specializing in transnational environmental governance, with a particular

focus on transnational public policy networks, their discourses and emer-

gence, as part of the PARTNERS research project at Vrije Universiteit.

Arthur P.J. Mol is Chairman and Professor in Environmental Policy at the

Department of Social Sciences, Wageningen University, the Netherlands.

His main fields of interest and publication are in environmental govern-

ance, social theory and the environment, globalization, informational

governance and Asian transitional economies.

Contributors xi



Philipp Pattberg, PhD, is a researcher and project leaderwith the Department

of Environmental Policy Analysis of the Institute for Environmental Studies,

Vrije Universiteit (Free University) Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is also

the Research Coordinator of the Global Governance Project (glogov.org), a joint research program of ten leading European institutes.

Ingrid J. Visseren-Hamakers is researcher at the Copernicus Institute for

Sustainable Development and Innovation at Utrecht University, the

Netherlands, and participates in the Utrecht-Nijmegen programme on

partnerships (www.unpop.nl).

Steve Waddell is Co-Lead Steward of Global Action Network-Net (GAN-

Net: www.gan-net.net). He focuses upon development of multi-stakeholderglobal issue networks.

xii Contributors



Preface

During the 1990s, but even stronger after the 2002 Johannesburg World

Summit on Sustainable Development (the Rio+10 Summit), partnerships

for sustainability emerged as a new phenomenon. These partnerships

aim to address the challenges of environmental governance in an increas-

ingly complex, globalized world. This volume discusses the emerging part-

nership paradigm in governance for sustainable development. Currentdebates on (global) environmental governance focus on the role and in-

clusion of private actors in policies for sustainable development, and part-

nerships are one mode and conceptualization for such non-governmental

involvements in initially state-dominated practices. Scientific research on

partnerships within the context of governance theory is fairly new, and

there is a clear need to systemize our knowledge base to further define the

international research agenda on this topic. In addition, there is an urgent

demand from governments and international organizations, but also from

non-governmental actors, for strategic insights to build upon their activi-ties in this field. This volume is designed to address the questions, debates

and agendas related to this new mode of governance.

The book arose out of an international colloquium and PhD master class

at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam in

June 2006. The colloquium and master class brought together experts and

students in the field of partnerships for sustainable development from many

countries and social science disciplines. The lively, stimulating and inno-

vative debates at these academic events have strongly contributed to the final

shaping of this volume and the individual contributions in it.Both the international colloquium and the master class were made poss-

ible by generous grants from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and

Sciences, the Netherlands Research School for Socio-Economic and

Natural Sciences of the Environment, the Faculty of Geosciences of

Utrecht University, and the Dutch Ministry of the Environment.

The colloquium and master class aimed to connect the theoretical

insights from research with policy needs. Though focused on academic

research, parts of the colloquium were addressed at the discussion of the

connection between the science and practice of partnerships that policy-

makers are confronted with. We would like to thank representatives of

the Dutch Ministry of the Environment, the Dutch Ministry of Foreign

xiii



Aff airs, Rabobank, Unilever and the World Wide Fund for Nature for

sharing their experiences with us.

Besides the authors in this volume we would also like to acknowledge the

intellectual contributions of Jem Bendell, Mirjam Bult-Spiering, JacquelineCramer, Mara Francken, Mariette van Huijstee, Ans Kolk, Jan Kooiman,

William M. Laff erty, Marc Levy, Reinier de Man, Pim Martens, Binayak Rath,

Paul van Seters, Egbert Tellegen, Katrien Termeer and Walter Vermeulen, as

well as the anonymous reviewers of all chapters.

April 2007

The Editors

xiv Preface



1. Setting the scene: the partnershipparadigm in the making

Pieter Glasbergen

One of the central themes in the debate on sustainable development

addresses the question of what institutional arrangements are the mostpromising in order to advance the process of progressive change. Fighting

for prominence are a state-centric approach versus a pluralistic approach.

The state-centric approach generally frames sustainable development as a

project. An ideal form of this approach is the mission to preserve the eco-

logical base of our planet, based on scientifically defined limits. The direc-

tion of the envisioned change is clear: to protect the environment in the

course of economic and societal development. It is assumed that govern-

ments should take a leading role. Business parties are seen as egoistic utility

maximizers, those who do not care about social responsibility, includingthe environment. Civil society is seen as a heterogeneous group of con-

flicting actors also seeking its short-term particular interests. It cannot be

expected that they will come up with solutions.

The pluralistic approach uses a more open-ended concept of sustainable

development. The task at hand, which is worth pursuing, is to refine the

definition of the quality of life, including material welfare and social

equity. Sustainable development is something that has to be defined anew

as times, places and circumstances change. This approach particularly rec-

ognizes the self-governing capacities of businesses and organizations in

civil society. Here the central question is how to motivate these stakehold-

ers in sustainability issues to make reasonable decisions and progressive

changes.

The state-centric approach is generally recognized as the basis for sus-

tainability policy and politics. In its implementation, though, the pluralis-

tic approach is increasingly gaining the upper hand. Instead of a strong

state to induce sustainable progress, the focus is changing to the oppor-

tunities of a strong society, which is at least partly based on private initiatives

from the market and civil society. Governance for sustainable develop-

ment, in other words, has become an eff ort to structure cooperatively the

relationships of stakeholders around a sustainability issue (Laff erty and

1



Meadowcroft, 1996; Meadowcroft, 1998; Glasbergen and Driessen, 2002).

This has been institutionalized in all kinds of collaborative arrangements,

of which partnerships, the topic of this book, are considered among poten-

tially the most powerful. Partnerships are self-organizing and coordinatingalliances, or – in a more strict definition – collaborative arrangements inwhich actors from two or more spheres of society (state, market and civil society) are involved in a non-hierarchical process through which these actorsstrive for a sustainability goal .

Partnerships are set up to solve societal problems. They do so on

the basis of a commitment that is formalized to some extent. And their

problem-solving task is accomplished, either partially or exclusively, by

private parties.

Partnerships are more and more perceived as arrangements that canfurther the drive for sustainable development. In that role, they provide a

managerial response to the general ethical ideal of societal progress.

However, these managerial tools are also contested. They are part of the

political tug-of-war over the degree to which public goods and services can

be privatized. And they are part of the political battle over the implications

of the concept of sustainable development. Discussing partnerships as new

forms of governance thus brings us to the heart of the debate on public

and private responsibilities, their relationships and the possibilities of

combining them into a forceful management strategy within the liberal-democratic order.

The aim of this book is to contribute to our understanding of how, to

which extent, and under what circumstances partnerships can improve

the eff ectiveness and legitimacy of governance for sustainable develop-

ment (see also Glasbergen, 1998). This introductory chapter will first

look at the direction in which partnership practices have grown, and

define what can be called the ‘partnership paradigm’. Subsequently, this

partnership paradigm will be discussed from three perspectives. The con-

secutive order of these perspectives shows a gradual shift away from apurely voluntaristic and intentional analysis toward a more institutional

analysis couched in governance terms. From the first angle, partnerships

are studied as single collaborative arrangements. Attention is focused on

how they are created, how they operate and what determines this. From

the second angle, attention is turned to the external eff ects of partner-

ships. Partnership arrangements are seen as tools for deliberate societal

change. The third angle takes a broader perspective on the governance

system. Attention is focused on the changes that partnerships make

in the configuration of political decision-making structures. Particular

attention is drawn to the consequences for the way a liberal democracy

functions.

2 Partnerships, governance and sustainable development



1.1 THE PARTNERSHIP PARADIGM

The shift towards the pluralistic approach of governance for sustainable

development was already obvious at the UN Conference on Environmentand Development (UNCED) in Rio in 1992. Empowerment of people

(and not only governments) to deal in a responsible manner with their

own future was – and still is – one of the cornerstones of the Rio Agenda

21. The main message was that building up deliberative capabilities of

societies forms an indisputable part of their sustainable development

(Burger, 2006). One of the main discussion points concerned the responsi-

bility of private parties, particularly corporations. They would have to

live up to their social responsibilities and not just serve their share-

holders’ direct interests. They would also be expected to apply theirproblem-solving capacity to public issues. Thus, thinking in terms of

giving private parties a wider responsibility would place public and

private interests on a continuum. In fact, one could even speak of a shared

interest in public aff airs. This perspective opened up the opportunity for

public administrations, businesses and NGOs to undertake joint activities

in the public interest.

The UNCED laid the foundation for a conceptual shift. In time, the

reflection on public and private responsibilities did lead to new governance

practices. Eff orts were made to restructure the relationships among stake-holders in a sustainability issue along cooperative lines. Various forms of

new institutional arrangements were formed:

● Government policy turned away from strict regulation toward more

flexible incentive-based and market-oriented policy systems.

● Public administrations tried to strengthen their policy through co-

operation with private parties from both the market and civil society.

● In some economic sectors, the business community developed its own

proactive rule-systems in new social arrangements promoting sus-tainable business models.

● NGOs that had previously tried to achieve sustainable markets exclus-

ively by putting pressure on public administrations to adapt their

policy – the indirect route – now also formed alliances with busi-

nesses to intervene directly in markets and to guide them towards

sustainability.

Some of the new institutional arrangements only serve the interests of

their participants. Others have a wider public dimension, pursuing a

sustainability agenda that goes beyond the limits of private interests and

sovereign territories. They provide morally inspired voluntary management

Setting the scene 3



standards, codes of conduct and/or certified product and process labels.

The World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg in

2002, confirmed this trend. Partnerships were promoted as the preferred

vehicles of sustainable change. There was talk of a new era of governance,characterized by consultation, collaboration, mutual accommodation,

shared decision-making and an orientation toward the market among all of

the stakeholders – both public and private – in sustainability issues. The

primary orientation toward the regulatory capacities of public adminis-

trations was replaced by a primary – or at least supplementary – orientation

toward the roles of private parties and toward building new relations

between public and private actors for solving public problems.

The normative foundation for partnerships lies in a broader conceptual

change in the way sustainable development should be managed. However,this normative turn is not only the result of idealistic change. It can also be

explained in terms of structural transformation. Partnerships fit into a

context in which they are incontrovertible. This context emerges when

public administrations have lost their credibility and with it their capacity

to govern autonomously. It emerges when multinational corporations have

expanded to become powerful political players. And it emerges when social

movements have professionalized and built up so much social and eco-

nomic capital that they have become indispensable to any definition of

public problems and their solutions. From this perspective, partnershipsand other forms of ‘co-’and ‘self-’governance reflect deeper socioeconomic

changes in the last part of the twentieth century.

The new philosophy of governance postulates the need for changes in the

institutional order of liberal democracies. In those societies, public (in the

sense of defining and implementing a conception of the general interest)

and private responsibilities were traditionally clearly separated from each

other. Partnership practices may be seen as both idealistic and structural

specifications of that philosophy in a more operational governance para-

digm. We can summarize the main premises underpinning this partnershipparadigm as follows:

● Parties from the public sector, from the market and from civil society

have an interest in sustainable development.

● A constructive dialogue among these interests can be convened in a

setting that excludes hierarchy and authority.

● Dialogue can produce a shared normative belief that provides a

value-based rationale for collaborative action.

● Collaborative action based on voluntarism, joint resource commit-

ment and shared responsibility of all actors for the whole project can

serve public interests as well as private interests.




● Collective action can be commercial in nature; the market mech-

anism can promote more sustainable practices through the leverage

and spin-off of private-sector investments.

Meanwhile, a pluriform partnership practice has taken root in these

paradigmatic premises. Partnerships come in three modalities. The first

modality concerns partnerships that are initiated by government. They can

generally be considered an extension of government policy. Public admin-

istrations try to reinforce their powers by forming alliances with businesses

and/or civil society. These partnerships lean heavily on the authority and

sanctions of government. The second modality concerns arrangements

made by private parties in which public administrations participate as one

of many partners. Here, there is more balance between the public and theprivate character of the arrangement. The partnership derives some of its

legitimacy from the authority of the administrations, though their formal

sanctions have little if any eff ect. The third modality concerns the cooper-

ation between businesses and non-governmental organizations. These col-

laborative arrangements also relate to society’s problem-solving capacity.

They are initiated as a supplement or alternative to government policy. The

basic assumption is that public aff airs can be dealt with more efficiently and

eff ectively by the private sector. In this modality, there is no role for the

authority and sanctions of the government.These forms coalesce around area-specific sustainability issues, within

international product chains, in the service of specific natural resources,

and through environmental reporting and other such functions that

support sustainable development. Some partnerships are local or national

in scope. Others are international or global arrangements connecting the

developed and the developing world. They vary considerably in size (that

is, in the number of partners) and in geographic scope. But they also diff er

in terms of their time frame, functions and access to funding.

In the rest of this chapter, I will discuss the three angles mentioned above:the collaborative angle, the focus on partnerships as steering mechanisms

and partnerships and their impact on political decision-making structures.

1.2 PARTNERSHIPS AS COLLABORATIVEARRANGEMENTS

The partnership paradigm raises several fundamental questions. First of

all, what are the options for establishing collaborative alliances for public

issues? From this angle, partnerships are questioned as arrangements in

their own right.

Setting the scene 5



Partnerships are specific configurations of parties from diff erent sectors

of society. Each partner represents a particular interest, embodies a diff erent

segment of the world outside, comes with specific hopes, expectations and

claims, and has its own strong and weak points too. The literature on part-nerships presents precisely these characteristics as their strengths. With

respect to tri-sector partnerships, the literature emphasizes the advantages

of combining the moral authority of NGOs, the market principles of busi-

nesses and the public authority of the state (i.e., Waddell, 2005). Yet these

strengths could also be seen as a fundamental disadvantage. NGOs are

bound by their identification with and loyalty to civic values. The market

mechanism forces businesses to act in their own direct economic interest. In

principle, governments cannot share the political mandate that the public

has vested in them. Indeed, the fact that partnerships still arise aroundpublic issues is more of a miracle than something we can take for granted.

In a sense, partnerships are a governance anomaly. They do not have any

formal political power. And they are hard to interpret in a legal framework.

Actually, it is hard to reconcile partnerships with the separation of powers –

a fundamental principle of the democratic state – or with the juridical foun-

dation of the tasks and responsibilities of government.

Taking this argument a step further and looking at partnerships from the

perspective of the constituent parties, partnerships may be seen as green

political market places. Each partner stands for its own rationality. Theparty with access to most resources will probably acquire the most power.

Each of the participants can be expected to act strategically, in the sense of

striving to maximize their individual profit. Taking a rather cynical view,

one might assume that businesses always try to protect their own market,

NGOs are constantly scouting for funding, and governments – if they have

joined partnerships – see their participation as an opportunity to shift some

of their responsibilities onto other shoulders.

Yet this is definitely not the angle taken in the partnership literature. The

diff

erent rationalities of the partners are amply recognized, though not asobstacles. In fact, they are seen as opportunities. By far, most authors direct

their attention to what goes on within the partnerships. They study the cre-

ation and development of new practices as if these were merely a problem

of process design. The solution would thus lie in sensible relation manage-

ment. This actor perspective does not question the partnership phenome-

non as such. Nor does it look at it as a possible solution for governance

problems. Typically, a study from this perspective will display the following

characteristics:

● Partnerships are seen as instruments for the advancement of actor-

specific goals inrelationtothe goals of the other actorsina partnership.




Studies describe and analyze how partners cope with the partnership

such that it helps all of the actors achieve their goals.

● The partnering process is assessed on the basis of criteria that can

make the process more eff ective. Eff ectiveness is translated in termsof the feasibility of intersectoral collaboration. This entails partner

satisfaction, improved partner relationships and the development of

shared objectives.

● The aim is to provide practical recommendations for either one or all

partners, advising on when, how and with whom to partner and how

to arrange the process. The recommendations are focused on outputs

rather than outcomes. That is, researchers hardly study how products

contribute to sustainable development.

The favorite methodology is the single case study. The core questions are

pragmatic and managerial in nature. Many case studies have an anecdotal

character. The objective is to discover how stakeholders in a multi-actor

game reframe their own interests. How do they establish a common lan-

guage and a shared discourse? How do they develop a common definition

of the problem? And how do they connect their problem-solving capacities

in a common policy practice? Much of this research is based on obser-

vations gained by consultants who play an active role in the development

of partnerships.This kind of research has generated many decision tools and checklists.

It has identified countless pitfalls and success factors in the design and

implementation of partnership processes (see Long and Arnold, 1995;

Hartman and Staff ord, 1997; Murphy and Bendell, 1997; Austin, 2000;

Heap, 2000; Rondinelli and London, 2003; Tennyson, 2004; Waddell, 2005).

The resulting classifications are quite diff erent, though. The factors of

success and failure are related to – among other things – the type of actor,

the relations between actors, the working relations within a partnership, the

phases in the partnering process, the way the partnership is structured, aswell as the environment in which it operates.

The Relevance of Collaborative Advantage and Trust

Research from an actor perspective is closely related to collaboration

studies in interorganizational relationships. One core concept, though

often left implicit, is collaborative advantage. This notion encapsulates the

synergy argument: to gain real advantage from collaboration, something

has to be achieved that could not have been achieved by any one of the part-

ners acting alone. Collaborative advantage refers to the purpose of collab-

oration (Huxham and Vangen, 2004). Trust is often identified as the pivotal

Setting the scene 7



mechanism for gaining this advantage. Trust encapsulates the emotional

argument: the reduction of feelings of risk and vulnerability in the part-

nering process.

The notion of collaborative advantage postulates the possibility thateach of the parties can connect its own interest with the common (i.e.,

public) objective of the partnership. It is assumed that collaborative ad-

vantages can be generated through discursive consensus formation

(Meadowcroft, 1998). This is a process by which stakeholders can attune

their expectations, aspirations and assumptions. In other words, they must

be motivated to create overlapping agendas. They will only do so if they are

convinced they stand to gain from the partnership.

Consider the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), for instance (Pattberg,

2005). The parties who launched it were absolutely certain that this was theright way to go. As for the overlapping agendas, the companies wanted to

continue selling tropical wood, while the NGOs realized that their boycott

of tropical wood was unrealistic. Both sides wanted to work out an alter-

native resource in order to spare (tropical) forests that were not sustainably

managed. Moreover, the companies that had set up the FSC felt it was their

responsibility to help find a solution.

Thus, without overlapping agendas and motivation, there can be no suc-

cessful partnership. Yet there is another necessary precondition for success.

Even before those agendas can be set, the parties must develop a sense of mutual trust. Trust is fundamental to any process aimed at creating suc-

cessful collaborative advantages. The concept refers to a psychological

state, characterized by reliable expectations about how the partners will

behave. It connotes a positive evaluation of this behavior where it impinges

upon one’s own interests as well as upon the interests of the partnership as

a whole. In this sense, there is always an element of reciprocity in trust. To

some extent, the reciprocal relations have to be predictable. The parties will

not enter into a dialogue if they do not have some positive preconceived

ideas about overlap in agendas and the potentially valuable input of eachof the other partners. Mostly, this initial trust will be based on reputations,

past behavior or pre-existing informal relations between the parties.

Partnerships generally build upon positive experience in the past.

Building trust is a continuous activity. In the context of a partnership, this

process takes on some specific characteristics. Naturally, these will change

during the partnering process. First, partnerships are voluntary alliances;

the partners do not need to work together. To reach an agreement, the

parties will have to validate their initial trust, giving it depth in the course

of their interactions. They will have to find a balance between opportuni-

ties and risks. Second, partners are representatives of various societal

sectors. Thus, the right balance might be diff erent for each partner. The




balance will also have to be convincing to the constituencies of the part-

ners. And it will have to fit in with the relationships in the broader networks

they participate in. Third, building trust, specifically in the early phases of

partnering, is a delicate and controversial process. To establish trust suc-cessfully, bureaucratic mechanisms have to be in place. These can provide a

basis for the allocation of responsibility. They can set the rules of the game.

These rules are necessary to minimize existing power diff erentials and

articulate mutual respect. And they can provide facilities to make commit-

ments operational. Fourth and finally, partnering processes need to result

in more or less formalized agreements. The contractual nature of this re-

lation changes the trust-building process fundamentally. Voluntarism is

replaced by dedicated commitment. The contractual relationship, and the

degree to which the parties live up to the contract, then defines for a largepart the continuity of trust. Provisions in the contract take over some of

the trust-building activities. The stability can be turned into dynamism

again, for instance when new partners join up.

In light of the characteristics of partnerships, concepts such as collabor-

ative advantage and trust could obviously provide grounds for fruitful

analysis. Indeed, analysis based on these concepts has already yielded many

practical tools for the development of partnerships. This actor approach

has several consequences for research, however. For one thing, it leaves rela-

tively little room for the broader structures in which the partners areembedded. It often ignores the constraints that these structures place on the

behavior of the partners (see also Chapter 7 by Visseren-Hamakers, Arts

and Glasbergen in this volume). For another, the approach is rather volun-

taristic. It gives little attention to the question of which kind of problems

do or do not lend themselves to a partnering initiative. As yet, the actor per-

spective has not been used to assess the outcomes of partnerships in terms

of the public interests they serve. Though there is a large body of literature

devoted to the added value of partnerships, the concept is mostly defined

in a narrow sense. Added value is usually determined by comparison withother private and public forms of governance. It is not defined in terms of

their actual contribution to formal sustainable development policies and

the outcomes of these policies (Brinkerhoff , 2002; Nelson and Zadek, 2000;

Mitchell, Shankleman and Warner, 2004).

1.3 PARTNERSHIPS AS GOVERNANCEMECHANISMS

The mutual trust that results in an agreement should not be a goal in itself.

My second question concerns the presumed potential of partnerships to

Setting the scene 9



serve as steering mechanisms. The question is, whether a reform agenda can

be the logical result of increased collaboration between the state and private

actors of the market and the civil society, as well as the result of private in-

itiatives themselves. Thus, I shall now look at partnerships as strategic toolsin a process of change towards sustainability.

Steering mechanisms perform cognitive, regulatory and normative func-

tions. They collate knowledge, point out directions for change and put both

the information and the observations into a moral perspective. All part-

nerships perform these functions, though diff erent types of partnership

emphasize diff erent aspects. Some of the most common types are:

● Partnerships that mainly serve to raise awareness. These are plat-

forms that encourage debate, sharing of experiences, and develop-ment of new ideas. Multi-stakeholder policy dialogue and panel

sessions fall into this category. But it also includes partnerships such

as those pursuing joint learning and research on sustainable food

production, sustainable energy and the sustainable development of

financial markets.

● Partnerships that concentrate on the dissemination and accreditation

of information on sustainable development. Often, this takes the form

of guidelines for reporting on the performance of a sector of the

market. The Global Reporting Initiative is a well-known example.There are many more with roughly the same objective – namely, to

promote access to information, participation, and justice in environ-

mental decision-making.

● Partnerships that provide technology assistance in management

processes. They tend to focus on a specific sustainability issue or pro-

gram in a given problem area. For instance, there are partnerships

that provide support for investing in or constructing (water) infra-

structure, or partnerships to support forest resource management.

●

Partnerships that develop a new, more sustainable product. The aimis to get products that comply with a specific definition of sustain-

ability onto the market. This type of partnership is the one most

directly involved in establishing an alternative market structure. Two

of the most well known are the Forest and the Marine Stewardship

Councils. But there are multiple partnerships in play promoting these

and many other products, including services such as tourism.

In addition, there are partnerships that have become institutional struc-

tures in their own right. One is the Global Environment Facility; another

is the United Nations Fund for International Partnerships. These two are

already counted among the established political regimes (Nelson, 2002).




They, and other partnerships, such as the Johannesburg partnerships, are

vehicles for distributing development and/or environmental funding. Some

partnerships combine several of the functions mentioned above, while

others evolve along certain lines. For instance, dialogues between corpor-ations and NGOs can lead to institutionalized forms of cooperation geared

to an activity they undertake together. The development and promotion of

a sustainable product is just one example (Glasbergen and Groenenberg,

2001). Because any given partnership serves various functions, it may be

placed in multiple categories. Accordingly, there is wide variation among

partnerships with respect to the type of steering and governance power.

Even so, they all follow a general pattern: all of the alliances have a volun-

taristic character. To the extent that partnerships seek to promote sus-

tainable practices, they are essentially indicative or exemplary in nature.They demonstrate a socially responsible alternative. In that vein, two very

common operational instruments are certification and labeling. Assessing

the external operation of these partnerships brings two other criteria to the

fore: scaling-up and legitimacy. The performance on these criteria depends

on how external audiences react to the partnership initiatives.

The Relevance of Scaling-up and Legitimacy

Scaling-up denotes the purpose of collaboration, but not in the same wayas collaborative advantage. The diff erence is that scaling-up is mainly about

the image projected to outsiders. We speak of scaling-up when the part-

nerships seek to expand the scope of their initiatives. The objective is to

broaden their first initiative to encompass a new sustainable standard in an

issue area. In that event, the central mechanism is legitimacy. Legitimacy

refers to the process whereby partnerships gain recognition and become

accepted as a relevant alternative – or supplement – to government policy

on a particular public issue. There are various ways to initiate scaling-up

processes:

● The first is by replication. This occurs when a particular partnership

model is repeated at other places. A good example is the ubiqui-

tous kind of partnership – consisting of financial institutions and

local NGOs – that is set up to arrange micro-financing in developing

countries.

● The second is through coverage enlargement. This occurs when

more and more parties join the partnership. The Global Reporting

Initiative is a good example.

● The third is by increasing the scope of the partnership. In this case,

the partnerships draw more and more aspects of a problem complex

Setting the scene 11



into their governance. We see this pattern in both of the Stewardship

Councils. For example, the Marine Stewardship Council was pres-

sured to take a wider view in its procedures for certifying sustainable

fisheries. It was expected to devote attention to social criteria, includ-ing the livelihood interests of the fishing communities. (Constance

and Bonanno, 2000)

Related to scaling-up processes is the process of transferring the initiative

into the regular administrative practices of government. In that case the new

practices that the partnership introduced are translated in formal govern-

ment policy. Interestingly, there is hardly any systematic information avail-

able on this phase change (see also Chapter 8 by Pattberg in this volume).

Legitimacy refers to the mechanism through which partnerships gainrecognition and become accepted as a relevant alternative – or supplement –

to government policy. Eff ective partnerships manage their legitimacy. With

respect to sustainable development, perhaps the most meaningful partner-

ships are those that seek to influence directly the economy of a particular

sector or commodity chain. One way to do so is by establishing new stand-

ards for sustainable products. In their quest for legitimacy, these partnerships

appeal to economic interests as well as to the public values attached to those

interests. Besides calling for recognition on utilitarian grounds, they also

emphasize a specific morality. The extent of their success depends, amongothers, on the characteristics of the partners, particularly their status and

level of professional expertise. It also depends on how the partnership oper-

ates. One way to promote legitimacy is by applying the principles of good

governance (see Chapters 4 and 5 by J. and D. Brinkerhoff in this book).

However, no single partnership will be able to set new standards exclusively

on the basis of their own characteristics.

Gaining legitimacy also depends on the interactive structures and

processes in which partnerships operate. One striking feature of these inter-

active structures is that partnerships are also competing with each other forlegitimacy.

Take the agro-food sector, where for many products, multiple partner-

ships exist. The coff ee market is a prime example. Sustainably produced

coff ee falls into several categories: organic, shade-grown, Fair Trade and

coff ee certified by the Utz Kapeh Foundation or the Forest Alliance. In

addition, large commercial roasters and international traders with sustain-

ability aspirations set private standards (Ponte, 2004). With respect to

biodiversity conservation, each sub-field displays the same pattern. On the

issue of forest biodiversity, some partnerships have set standards for

sustainable industrial logging. Others have set standards to control the

conversion of forests or illegal logging. Yet other partnerships take an




integrated approach to the protection of specific regions (Visseren-

Hamakers and Glasbergen, 2007). All of these partnerships exhibit a wide

diversity of sustainability ambitions. While some focus on the characteris-

tics of the product itself, others are concerned with production and processqualifications. Some operate nationwide, while others span a continent. In

all of these partnerships, governments, NGOs or businesses are represented

in diff erent combinations.

Another striking feature of the interactive structures is the dependence of

partnerships on economic power. The degree of influence in a commodity

chain depends largely on the position of the commercial partner. That

partner derives its power from the added value in the chain and whether it

is maintained or expanded. In that sense, partnerships are grounded in the

logic of market principles.Let us take agro-food partnerships again. Most of them are Western in-

itiatives inspired by the presumed preferences of Western consumers or the

wish to create a stronger green consumer demand. Although the primary

producers in developing countries usually receive technical and adminis-

trative support, sustainability certification is a costly and lengthy process

for them. They are also not always sure that they will be paid a premium

for a more sustainable product. As a result the most important incentive to

participate tends to shift away from the intrinsic value of a sustainable

product toward the assurance of market access. Conversely, this createsnew entry barriers, which mainly benefit a select group of powerful actors

on the market (see also Van der Grijp, Marsden and Cavalcanti, 2005).

Some partnerships are little more than a purely economic reaction to pre-

viously established partnerships that are pursuing more ambitious goals for

sustainable change. Regarding the protection of forest biodiversity, these

are mainly partnerships between governments and businesses. On the coff ee

market, it is mainly private parties such as retailers who bring their own

watered-down sustainability standards into the market.

It is obvious that partnerships are embroiled in the struggle for steeringpower on economic and political markets. The standards they set are cer-

tainly not neutral tools to improve sustainability. They should be consid-

ered political spheres of action because they shut out some sustainability

aspects and interests while serving others (Ponte, 2004). In essence, compe-

tition almost always leads to an economic struggle for market power. It

should be kept in mind, however, that partnerships are often formed in

reaction to the failure of government policy. In many issue areas, new and

challenging standards for sustainability have been introduced by partner-

ships that include the larger NGOs. In reaction, other market players have

presented less ambitious standards through their own initiatives. That leads

us to conclude that markets are in fact being shaken up.




The implications for the reform agenda of sustainable development are

still unclear. We increasingly see paired labels on a single product. This sug-

gests opportunities for convergence. However, other evaluative positions

could be taken. From an economic perspective, the competition betweenpartnerships and their standards might be seen as a positive development.

Competitive relations are expected to ensure that the most viable alterna-

tive will prevail. But things could turn out diff erently. The mainstream

markets could force the sustainable niches out of the market or replace

these niches with their own ‘light’ versions. From a sustainability perspec-

tive, most attention is devoted to the possibilities for mainstreaming the

most ambitious standards. Most striking from that perspective is the

power of the strongest economic actors in a chain. This would support a

preference for making the most ambitious standards binding for an entireeconomic sector. For instance, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil

(RSPO) is on that track.

Legitimacy is crucial to partnerships with an ambition to take part in

governance. In their quest for legitimacy, they appeal to economic interests

as well as to the public values attached to those interests. Besides calling for

recognition on utilitarian grounds, they also emphasize their moral right to

exist. Of course, they want to off er an alternative that is economically viable,

but they also want to enhance quality. Altogether, they want to show that a

public good, namely sustainable development, would be well served by thepartnership. Their competitive approach promotes their economic legit-

imacy, while the concern with quality promotes their political legitimacy.

For the time being, the present situation – with many ad hoc initiatives –

seems to be a transitional period. Partnerships are still mainly engaged in

limited issue management. The partnership paradigm is a fragmented way

of achieving sustainable development. To some degree, mainstreaming is

dependent on the partnership itself. In the processes of scaling-up and legit-

imating themselves, they will lose two of the most important paradigmatic

features: one is the voluntaristic character of participation; the other is themarket mechanism. If private regulation is to be eff ective, there must be

commitment and oversight.

Partnerships that establish new standards will take on more of a trad-

itional regime character. In other words, they will resemble government

regulation. In that light, they will come to be judged in the same manner as

government policy. Thus, partnerships will gradually disband in the course

of the legitimating process they are so avidly pursuing. Though this is

inevitable, it may not be what they want. The truth is that dissolution means

they will lose their exclusive competitive advantage. Nor is it at all certain

that they are capable of disbanding, as they are engaged in economic com-

petition. The question is even broader, though. It remains to be seen if even




without a stronger generic government policy these ambitious partnerships

could actually create many opportunities for more sustainable develop-

ment. This question arises in light of the market forces in which the major

players are powerful economic parties.

1.4 PARTNERSHIPS AND THE LIBERAL-DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE STRUCTURE

Any single partnership should be evaluated on its own merits. In so doing, it

could open itself to criticism – or appreciation – and would diff erentiate itself

from other partnerships. The extent to which the partnership paradigm has

been institutionalized tells a diff erent story though. It suggests a more fun-damental shift in the pattern of governance in liberal-democratic societies.

The third perspective is an inquiry into the consequences of partnership

paradigm dissemination. Specifically, I shall consider how this aff ects the

responsibilities of governance within the liberal-democratic order.

The reform agenda for sustainable development – from the very incep-

tion of the concept – has been associated with the functioning of liberal-

democratic structures with regard to decision-making on social issues.

Many have called for a convergent evolution of environmental ethics and

the political structures of decision-making (Doherty and de Geus, 1996;Laff erty and Meadowcroft, 1996; Barry and Wissenburg, 2001; Eckersley,

2004). By providing an alternative model of governance, the partnership

paradigm contributes to this discussion.

Earlier in this chapter, I distinguished between governance for sustain-

able development as a project and as a process. This distinction is based on

two images of the manageable society. Each represents a particular attitude

toward the relation between public and private responsibility.

As a project, governance for sustainable development is steeped in the

classic attitude. A characteristic feature is the strict separation of publicand private responsibilities. Full responsibility for public issues is relegated

to the public domain of the state. That is, the state is in charge of issues

that are relevant to society at large and are in the public interest. Private

parties are only held responsible for public issues if the rules imposed by

governments explicitly demand accountability from them and place the

responsibility on them. Actors in business and civil society are thus seen

as target groups in need of correction by a strong and autonomous state.

This image traditionally forms the core of liberal-democratic ideology.

At both the national and international scale, it has engendered a sustain-

ability policy that is largely government-initiated, rule-oriented, legalistic

and rather formal.






● Conversely, it has been argued that both private and public–private

governance will erode the public authority and responsibility of

governments, resulting in private capture of what should be a public

aff air (Cutler, Haufler and Porter, 1999; Saurin, 2001; Richter, 2003).● Taking a position between these two standpoints, some have also

weighed in with a utilitarian view. They assume there is a large but still

unexplored potential for governance. Thus, private and public–private

arrangements could in principle create supplements or meaningful

alternatives to government policies, with greater legitimacy, and con-

tribute to an improved functioning of the public sector (Murphy and

Bendell, 1997; Ronit and Schneider, 1999).

These contradictory views reflect the prevailing uncertainty about theprocess of change that liberal-democratic societies are going through. The

outcomes are still uncertain with respect to a new ordering of governance.

Will there be a new kind of hierarchy? Will the parties be complementary to

or superimposed on each other? Or will they replace one another? As a con-

sequence of the uncertainty, each of the evaluations will highlight only one

aspect of the situation. There are valid arguments in favor of each of these

standpoints. However, what they do not yet grasp is the question of the insti-

tutional relationship between public and private responsibilities in the

liberal-democratic order. This is a fundamental issue as the creed of sharedresponsibility might also be understood as a discourse that serves specific

interests. It may mask that the various partners have diff erent responsibili-

ties and distract attention from structural inequalities in society.

To address the issue of responsibility, we need to take some distance from

the approaches commonly taken by political scientists and policy scientists

in their studies of international relations. Many of these studies focus on

the influence of multinational corporations and non-governmental organ-

izations on formal regimes from the perspective of their contribution to the

improvement of the public tasks that need to be performed by govern-ments. Therefore, to assess the new division of responsibilities with the

introduction of the partnership paradigm we must take a whole issue area

into account and we should consider this area holistically as a public policy

network (Arts, 2000). Such an approach highlights the configuration of

public, public–private and fully private regulatory initiatives. Partnerships

must be seen as actors in such a configuration.

Some partnerships have taken initiatives that also have a classic regime

character in the sense that their rules and standards are similar to those

provided by governments in the past. In itself, this does not threaten

the democratic functioning of the rule of law – certainly not when govern-

ment responsibilities are delegated to implementing and executing parties.




Democratic principles are only jeopardized when partnership initiatives

arise from a powerless government. And public administrations lose their

power when they do not clearly identify their own role and remit. At the

current stage in the evolution of the partnership paradigm, both of theseconditions seem to be present. The prominent partnerships that derive part

of their legitimacy from the United Nations (WSSD partnerships) can

serve as models worth emulating. Although the accreditation rules are

quite general, they are exemplary for several reasons.

First, it was only in the context of the Johannesburg World Summit that

the UN articulated the idea of partnerships as arrangements for sustain-

able development. This could only happen once it was clear that no formal

agreements could be reached on many sustainable development issues.

Although partnerships had probably been given due attention – indeed,many collaborative practices had become entrenched – there is an under-

tone in the official recognition of a welcome fallback position (Norris,

2005, p. 229). Thus, these partnerships derive partly from the powerless

position of governments.

Second, the various roles of governments have been blurred by the pro-

motion of partnerships. The role of governments in the hierarchy of the

United Nations has been merged with their role as occasional partners in

the horizontal partnership arrangement. Public administrations cannot

always – or do not always want to – perform their primary and authenticrole. But through this back door, they seem get their act together after all.

The question then arises, what precisely are the interests of governments

when they adopt a dual responsibility (see also Chapter 10 by Mol in this

volume)?

Third, this relationship becomes even more ambiguous because of the

absence of a cohesive framework. What is lacking is a form of meta-

governance. This missing framework would have endorsed the co-

ordination and resource synergy that form the cornerstones of successful

governance. It is true that the UN has placed partnerships in the context of wider government commitments such as Agenda 21. But these objectives

only provide abstract objectives for sustainable development. As a conse-

quence, the UN has relegated itself to the position of endorsing any part-

nerships that pertain to sustainable development – or that could even be

construed as contributing to it in any way whatsoever. The result is pre-

dictable: countless duplication of eff ort, disjointed actions and a patch-

work quilt of partnership programs. Whether this will provide a grounding

for creative competition remains to be seen.

Although governments recognize that the partnership paradigm is an

institutional issue, they take a pragmatic approach to it. As a result, respon-

sibilities are spread diff usely over public and private parties. So far there are




not enough indications that partnerships fundamentally change the world

of politics. The WSSD partnerships are largely supply-driven (by what

powerful actors have to off er) rather than demand-driven (by what is

needed to bring a more sustainable development forward). They reflectongoing implementation eff orts more than new ideas for bridging core

implementation gaps. Furthermore, most initiatives are Northern-based,

funded by governments, and the private sector hardly ever takes the lead.

Only a small portion of the partnerships involves all significant stakehold-

ers (Andonova and Levy, 2003/2004; Hale and Mauzerall, 2004).

Recognizing this lack of transparency does not detract from the inci-

dental problem-solving capacity of partnerships. They can develop further

as sources of information and knowledge but also as alternatives to the

classic sustainability regimes. Moreover, taking the partnership paradigmas a model enhances the deliberative capabilities of societies. It promotes a

sense of collective responsibility for sustainable development. That in itself

is a valuable outcome, regardless of the ultimate results of partnership in-

itiatives (Norris, 2005, p. 229). Thus, the problem with the relation between

public and private responsibilities does not lie with partnerships; the

problem also lies with governments.

The tension between governance for sustainable development as a

project and as a process – which I noted earlier – is still unresolved. Steering

on the basis of the partnership paradigm also has its limitations. Confusionmay arise about public and private responsibilities when the governments

and partnerships get too cozy and do not clearly define their institutional

responsibilities. Partnerships derive partly from the powerless role of

governments. However, their success is also largely dependent on them. The

success of many partnerships depends on specific government policies. For

example, overcapacity in fishery and illegal fishery can hardly be dealt with

by private initiatives on their own and need the back up of government

regimes restricting access to fish stocks. The same holds for sustainable

forestry, which is dependent on a strict land use planning and a formalpolicy against illegal logging. Partnerships cannot solve the poverty and

energy problems on their own, but only add to their solving. The redistri-

bution issues that are inherent in sustainability issues lie largely out of their

reach, since partnerships do not have a logical place in government policy.

The situation is essentially the same for either fully private partnerships (or

any form of private regulation) and partnerships involving the government.

The former have been trumpeted as ‘governance without government’

(Rosenau and Czempiel, 1992; Cashore, 2002; Ensui, 2002). But that slogan

does not do justice to reality yet. The reality is that even these arrangements

are virtually never completely autonomous with respect to public author-

ity (Haufler, 2000, p. 126). In public–private partnerships, that autonomy




is in theory even harder to maintain. The problem is that government

involvement by definition links the partnerships to larger public policies in

one way or another. Up to now, governments fail to develop these necess-

ary back-up policies. They are part of the problems that partnershipsaddress.

1.5 FOCUS OF THE BOOK

Policy analysts for a long time accepted the classical image of the man-

ageable society, which they took as inspiration for their research. As Leroy

and Nelissen showed, it led them for the most part into the ex post study

of the practice of policy implementation and enforcement, into the actualeff ects and eff ectiveness, and also into the ex ante question of the design

of policy instruments that might improve the regulatorycapacities of govern-

ments (Leroy and Nelissen, 1999, pp. 233–6). Policy analysts framed

conflicting particular interests as undesirable. Rational policy analysis

should help to define and implement the general interest to which group

interests should give in, and governments should take a central position to

defend the public interest. One can state that policy analysts were critical

within the context of the main assumptions of the dominant image of the

manageable society and made a substantial contribution towards sup-porting it. This choice is quite understandable. A new policy sector for

sustainable development had to be developed, with its principles, norms,

instrumentation, legal underpinnings, implementation structures and

monitoring schemes.

The new conceptualization of the manageable society also changes the

roles of policy analysts: from a focus on the design of policy instruments

that might improve the regulatory capacities of governments to a focus on

new institutional arrangements involving representatives of the state, the

market and the civil society. First, they now need to be able to understandand facilitate collaborative interactions as the core of policy-making pro-

cesses. An intrinsic part of this role is to constitute conditions for a process

of self-reflection by the actors involved in an issue. Second, policy analysts

are assumed to produce knowledge on the design and development of new

institutional arrangements for cooperative action; their architectures and

the conditions that determine their functioning. This kind of knowledge is

based on comparative research of the factors that improve the eff ectiveness,

efficiency and legitimacy of collaborative arrangements. Part of their tasks

is also the critical evaluation of the contribution collaborative arrange-

ments make to bring the process of sustainable development forward. This

includes the reflection on the questions of what drives the search for new




governance mechanisms and what inhibits them; what the opportunities

are to solve public problems in the newly created political spaces; and what

the consequences are for problem-solving on the basis of classical political

power (Glasbergen, 2007).This book is inspired by a perceived need to understand and define the

partnership paradigm and to sustain the new role of policy analysts (in this

context see also Selsky and Parker, 2005). To that end, we must analyze the

roles and functions of various types of partnerships. We have to examine

the conditions that determine their performance. And we should sketch out

the implications of the paradigm for governance in the context of sustain-

able development. This motivation was the basis for the central research

question introduced at the beginning of this chapter. Although my reflec-

tions have a positive undertone, they also take a critical look at partnershipsfrom each of these perspectives. The partnership paradigm still poses some

challenging questions, which call for both empirical research and theoreti-

cal interpretation. The structure of the book follows the lines of the three

perspectives, addressing the questions:

● What are the strengths and weaknesses, and the costs and benefits, of

various types of partnerships? Which design criteria could improve

their internal performance?

● In what way and with what degree of success do partnershipscontribute to the eff ectiveness and legitimacy of problem-solving

capacities?

● How is their contribution related to the capacities of established

policy-making procedures and policy implementation?

● What might be some useful roles of governments with regard to the

various types of partnerships? How could they connect partnership

approaches in a strategic way to their sustainability policies?

Part 1 deals with the ‘actor perspective’ from diff

erent analyticalapproaches. Based on a phase model, Barbara Gray enumerates the critical

issues that need to be addressed in collaborative agreements. With the help

of two other conceptual frameworks, James Austin continues with a specific

focus on business–NGO partnerships. The last contribution to this part, by

Jennifer Brinkerhoff , further develops her earlier framework for the evalu-

ation of partnership’s contribution to governance. Each of the authors uses

selected examples to illustrate the analytical approaches.

Part 2 addresses ‘partnerships as governance mechanisms’ in three soci-

etal contexts. Derick Brinkerhoff employs concepts of good governance to

analyze the role of the state as an enabler of eff ective partnerships for

resources management. He takes Madagascar’s forest sector as an example.




Neil Gunningham examines agricultural environmental partnerships in

Australia. Based on a variety of cases he discusses some design factors

that may help to bridge the gap between aspiration and achievement.

Visseren-Hamakers, Arts and Glasbergen develop a transactional model toimprove our understanding of North–South partnerships on sustainable

development. They study two partnerships for marine biodiversity, high-

lighting the specific challenges of partnerships in development cooperation.

Part 3 examines ‘partnerships and the liberal-democratic governance

structure’. Philipp Pattberg analyzes private rule-making partnerships as a

specific type of transnational regime. He aims to understand the emergence

of these partnerships and the causal pathways through which these regimes

gain influence in world politics, and illustrates his arguments with various

case studies. James Meadowcroft examines the democratic credentials of strategic partnerships. His concern is with cross-sectoral partnerships that

take up the collective management of sustainability problems. Arthur Mol

explores the shifting analysis and understanding of environmental govern-

ance, questioning the role of the state.

Part 4 continues the analysis of Part 3 but with a stronger focus on the

future of global partnerships. Biermann, Chan, Pattberg and Mert study

the contribution of partnerships to traditional ways of governance in inter-

national relations. They empirically analyze the multi-stakeholder partner-

ships five years after they were institutionalized at the World Summit onSustainable Development. Waddell and Khagram construct an initial land-

scape of the emergent field of global action networks and evaluate their

potentials in new global governance architecture.

In the Conclusion, the editors discuss some research challenges.

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PART 1

Partnerships as collaborative arrangements:the actor perspective







As Glasbergen (Chapter 1 this volume) explained, by the time of

the World Summit of Sustainable Development in Joannesburg in 2002,

an expanded vision of the partnership approach had gained prominence –

one in which numerous lateral arrangements among public, private andnon-governmental actors were championed as the ‘preferred vehicles

of sustainable change’. Of the three approaches to studying partnerships

identified by Glasbergen in the introductory chapter, this chapter repre-

sents the ‘actor perspective’. Rather than focusing on why partnerships

form and on their comparative advantage as governance mechanisms,

I examine what it takes for partnerships to succeed and, in particular, what

partnership leaders can do to facilitate success. I adopt this stance because,

despite good intentions, partnership success is far from assured. Many

partnerships succumb to collaborative inertia; that is, they experience slowprogress or truncate their eff orts without realizing their goals (Huxham and

Vangen, 2005). If partnerships are the key to achieving sustainability, then

it is imperative that partners learn to avoid the inertial impediments and

improve the odds of success. Achieving collaboration in such partnerships

requires an ability to work constructively with diverse points of view, devel-

opment of strong integrative negotiating skills and sustained coordination

to ensure eff ective implementation of agreements.

My focus in this chapter will be on leading and managing the dynamic

process issues that are inherent in partnership formation. Sustainable devel-opment issues pit business values for progress, profit and self-interested

consumption of the environment against environmental values that stress

ecological sustainability, interdependence with the natural world and oppo-

sition to exploitation. Thus, they are often characterized by heated and pro-

tracted conflict. Potential partners often start from fundamentally diff erent

value premises and worldviews, and construct very diff erent understand-

ings of what is at stake and how problems should be addressed (Lewicki,

Gray and Elliott, 2003). Additionally, these partnerships vary on several

dimensions including: scope (local, national, regional and global), type of environmental issue under consideration (e.g., commons problems, shared

resources, transboundary externalities and linked issues) (Gray, 1999;

Torrance and Torrance, 2006), and nature of the partners (e.g., NGO-

market partnerships versus those involving governments). Partnerships in

the sustainable development arena include a host of inter-organizational

relationships ranging from networks of NGOs (such as the Climate Action

Network [CAN]), transnational coalitions that link global with local

NGOs (such as the ones that halted a development project in Brazil’s

rainforest and forced reassessment of global projects by the World Bank),

and partnerships across sectors such as the one between British Petroleum

and the World Resources Institute to forestall climate change (Torrance

30 Partnerships as collaborative arrangements



and Torrance, 2006). Because of their sheer scope, diversity of levels and

diverse interests, these partnerships are particularly difficult to construct

and sustain. Consequently, skills for leading and managing partnerships

are of critical importance.I begin with a brief theoretical explanation of why partnerships are

necessary. I then identify numerous obstacles to building successful part-

nerships, since we can learn much about the challenges that arise in part-

nership construction from dissecting those that have foundered. Next a

four-phase model of partnership development is introduced, and subse-

quently the critical issues will be analyzed that need to be addressed in each

phase if the partnership is to move forward successfully: who should par-

ticipate; who can best initiate and lead; how diff erences in perspectives can

be met; and how to enhance implementation and institutionalization of agreements.

2.1 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

Organizational scholars have touted collaborative partnership as a useful

and necessary mechanism for organizing parties within a problem domain

(Trist, 1983; Gray, 1989). Problem domains are contexts in which the

central issues cannot be controlled or governed by individual actorsbehaving independently. Instead, when actions individuals take with

respect to the focal issue have repercussions for others and vice versa,

individual eff orts become maladaptive, and the domain experiences turbu-

lence because of the unpredictable consequences of actions taken by other

stakeholders (Trist, 1983). As Gray (1989) notes, ‘Organizations facing tur-

bulent environments find that unilateral strategic actions taken to control

environmental exigencies are often ineff ective’ (p. 28). Since actors are

interdependent, the only eff ective response to turbulence requires adopting

a system-level perspective through which stakeholders join forces to infl

u-ence how the issue is resolved. Rather than continuing to thwart each

other’s eff orts, by collaborating, stakeholders can devise correlated re-

sponses to minimize turbulence and increase regulation of domain dynam-

ics (Trist, 1983).

Building a collaborative partnership requires skilled leadership to ensure

integration of diverse points of view, careful attention to process dynamics

and eff ective implementation of agreements, not to mention attracting

the diverse partners to participate in the collaborative process in the first

place. In the area of sustainable development, constructing partnerships

that produce solutions that go beyond each partner’s individual vision is a

tall order.

The process of partnership construction 31



Obstacles to Collaboration

Despite parties’ inherent (but often unacknowledged) interdependence,

achieving collaborative outcomes is far from easy. Numerous factorsranging from political maneuvering or covert power brokering, institu-

tional pressures and serendipity can all contribute to collaborative inertia.

Here I have grouped factors into three general types for ease of discussion:

those associated with (1) past history, mistrust and identity issues; (2)

diff erential framing of issues; and (3) process and institutional issues:

Past history, mistrust and identity issues A partnership that began as a

protracted conflict between loggers and environmentalists over logging

practices in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains shows how diff erences inorganizational cultures of the partners, past histories of misunderstanding

and erosion of trust among parties can make partnership formation

extremely challenging. After years of extremely hostile interactions and

even violent skirmishes, these stakeholders finally put the future of their

community above the conflict and joined forces to devise a plan for sus-

tainable logging (Bryan and Wondolleck, 2003). In this conflict, and others

related to sustainable development, deep-seated identity diff erences and

threats of loss of identity can pose formidable obstacles to partnership for-

mation (Lewicki et al., 2003). Cultural diff erences also make collaborationmore difficult because partners often criticize what is sacred in each other’s

proposals (Pearce and Littlejohn, 2003). The sheer time and resource com-

mitment, fear of potentially negative reactions from one’s constituents

(based on stereotypes about ‘sleeping with the enemy’), as well as concerns

about establishing unfavorable precedents, can also derail potential part-

nerships before they start.

Di ff ering frames Another critical obstacle arises from diff erences in how

the potential partners frame their understanding of the issues that bringthem together. ‘Framing refers to the process of constructing and repre-

senting our interpretations of the world around us. We construct frames

by sorting and categorizing our experience – weighing new information

against our previous interpretations’ (Lewicki et al., 2003, p. 12). Frames

are both guides to and outcomes of sense-making processes. Parties use

frames to make sense of their experiences and to locate themselves with

respect to other stakeholders. More specifically, framing involves develop-

ing ‘interpretive schemas that bound and order a chaotic situation, facili-

tate interpretation and provide a guide for doing and acting’ (Laws and

Rein, 2003, p. 173). As noted earlier, parties who might profit from reach-

ing consensus on how to coordinate their activities around sustainable




development often hold vastly diff erent interpretations of the issues they

all are concerned about (Lewicki et al., 2003). Even when parties agree on

the need to pool their eff orts, they frequently do not see eye to eye on the

aims of collaboration, and, once they begin to work together, theirdiff ering interpretations about the issues and how to frame them may

interfere with the joint work of finding an acceptable agreement. For

example, diff erences in potential partners’ views of nature (i.e., the need

for conservation and its capacity for regeneration), the options they con-

sidered as feasible means of conflict resolution and their strong, but

diff ering identifications with the land, contributed to the perpetuation of

a 40-year conflict over the existence and management of a US national

park (Lewicki et al., 2003).

Process issues and institutional constraints Even when parties freely join

up and have similar conceptions of the problems, another major impedi-

ment to partnership success is the absence of process skills among the part-

ners once they begin working together (Wondolleck, 1985). In a similar

vein, psychodynamic factors that arise in the subconscious work of the

group can also derail collaborative eff orts (even when the parties are well

intended about working together) (Vansina, 2000). Finally, at a more sys-

temic level, institutional forces and power diff erences make partnership for-

mation more difficult. How then can partners overcome these formidablechallenges?

Phases of Collaboration

To envision successful collaborative partnerships, it is useful to understand

the critical issues that need to be addressed as they evolve. Many authors

have proposed phase models of multi-party collaboration that describe dis-

tinct periods of sequential activities. Here I adapt the Phase 1 (problem

setting), Phase 2 (direction setting) and Phase 3 (implementation) model asdescribed by Gray (1989). The critical tasks in the problem-setting phase

include identifying the relevant partners and getting them to commit to a

collaborative partnership. Direction setting involves exploring the issues

and reaching any necessary agreements to address them. Implementation

entails putting those agreements into place and ensuring that follow-

through occurs. Since experience has also shown that partnerships often

continue in some form beyond implementation of the agreements they

reach (Phase 3), I have added Phase 4 (institutionalization) to capture struc-

turing and regularization of ongoing interactions among stakeholders

and/or replication of partnerships in other contexts. Even if partnerships

do not evolve precisely in this manner, the principal benefits of phase




models are: (1) they identify the key challenges that arise and off er a

suggested order for responding to them; (2) they provide leaders (as well as

participants) with a basis for reflecting on their experience; and (3) they

off er guidance for process design.

2.2 LEADERSHIP TASKS DURING PROBLEMSETTING

While scholars may not agree about the extent of control that interveners

can exercise or to the degree that partnership dynamics can be orchestrated,

most agree that partnerships are not totally at the mercy of exogenous

forces. Individuals can exert some leverage over the domain by engaging inself-regulation and taking correlated actions (Trist, 1983; Gray, 1989).

Several kinds of tasks constitute leadership in inter-organizational domains

because their execution can enhance the likelihood of reaching collabor-

ation among partners. These tasks include: appreciation or visioning, con-

vening, problem structuring, designing the process, reflective intervention,

conflict handling, brokering and institutional entrepreneurship (Gray,

2007). I refer to them as leadership intervention tasks because they can be

executed by the partners themselves or by external third parties who are

engaged to facilitate partners’ interactions; most likely they will be sharedby many people over a partnership’s lifetime. I have linked them to the four

phases of collaboration, indicating when they would be most necessary and

eff ective.

A critical task for launching a new partnership is that of appreciation or

visioning. By appreciation, I refer to recognizing the interdependencies

among a group of stakeholders, imagining how the parties can collaborate,

and helping others to see this vision. Appreciation entails the ability to

translate a possible new vision of the domain to other stakeholders. While

any stakeholder can off

er a collective appreciation, often this task is per-formed by someone who has experience in the domain, legitimacy (in the

eyes of other stakeholders) and the political clout to frame the collabor-

ative vision in a way that others cannot ignore (Gray, 1989). Visionaries

need to understand the social, political and economic context surrounding

a partnership as well as the key players. In one of the first US partnerships

between business and environmentalists, the two leaders who hatched the

idea of forming a partnership did so after years of wrangling over similar

issues in the courts. Their proposal turned into the National Coal Policy

Project in which coal-producing firms, major coal-consuming manufactur-

ers, and environmentalists met for two years to thrash out jointly accepted

regulatory measures (Gray and Hay, 1986).




Methods for Appreciation

Several methods for enhancing joint appreciation among stakeholders

within a domain are available to enhance stakeholders’ awareness of theirinterdependencies and formulate correlated actions to reduce domain tur-

bulence. One appreciative technique, the construction of shared strategy

maps (Bryson and Finn, 1995) involves querying and constructing a cogni-

tive map of each individual stakeholder’s views on a topic and then

combining these into a computerized composite map that reflects the per-

spectives of all and serves as the basis for discussion, revision and forging

a common vision for the partnership.

Moore, Long and Palmer (1999, p. 558) describe visioning as ‘a process

in which people build consensus on a description of their preferred future – the set of conditions they want to see realized over time’. Other interven-

tions, such as search conferences, are designed to build common awareness

of domain issues among diverse stakeholders. For example, in a search con-

ference, third parties guide stakeholders in identifying the broad contextual

influences impinging on the domain, their individual and collective aspir-

ations and their preferred strategies for how the domain should evolve

(Emery and Purser, 1996). Two critical early steps in the search conference

promote domain-level understanding: (1) identifying common futures that

direct stakeholders’ attention to their mutual aspirations for the future of the domain; (2) identification of current and anticipated trends likely to

aff ect the domain. Often, the realizations produced through such analyses

break down boundaries among potential collaborators and promote

awareness of their common plight, as Weisbord and Janoff (2005, p. 80)

observe, ‘a short, intense, whole system meeting enables something not

available in any other way: A gestalt of the whole in all participants that

dramatically improves their relationship to their work and their coworkers’.

The utility of this process for partnerships is exemplified by an influential

1993 Futures Search report issued by the Conservation Breeding SpecialistGroup (CBSG), which is technically an NGO but functions as a network

of scientists and others concerned about endangered species preservation.

The CBSG conducts such visioning workshops around the globe (Westley,

1999) to forge consensus about endangered species preservation.

Convening

A second intervention task is convening. Carlson (1999, p. 169) identifies

four primary activities that conveners undertake: (1) assessing a situation

to determine whether or not a consensus-based approach is feasible;

(2) identifying and inviting participants to ensure that all key interests




(i.e., stakeholders) are represented; (3) locating the necessary resources to

help convene, conduct, and support the process; and (4) planning and

organizing the process with participants, or working with a facilitator or

mediator to do so.While visionaries may see the wisdom of partnering and may also engage

in the task of convening, external third parties are often hired as conveners

to test the feasibility of a potential collaborative alliance. They may do this

by means of a feasibility or conflict assessment (if the presenting issues are

conflictual) in which they interview stakeholders to assess their willingness

to participate and their motivation to work toward a collaborative agree-

ment. Without an initial commitment to collaborate (Gray, 1989), partner-

ship initiatives may prove futile, and a convener should advise against going

forward. Assembling a wide array of stakeholders is also likely to enhancepartnership success in the long run because key players who are excluded

may later try to block implementation of agreements.

NGOs often serve as conveners of partnerships in developing countries.

For example, the Synergos Institute initiated the Chimalapas Coalition in

southern Mexico to prevent construction of a highly controversial hydro-

electric dam and highway through the rainforest. The partnership brought

together previously unconnected partners including two states, the federal

legislature, several ministries, environmental NGOs, human rights groups

and campesinos (farmers), and has met several sustainability objectivesincluding forest conservation (Gray, 1999).

For some partnerships, problems of representation and exclusion are

often critical to their success. That is, conveners face decisions about who

can participate in a partnership, for whom they can speak, and who can

speak for the partnership as a whole. For regional and national-level part-

nerships related to policy issues, a primary cause of partnership failure is

ineff ective resolution of representational issues. During the spotted owl

controversy in the United States Pacific Northwest, a federal agency made

unilateral decisions about representation in ten local partnerships ratherthan involve the communities in identifying issues and choosing their rep-

resentatives. Consequently, participants questioned the government’s

motives, the balance of power at the table and the fairness of resource allo-

cation to the partners (Carlson, 1999). In the United States, regulatory

negotiations (temporary partnerships that provide input to a governmen-

tal regulatory agency on rule-making) (Fiorino, 1988) and collaborations

convened under the Federal Advisory Committee Act, explicit criteria

about representation and clear decision-making guidelines must be met.

Accepted guidelines for design of consensus-building processes for

environmental issues at local and regional and even national levels also

stress widespread representation (Carlson, 1999). Conveners can minimize




partners’ subsequent withdrawal by ironing out issues about representation

and decision-making authority early in the partnership construction.

Negotiations often later become derailed and trust is eroded if partners

learn that their counterparts lack the necessary authority to decide theissues on their own. Even when representatives have authority to act, they

often experience tension about their role ‘produced by conflict between the

imperatives of the internal negotiation (i.e., negotiations taking place at the

negotiating table) and those of the external interactions with constituents’

(Laws, 1999, p. 244). In order to ensure transparency and encourage wide-

spread ownership of agreements, partnership designers may want to build

in a separate step for conferral with constituents to secure ratification of

any agreements reached.

For other types of partnerships, representational issues are of less impor-tance. For global environmental regimes, for example, only sovereign actors

participate, leaving others like NGOs out of the official decision-making

(Susskind, 1994). And in NGO–market partnerships such as the Forest

Stewardship Council, only selected actors are involved. In these partner-

ships, intended for certifying industry standards for sustainable products,

representational issues are less crucial, although failure to garner wide-

spread participation can limit the partnership’s reach and ultimate impact.

Partnership designs can also distinguish levels of stakeholder participation

between those who provide input and those with voting rights. When thenumber of parties is extremely large, a system of representatives and cau-

cuses may be necessary to test trial agreements or a design in which local

roundtables are constructed for initial and periodic input throughout

the process. In other cases, such as the CBSG, the ‘partnership’ includes

5000–6000 individuals worldwide so representation is quite open and inclus-

ive, enabling the organization to rescue or help to preserve at least 60 species

(Westley, 1999).

2.3 PROBLEM STRUCTURING

Leadership Tasks During Direction Setting

A useful leadership task for Phase 2 involves problem structuring in which

alliance partners tackle their joint problem by analyzing it and inventing

joint solutions. Techniques for problem structuring range from very simple

approaches that visually array data to complex computerized models used

to compare probabilistic scenarios. Some of these approaches, such as the

analysis of interconnected decision areas (AIDA) (Friend and Hickling,

2005), build on multi-attribute utility theory to select alternatives once




choices are arrayed. This approach identifies and links decision areas –

opportunities to act in at least two alternative ways with respect to a

problem – and then compares their utility in the eyes of participants to aid

decision-making. Another problem-structuring approach that relies ongroup decision support to help analyze the key issues is strategic options

development and analysis (SODA). SODA starts with individual cognitive

maps from all participants as input and relies on ‘modeling methods to

capture, analyze and play back to participants the substance of the issues

under discussion’ (Huxham, 1996, p. 142), enabling participants to view a

composite array of factors that comprise the problem.

Process Design

A critical distinction between the content and the process of interactions is

an immensely useful construct for leaders and collaborators to understand.

Partnership leaders should consider which stage a collaboration is in, what

ground rules might be necessary, what tasks are needed to move the part-

ners toward their objectives, how to best design the meetings, when plenary

versus small group meetings, caucuses or joint data collection may be pro-

ductive, how to garner buy-in from constituents and how to facilitate the

resolution of conflicts (Gray, 1989). While process design can be useful in

any phase, it is particularly important in Phases 1 and 2 when stakeholdersare least sure about the value of participating, how to get started or how to

bridge their disagreements.

One critical task in Phase 2 is reaching agreement on ground rules for

interaction among partners. These can include how anger will be expressed,

how decisions will be taken (e.g., whether consensus is required), wrestling

with ‘shape of the table’ issues and who can speak to the media. Although

collaborative partnership can often be fraught with ambiguity, ground rules

and process transparency can attenuate fears about the partnership:

‘Conferring with the parties about what is going to happen next and who isgoing to do it ensures that expectations are not mismatched and that the

parties retain ownership of everything that happens’ (Gray, 1989, p. 266)

and promotes trust among the parties. While many collaborative partners

underestimate the important role of process attention in aiding collabor-

ation (Wondolleck, 1985), they do so at a price, since eff ective attention to

process issues can deflect partners from detours that gobble up time

and generate frustration and mistrust. Process designers help partners to

establish guidelines for representation and participation, decision-making

processes, ownership of and responsibility for outcomes, power sharing

and conferring with constituents, the media and the larger community.

These activities foster transparency and constructive norms for partnership




evolution. While partners may resist process design as an unnecessary

expense or a threat to their control of interactions, expertise about meeting

design, group dynamics and facilitative structures can increase the likeli-

hood of constructive interactionsand helppartners avoid classic pitfalls thatoften derail even well-intended partnerships. For example, consideration of

how to replace participants if they leave their posts during the process might

have prevented the collapse of a New York City Partnership task force,

which unraveled when several key participants all changed jobs within a six-

month period. Building in redundancy of representation to preserve insti-

tutional memory may have saved this partnership (Gray, 1995), but would

have forced the conveners to deal with a larger table from the start.

When decisions about sustainability would be best served by involving

many parties in the process, large-scale designs can ensure that a wide arrayof viewpoints are included and promote widespread support for any policy

recommendation or agreements (as in deliberative democracy processes).

Third-party neutrals are typically hired to organize and conduct these

kinds of interventions because of the need for expert facilitation and use of

technological support systems to ensure that input from participants can

be garnered and collated quickly. For example, recently, 4500 diverse resi-

dents of New York City participated in a twenty-first century town hall

meeting designed to solicit their input on the site plans for the World Trade

Center memorial (Lukensmeyer and Brigham, 2005). Using simultaneouskeypad voting techniques, participants engaged with one another in facili-

tated roundtable dialogues and weighed in on various design proposals.

Their views were then relayed to official decision-makers for the project.

Reflective Intervening

The task of reflective intervening is designed to engage participants in

assessing their concerns, their objectives and their progress to date. The

leader encourages this self-refl

ective task, which can focus on the contentof the issues, the partners’ interactions or both. By engaging in this joint

diagnosis, partners can identify needed changes they want to make in the

partnership and devise action steps to take to rectify them (Huxham and

Vangen, 2005). Such reflection promotes ownership of and commitment to

the collaborative process particularly if facilitated by a third party.

Conflict Handling

Since conflicting viewpoints often arise in partnerships, the task of conflict

handling is an important one that is usually provided by a third party or a

skillful collaborative leader. Conflict handling interventions may mean




the diff erence between successful partnerships and those that succumb

to collaborative inertia. Because stakeholders wrestling with sustainable

development often start from fundamentally diff erent value premises,

incorporating a third party to help structure and facilitate discussion of these difficult issues may indeed be prudent, especially if the number of

partners is large or partners come to the table with high levels of mistrust

or past histories of unresolved conflicts. Conflict-handling interventions

not only provide methods for working through disagreements, they also

help to reduce stereotypes and restore trust.

Conflict handling can take various forms including facilitation, me-

diation and trust building, which address both the content and process of

resolving conflict. Mediators seek to promote win–win solutions by refram-

ing each party’s individual interests in terms of a common problem theyface. Mediators often help to bring appropriate partners to the table, design

constructive processes and ground rules for interaction among the partners,

facilitate disclosure of interests, help the partners generate alternative sol-

utions and ensure eff ective implementation (Moore, 1986; Gray, 1989).

Eff ective conflict handling often restores trust among partners, which

may have been destroyed in past interactions. Restoring trust may require

repeated demonstrations of good faith to overcome vulnerabilities estab-

lished in the past. ‘Through increasing the number of promises and con-

gruent actions that reinforce the belief that the commitment will be carriedout, negotiators gradually build a relationship of trust’ (Moore, 1986,

p. 142). One technique for fostering trust is asking potential partners to

recount instances in which they exhibited trustworthy behavior toward

each other. In a collaboration among business, government and civic

leaders to revitalize the city of Newark, New Jersey, ‘community groups

refused to begin work on the process design until the business sector

demonstrated its commitment to the city’ (Strauss, 1999, p. 142). Several

concrete short-term projects were identified and completed to pave the way

for a much longer consensus-building process that occurred over severalmonths. Without this upfront demonstration of good faith, the partnership

may never have commenced.

Countering long-standing stereotypes and persistent mistrust can only

occur when parties have positive contact with each other (Amir, 1994) and

repeated experiences in which their stereotypes are disconfirmed. Replacing

stereotypes with positive impressions can occur if potential partners take

joint data-gathering trips (Gray, 1989). On these occasions, by sharing

common experiences and everyday interactions, stereotypes are eroded.

Perspective-taking exercises also enable partners to explore their biased

impressions of their counterparts and try out alternative viewpoints. For

example, I facilitated a three-day workshop between representatives of the




US Fish and Wildlife Service and the US Forest Service who both worked in

the same national forest but had harbored negative stereotypes about each

other for years. Using a mirroring exercise, they exchanged impressions of

each other andtriedtopredicthow the other group viewedthem. Subsequentreview and discussion of these biases enabled them to realize how these

biases interfered with their ability to solve the joint problems they faced.

Partnership leaders can actively promote trust among partners in a

variety of ways. Engaging partners in the construction of clear ground rules

(such as equality of airtime and decision rules), which are then actively

enforce, enhances trust. So does agenda transparency and the use of

win–win negotiating techniques. Leaders may also conduct a priori inter-

views with each partner to assess their readiness to collaborate and then

summarize the important, commonly shared issues for the partners whenthey first meet. Finally, leaders can help overcome tendencies toward col-

lusion, the tendency to suppress diff erences that are difficult to admit or

risky to address (Vansina, 2000).

Internal Brokering

Internal brokers are responsible for sharing information among partners,

and are usually partners themselves (but they could be third parties). As

partnerships extend in duration, become larger, are geographically dis-persed, and/or are replicated in other settings, internal brokers are particu-

larly helpful to ensure that everyone is informed about current project

status and their input on emerging issues is garnered. This task is particu-

larly important in Phases 2, 3 and 4.

Several brokerage roles have been identified, including representatives,

liaisons, gatekeepers and so on. Liaisons create linkages and increase infor-

mation exchange between otherwise unconnected or unrelated parties and

also serve as conflict handlers, as bridgers who can connect less powerful

parties with more powerful ones (Westley and Vredenburg, 1991), and/oras translators who can link stakeholders from diff erent cultural traditions

because of their cultural fluency. For example, partners from diff erent cul-

tural traditions may prefer diff erent ground rules (e.g., less talking, more

silence) that emphasize values other than individuality and efficiency,

which are particularly Western orientations for interaction. Sensitivity to

process designs that respect the values inherent in non-Western or a variety

of cultural traditions will help to establish a level playing field for partici-

pants, reduce stereotypes and build trust among participants.

When stakeholders initially represent groups with asymmetrical power

and/or are unwilling to work together for this reason, brokers with the

necessary clout to help low-power stakeholders to gain access to elites can




play critical roles in creating a dialogue among these groups. In addition to

providing standing for low-power partners, they can serve as shuttle diplo-

mats, conveying critical information and negotiating agreements among

partners of diff erential power – especially by helping both sides to recog-nize the ways in which they are dependent on each other for the future out-

comes in the domain. Sometimes, special bridging roles are necessary to

first mobilize community groups to generate a voice in dialogues with elites

(Brown and Ashman, 1999). Brokers in this role assist these groups to orga-

nize, select a spokesperson and help them guard against cooptation by

more powerful groups. This was the role that the Catholic Church

played in Ecuador in 1995 when CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous

Nationalities of Ecuador), a coalition of indigenous peoples’ groups

blocked the Pan American highway and brought the country to a halt inthe interest of challenging land reforms introduced by the Ecuadorian

Congress and the International Development Bank (IDB) (Treakle, 1998).

The Church was able to help persuade Ecuador’s president that negotiat-

ing with the indigenous peoples made sense. Consequently, CONAIE, the

Church, the IDB and the government crafted a collaborative agreement

that stripped away the reforms and restored some control over the lands to

the indigenous people. Often, views of indigenous peoples are depreciated

by First World partners when, in fact, local knowledge of agricultural and

irrigation practices may prove very useful in meeting both partners’ goals.In general, in conflicts between the First and Third World over sustainable

development concerns, NGOs play important bridging roles, ensuring that

less powerful partners have a voice in deliberations (Brown and Ashman,

1999; Gray, 1999) and preventing cooptation by elites (Karan, 1994).

Certain power leveling can be employed to ensure that more powerful

parties pay attention to sustainability issues and comply with partnership

agreements once reached. One example of partnerships that spanned local

and global interests to challenge a powerful global player was the coalition

that stopped the World Bank’s Narmada Dam project in India (Foxand Brown, 1998). Once powerful parties are held accountable, they may

voluntarily adopt future contractual provisions that make themselves

dependent on other stakeholders. Alternatively, partners can appoint inde-

pendent watchdogs to oversee compliance with agreements or invoke sanc-

tions if power is abused during implementation. This will only work,

however, when, in the face of non-compliance with partnership agreements,

traditional enforcement procedures (such as enforcement of codes by regu-

latory bodies) or continued political pressure can be used as a fallback

strategy. In order to persuade powerful stakeholders who resist collaborat-

ing to change their minds, partnership leaders can remind them of the unat-

tractive consequences of not participating that they may have overlooked






They essentially manage the process by which agreements reached in Phase

2 become adopted, affirmed and monitored for consistency.

If implementation of an agreement requires the construction of a new

organization or a lasting change in the structural relationships among part-ners, then attention to Phase 4 dynamics is also important. Osborn and

Hagedoorn (1997, p. 272) have referred to building alliances and networks

as ‘experiments in institution building’ because they often involve creating

new organizational forms with more lateral than horizontal information

flow in which interactions are based on trust rather than authority. These

new structural arrangements and their accompanying modifications to rou-

tines and practices require both cognitive and behavioral shifts for partici-

pating organizations. When these new practices are embedded in existing

routines and align easily with existing values, they are easier to adopt, butin newly emerging fields in which stakeholders adhere to diff erent value

systems, the task of creating norms and building compliance with them

must incorporate the values and practices of diverse partners. Not only do

such changes often engender resistance in the face of ambiguity, but fragile

trust constructed during Phase 2 may easily be destroyed if diff erent rates

or methods of institutionalization are mistaken for deliberate attempts to

renege on the agreement. For partnerships bridging national boundaries

these diff erences can originate from diff erences in organizational, national

or ethnic cultures.For sustainable development agreements at the global level, willingness

of national governments to subscribe to regime-level agreements poses par-

ticular problems. For example, gaining approval for dispersal of funds or

implementation of new routines may occur much more quickly in a for-

profit than a bureaucratic public organization. On the other hand, insti-

tutional entrepreneurs should also guard against over-institutionalization

– that is, creating unnecessary structural arrangements and rules that may

stifle the flexibility needed by a collaborative network to accomplish its

objectives, minimize opportunities for partners to learn from each other, orrecreate pre-alliance hegemonic power relations among the partners that

promote collaborative inertia.

Institutional entrepreneurs may also be charged with replicating suc-

cessful partnerships – that is, translating a successful collaborative structure

to new settings with new partners. Wise institutional entrepreneurs will

realize that repeating the phases with new stakeholders is a critical step in

construction of replications. This not only ensures buy-in from new part-

ners but also allows for incorporation of local modifications that may be

key to successful implementation.




2.5 CONCLUSION

In this chapter I have tried to forecast the kinds of challenges and ob-

stacles that can befall even well-intended partners who are trying to forgecollaborative agreements for sustainable development and to recom-

mend appropriate countermeasures to improve the likelihood of success.

However, as noted earlier, partnerships in this arena vary vastly in scope,

the diversity of partners and in the types of issues being tackled. Some

involve governments; many do not. A key unanswered question that

remains concerns when and how governments should be involved and

whether they should play a leadership role. While it is impossible to devise

clear-cut rules delineating when governments should step in, governments

often can and should play a key role in catalyzing partnership develop-ment, especially within sovereign borders. That is, governments can create

forums to stimulate partnership deliberations. When governments have

clear rule-making authority, regulatory negotiation partnerships can

encourage diverse stakeholders (e.g., business and environmental NGOs)

to resolve conflicts in favor of sustainable practices. In non-rule-making

contexts, governments can serve as brokers to encourage deliberations

among private parties. To date, however, governments have varied in their

inclination and capacity to provide this role (i.e., those in developed

countries often playing a larger role). In developing countries, NGOs havetraditionally performed the leadership role by partnering with other

NGOs, foundations and grassroots organizations to promote sustainable

development partnerships such as the Chimalapas Coalition described

above. However, once private funds are withdrawn, governments need to

step in if high potential partnerships are to remain sustainable (Brown and

Ashman, 1999).

At the global level, business/NGO partnerships (such as the Marine and

Forest Stewardship Councils) have established a new partnership model,

albeit one with still limited reach (Visseren-Hamakers and Glasbergen,2007) and one that leaves local stakeholders and governments outside of

decision-making. Such market-based partnerships have a place since they

aff ord business stakeholders the opportunity to combine sustainability

with profitability. Perhaps the most optimistic scenarios for sustainability

partnerships, however, will emerge as grassroots stakeholders team up with

NGOs to demand that both government and business take sustainability

seriously. The recent commitment by leaders of the Christian Right in the

United States to curb global warming is a promising step in this direction.

Mobilization of such grassroots political muscle worldwide could stimulate

a new interest in partnerships by Northern business and governments and

even rekindle global interest in regime change with respect to sustainable




development. If so, governments can play a key role in convening and

leading such partnerships while ensuring wide representation and fair

processes.

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3. Sustainability through partnering:conceptualizing partnershipsbetween businesses and NGOs

James E. Austin

Sustainable development requires concerted collaborative actions at all levels

from macro to micro and across all sectors. Cross-sector social partnerships

are proliferating rapidly (Child and Faulkner, 1998; Berger, Cunningham

and Drumright, 2000). This chapter continues the examination of partner-

ships as collaborative arrangements that Barbara Gray began in the previous

chapter. I also focus explicitly on the first modality of partnerships as single

collaborative arrangements specified by Pieter Glasbergen in the opening

chapter, but with a specific focus on alliances between businesses and non-

governmental organizations (NGOs or, synonymously, non-profit organiz-

ations or civil society organizations).

There are four research questions that are central to deepening our

understanding of these cross-sectoral collaborations. First, why would

businesses and non-governmental organizations want to collaborate?

Understanding the motivational underpinnings is central to fostering the

births of partnerships by finding common ground for coming together

from disparate sectors. Second, how do business–non-profit collabor-

ative relationships evolve over time? Partnerships are not static phenom-

ena; like other organizational forms, they evolve over time. Consequently,

it is important to examine the dynamics of cross-sector collaborativearrangements. Third, how do such collaborations create value? The

fundamental purpose of partnering is to create more value than one

could alone. In social purpose collaborations we are concerned not

only with the benefits accruing to each of the partners, but also to

society more generally. Fourth, what are the critical determinants of the

performance of cross-sector collaborations? Not all collaborations

succeed; some clearly outperform others. Identifying key success factors

will contribute to more eff ective design and management of partnerships.

To address these four questions, the following sections will explore: part-nering motivations, relationship evolution, value-generation process and

49



performance determinants. The purpose of this exploratory chapter is to

provide conceptual frameworks for examining these dimensions and to

illustrate them through specific cross-sector collaboration examples,

which are mostly drawn from partnerships in Latin America studied bythe author and colleagues in the Social Enterprise Knowledge Network

(www.sekn.org).

3.1 PARTNERING MOTIVATIONS

The theoretical rationale for collaborations has been usefully rooted

in resource dependency theory (Gray, 1989), stakeholder management

(Andrioff et al., 2002), and social issues (Selsky and Parker, 2005) amongothers. To provide an additional lens through which to explore why

companies and non-profits would want to partner each other, this

chapter conceptualizes a collaboration motivation action (CMA) frame-

work.

This CMA framework enables us to understand the linkages from moti-

vations to actions by examining four components: motivational categories

→ behavioral forces→management orientation→ action focal points. By

systematically understanding these interrelated components, one can better

identify if, why and where the path of collaboration is chosen. The fourcomponents of this framework can be applied to examine both companies

and non-profit organizations, but the elements under each component are

diff erent for businesses and NGOs. The framework will be illustrated by

applying it first to companies and then to NGOs (Tables 3.1a and 3.1b

respectively).

CMA Framework for Companies

Motivational categories The starting point is to categorize the more gen-eral motivations for businesses engaging in sustainable development or

social value creation. Motivations can be utilitarian or altruistic or a com-

bination. Manifested motivations can be sorted into four distinguishable,

although sometimes interrelated, categories: compliance-driven, risk-

driven, values-driven and business-opportunity-driven.

Behavioral forces Behind each of these motivations there is a corres-

ponding force dictating the behavior. Compliance is dictated by legal obli-

gations; risk by external threats; values by core beliefs; business opportunity

by economic self-interest. As one crosses the motivational categories, the

forces increasingly move from obligatory to voluntary.




Management orientation These forces in turn shape the management

approach. Fulfilling legal obligations generally involves preserving the

status quo; dealing with external threats entails averting negative conse-

quences; exercising core beliefs aims at validating institutional integrity;and pursuing opportunities focuses on capturing economic gains.

Action focal points Each of these management arenas has a corre-

sponding set of focal points for action. Managing legal compliance

involves political, regulatory and administrative actions, and other inter-

actions with government entities. Managing the negative focuses on risk-

mitigation actions aimed at averting damage to, for example, reputation,

consumer patronage, employee loyalty and resource access. Managing

beliefs basically strives to ‘walk the talk’ and can involve philanthropicand social responsibility actions among others that contribute to external

and internal reputational enhancement. Managing the pursuit of eco-

nomic opportunities can aim at such areas as product diff erenti-

ation, market expansion, human resource enrichment, supply development

and production efficiencies, all of which can generate competitive

advantage.

Table 3.1a illustrates the above, with each column headed by one of the four

motivations and the vertically descending entries being the behavioralforce, the management orientation and the action focal points correspond-

ing to each motivational category.

CMA Framework for NGOs

To illustrate the CMA framework for NGOs we use three motivational cat-

egories, followed by the corresponding behavioral forces, management ori-

entation and action focal points.

Funding-driven The behavioral force being a concern for organizational

survival, with a management orientation of financial sustainability, and

action focal points being, for example, fundraising and earned income

activities; partnerships enter in as a new source of revenue generation.

Capabilities-driven Behavioral force focuses on organizational eff ect-

iveness, managerially oriented toward optimizing resource mobilization

and deployment, with actions on developing skills and organizational ca-

pacity, and obtaining new capabilities; partnerships off er access to new

resources that can strengthen or complementtheNGO’s current capabilities.

Sustainability through partnering 51



Mission-driven Behavioral force being centered on the cause, manage-

ment emphasis on goals, and actions focused on outcomes and assessment;

partnerships identify companies that have a significant degree of congru-

ency with the NGO’s mission. Table 3.1b summarizes the above.

There is insufficient empirical evidence to state which motivations for

businesses or NGOs is most prevalent. In using these CMA frameworks,

one should recognize that companies and managers might have a mix of

possible motives rather than just a single one. Accordingly, the resultant

action points might also contain a mixed configuration. The frameworks

provide a way of systematically clarifying the motivations and then exam-

ining each corresponding chain to decide if, where and how a collaboration

would be most eff ective.


Table 3.1a Collaboration motivation action framework: companies

Motivational Compliance- Risk-driven Values-driven Business-categories driven opportunity-

driven

Behavioral Legal External Core beliefs Economic

forces obligation threats self-interest

Management Preserving Averting Validating Capturing

orientation status quo negative institutional economic

consequences integrity gains

Action Politics Reputation Philanthropy Productfocal points Legislation protection Corporate social diff erentiation

Regulation responsibility Market

Employee Reputation expansion

loyalty enhancement Employee

Resource access enrichment

Consumer

patronage Supply

development

Production

efficienciesCompetitive

advantage



3.2 ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE CMA FRAMEWORK

To illustrate the foregoing collaboration motivation action framework and

how accessing distinctive resources held by potential partners constitutes

the rationale for collaborating, we analyze a few business–NGO sustainable

development alliances.

Case study: TetraPak and Junior League of Mexico (Austin and Reficco

et al., 2004)

TetraPak was the largest producer of multi-layer packaging for beverages

in Mexico. Its used containers were a significant contributor to the solid

waste disposal problem in Mexico City and beyond. Every month, Mexico

City disposed of 35 million of these containers, which require three decades

to disintegrate in solid waste disposal sites. Governmental and public

concern was rising and stricter regulations were being discussed by legis-

lators. In the early 1990s, an environmental NGO emptied a trailer load of used containers in front of TetraPak’s company gates, which was an en-

vironmental wake up call for the company.

For the company, the motivations for action were worries about compli-

ance with potentially costly regulatory actions and risk mitigation of nega-

tive reactions by governmental, community and consumer groups. The

NGO Junior League was motivated by its mission of community better-

ment and a need to mobilize additional capabilities in order to have an

impact on the increasingly acute environmental problem of solid waste dis-

posal. Alone, the NGO simply would not be able to alter the system.

TetraPak joined forces with Junior League to undertake a new approach to

the problem by launching a program named ‘Naturally Recyclable’ to shift


Table 3.1b Collaboration motivation action framework: NGOs

Motivational Funding-driven Capabilities-driven Mission-drivencategories

Behavioral Organizational Organizational Social cause

forces survival eff ectiveness

Management Financial Optimizing Goals

orientation sustainability resources

Action Fundraising Personnel skills Outcomes

focal points Earned income Organizational Assessment

capacity



from a disposal strategy to recycling. This required the leadership skill

(cited in the previous chapter by Gray) of visioning a new approach.

Their strategy also was to define the issue and its solution in systemic

terms. This would involve the entire chain of actors encompassing diff erenttypes of packaging manufacturers, processors using the packaging, dis-

tributors, end consumers and the public waste disposal organizations. This

was a leadership task of reframing the solution in what Gray referred to in

the previous chapter as the direction-setting phase. The eff orts focused on

education and coordinated actions throughout the entire chain to deal

more eff ectively with the problem collectively, rather than simply spot-

lighting a single company. Junior League brought the credibility of a

community-oriented third party to the process, which facilitated eliciting a

more favorable reaction than would have been possible through traditionallobbying by the company of government officials. TetraPak brought to

Junior League a major player with action capabilities to help solve the

problem. Its presence also induced other companies to join in the eff ort,

thereby achieving critical mass for impacting the problem. Both the NGO

and the company applied their respective convening powers to attract all

the diff erent key actors in the value chain so that a systemic approach was

possible in the implementation phase.

Case study: Starbucks Coff ee Company and the NGOsStarbucks, the world’s leading gourmet coff ee marketer, has relationships

with various NGOs that illustrate distinct motivational perspectives. Two

of these stand in interesting contrast. First, the company entered into an

alliance with Conservation International (CI), a major environmental

NGO, in a project involving small coff ee growers in Chiapas, Mexico

(Austin and Reavis, 2004). This project sought to promote shade-grown,

organic coff ee utilizing environmentally appropriate production processes

that would preserve and enhance the buff er zone habitat around El Triunfo

Biosphere Preserve, a major government environmental reserve. While thecompany had received criticisms and pressure from the Audubon Society

about migratory bird habitat destruction due to coff ee planting, Starbucks’

joining up with CI was more opportunity-driven than risk-driven. Assisting

the small coff ee growers also had an element of values-driven motivation

because part of the company’s core beliefs was providing value to all of its

stakeholders, including the countries of origin of its coff ee.

On the pragmatic opportunity side, the company recognized the strategic

need to ensure sustainability of small coff ee growers in order to guarantee

an expanding supply of high-quality coff ee essential to its high-growth

strategy, opening three new retail stores every day. However, the company

did not traditionally deal directly with small growers, nor did it have




environmental expertise. CI had begun working with small growers before

its partnership with Starbucks as a priority area for achieving its mission of

environmental preservation through altering coff ee cultivation practices,

and it sought out Starbucks’ collaboration. Starbucks had the buyingpower to create economic incentives through premium prices for quality

coff ee, which would enable CI to attract more farmers into environmentally

friendly production methods and scale up its small experiment. CI had the

environmental expertise and ability to work directly with small growers that

Starbucks lacked. Thus, each could access needed capabilities that the other

possessed. Starbucks additionally provided funding to CI, as did the

United States Agency for International Development, which saw great sus-

tainable development value in this partnership.

A second Starbucks–NGO interaction that also dealt with its coff eesupply, but quite distinctly, was with two NGOs: Global Exchange and

TransFair USA. Global Exchange is a Fairtrade advocacy organization that

confronted Starbucks through exhortations at its annual meeting to have the

company buy Fairtrade coff ee. TransFair works in tandem with Global

Exchange as a Fairtrade-certifying NGO, so while it promotes the sale of

Fairtrade coff ee, it is more an enabler of the transactions between coff ee

cooperatives and coff ee buyers. The confrontational approach of Global

Exchange stood in stark contrast with CI’s collaborative approach. Global

Exchange posed reputational risk to Starbucks both with consumers andwith its internal workforce, as criticisms might call into question the credi-

bility of the company’s commitment to countries of origin, part of its core

values. However, a fundamental obstacle was whether the coff ee produced

by small farmer cooperatives associated with TransFair would produce the

high-quality coff ee that is key to Starbucks’ success. The company did enter

into a contractual agreement with TransFair to buy certified Fairtrade

coff ee as long as it met the company’s quality standards. While this was

largely a risk-mitigation arrangement for the company to avoid Global

Exchange’s criticisms, it did open up the opportunity to develop a newcommitment to origin coff ee lines that encompassed Fairtrade and shade-

grown coff ees. For TransFair, the contract with Starbucks was basically a

transactional relationship from which the certification fees significantly

increased its revenues and financial sustainability as well as contributed to

its social mission of bettering the economic conditions of small coff ee

growers.

Case study: Natura and the Amazonian product line (Austin and Reficco

et al., 2004)

Natura is Brazil’s leading cosmetics manufacturer and marketer.

Environmental enhancement and community betterment are central to its




corporate values, strategy and operations. While it has leading-edge practices

in eco-efficiency production and environmental footprint operations, it also

envisioned an opportunity to produce a natural-based product line derived

from renewably extracted ingredients found in the Brazilian Amazon. Theproduction of the ingredients was to be carried out in partnership with local

community organizations as a new and sustainable economic activity. Thus,

it was dealing with community groups rather than formal NGOs. Given the

communities’ very precarious economic situation and meager income-

producingalternatives, theirmotivationfor enteringintothepartnershipwith

Natura was driven by the opportunity to receive new funding and income.

The company also partnered with an NGO that served as a third-party

verifier of the social and environmental integrity of the process. The result-

ing Ekos product line was a commercial success, as it created a diff erentiatedpremium product for the export and domestic markets. There was the added

bonus that the Natura direct salesforce were also highly motivated by being

able to off er this socially and environmentally attractive product that was

also distinctively diff erent for the consumers. It created a basis for the sales-

force to engage in a diff erent type of conversation about the product and

establish a richer social and emotional connection with the clients.

Each of the foregoing examples revealed how diff erent motivations can

propel alliances that contribute to sustainable development. However, it isimportant to recognize that an alliance per se need not necessarily have a

positive or significant developmental impact. The type of motivations may

influence the potential outcome. Companies motivated primarily by com-

pliance may try to use an alliance to do the legal minimum or to avoid regu-

lations rather than to make a significant advancement from the status quo.

Similarly, risk avoidance motivation may narrow the company’s focus on a

particular potential problem area, thereby limiting the scope of potential

social contribution. Or it might even lead to using non-profits, for example,

in cause-related marketing arrangements to off

set possible criticisms of company practices that might have adverse environmental consequences. It

may be that values-driven motivations reduce the possibility of such social

manipulation. Motivations focused on business opportunity partnerships

could run the risk of the pursuit of the profit potential crowding out the

concern for contributions to sustainability.

From the NGO side, the risk of partnering without contributing to sus-

tainability is probably greatest when the funding motivation is dominant.

Agreeing to a window-dressing cause-related marketing arrangement as

suggested above might be such an instance. The mission-driven motivation

is most likely to ensure a positive social contribution. The capabilities-

driven motivation could cut either way, with a focus on leveraging the




organization’s assets to maximize social or financial performance through

partnering, with positive or negative consequences in terms of furthering

sustainable development. Thus, it is important in the discussions among the

partners to dig deeply and honestly into the motivational mix and to layexplicitly on the table the issue of how important to each of the partners is

a contribution to sustainable development. That contribution will also be

influenced by the nature of the relationship between the partners.

3.3 RELATIONSHIP EVOLUTION

Whereas the foregoing CMA framework provides a basis for understand-

ing the motivations for engaging in social actions, sustainable developmentis an enduring process. Therefore, it is important that we also examine part-

nerships as ongoing relationships that experience a dynamic evolution. The

CMA framework is related to the evolutionary framework because some of

the motivational factors influence what type of relationship is established

and how it develops over time.

Research on business–NGO relationships has revealed a ‘collaboration

continuum’(Austin, 2000) depicted in Figure 3.1. This framework identifies

three types of relationships and a set of descriptive parameters that evolve

as an alliance moves along the relationship continuum:

1. The philanthropic stage is the traditional and most common relation-

ship in which the company largely plays a financial benefactor role for

the NGO. The non-profit is funding-driven and the company may be

altruistically or pragmatically driven, attaining some internal and

external reputational enhancement, values credibility and perhaps risk

reduction. While the philanthropic relationship is beneficial to both, it

is generally not particularly demanding or strategically vital to either

partner.2. When the relationship moves into the transactional stage the inter-

action focuses on specific projects or activities with set goals and time

lines. The value exchange becomes more two-way and more relevant to

mission. More and diff erent types of resources are mobilized.

3. In the integrative stage the two organizations begin to have more and

deeper points of intersection in terms of mission, strategy and activi-

ties. The strategic alliance in this stage is more complex and demand-

ing but is generating greater benefits for the partners and for society.

There is nothing automatic about progressing along the continuum, and

in each relationship diff erent parameters might fall at diff erent points on the




continuum. Furthermore, although most alliances that do evolve seem to

start in the philanthropic stage, it is possible to leapfrog directly into a trans-

actional relationship, and in rare circumstances launch an integrative

alliance.

3.4 ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE COLLABORATIONCONTINUUM

I shall now illustrate the continuum dynamics in several sustainable devel-

opment partnerships.

Case study: Monsanto and the Mexican Foundation for Rural Development

(Austin and Lozano, 1999)

Monsanto is one of the world’s largest suppliers of agro-inputs to largecommercial farmers. Some of its employees began helping small farmers as

a purely philanthropic endeavor. This activity increased the company’s

awareness of the needs of this producer segment and also the perception

that the company’s products and services could enhance farmer productiv-

ity and incomes significantly. In the aggregate, small farms constitute half

of the globe’s farmland, thereby representing a strategically important

market opportunity. Rather than just seeing the small landholders as needy

charity cases, the company reconceptualized them as productive agents

warranting serious attention.

Thus, the motivation for engagement in this sustainable development

activity, referring to the CMA framework, was opportunity-driven based on


Source: Based on Figure 2.1, p. 35 in Austin (2000).

Figure 3.1 The collaboration continuum

Stage I Stage II Stage III

Nature of relationship Philanthropic

Level of engagement Low HighImportance to mission Peripheral Central

Magnitude of resources Small Big

Type of resources Money Core competencies

Scope of activities Narrow Broad

Interaction level Infrequent Intensive

Trust Modest Deep

Managerial complexity Simple Complex

Strategic value Minor Major

IntegrativeTransactional



the business potential. However, the company had little experience with and

knowledge of this producer category. Similarly, the small farmers had never

interacted with the company and even harbored suspicions about big com-

panies. To build a bridge between the two, Monsanto turned to the MexicanFoundation for Rural Development (FMDR in Spanish), an NGO that had

been working for decades with small farmers throughout Mexico to improve

their livelihood. FMDR brought to the partnership deep knowledge and

trust relationships with the community. Monsanto provided funding to

FMDR to assist in the eff ort to work with the small farmers to identify

and test out diff erent technology practices. The company, through its cor-

porate foundation, provided donations to the communities to assist in

meeting non-production but important social needs. Thus, there was an

ongoing philanthropic activity, but in parallel the collaboration movedtoward a transactional relationship focused on the production and income-

enhancement project that was a form of market development for the

company. The model aimed at migrating the farmers along a technology

adoption process to the point where increased incomes would enable the

farmers to purchase, on their own volition, the inputs that they deemed

desirable. Thus, Monsanto moved from an initial altruistic motivation of

helping poor farmers to a more utilitarian focus of developing a new client

segment. The FMDR was attracted to the collaboration because it brought

in the new set of technological capabilities of the company, which off erednew paths to achieve their mission of enhancing farmer incomes.

Case study: Starbucks and the NGOs

Returning to the Starbucks alliances we find two diff erent types of relation-

ship. The interaction with TransFair was definitely a transactional one,

tightly defined contractually, and with a fee for the Fairtrade label usage.

There was never any philanthropic stage. Nor did it evolve beyond the trans-

actional relationship. TransFair deemed that it needed to have an arms’-

length relationship with the company and resisted off

ers by the company towork together to improve small farmer cooperative coff ee quality.

In contrast, while the relationship with Conservation International began

with a transactional focus on the Chiapas project, it has evolved into a more

integrative stage. Starbucks mounted similar collaborations with CI in

several other countries, made donations to CI, engaged jointly with CI to

formulate sustainable coff ee production and procurement guidelines for the

company and the industry, and its CEO joined the CI board of directors.

Case study: Georgia-Pacific and The Nature Conservancy (Austin, 2000)

Georgia-Pacific (GP) is a major timber products company and The Nature

Conservancy (TNC) is the largest environmental landholding NGO in the




United States. These two organizations had traditionally been opponents

facing off over environmental destruction issues surrounding the commer-

cial exploitation of forests. The starting point of the relationship was as

adversaries; they had not even made it onto the collaboration continuum.Yet, they evolved into being allies.

This dynamic was driven by fundamental reconceptualization of their

respective strategies by two new CEOs. GP concluded that its repeated con-

frontations with environmental groups were costly and inconsistent with a

growing green consciousness among consumers. A senior vice-president

described the shift:

in our environmental journey we have recognized that environmental steward-

ship is an important element in how we manage our mills and our nearly sixmillion acres of commercial forest land. And cooperative partnerships andproactive alliances are a growing part of our environmental strategy and com-mitment to sustainability.

The company shifted from a compliance motivation to a risk-mitigation

and business-opportunity approach.

TNC also made a strategic shift, as explained by its then CEO: ‘The

Conservancy has recognized that in some ecosystems protecting rare plants

and animals need not exclude economic activity, in this case, logging’. Thus,

there was a diff erent vision of how to achieve its mission, which enabled areconsideration of the nature of the relationship with companies. The two

organizations entered into a joint management agreement of North

Carolina’s Lower Roanoke forest wetlands area owned by GP and includ-

ing environmentally valuable habitat. The two organizations combined

complementary scientific and forest management skills to develop a novel

forest stewardship approach that enabled both some set-asides of environ-

mentally sensitive areas and lower-impact timber extraction processes. This

initial project was transactional in its specific geographical focus but inte-

grative in terms of shared goals and collective decision-making. Because of the positive results of this initial collaboration, the two organizations

undertook additional partnering actions in other locations.

Case study: Rainforest Expeditions and the Eseje community (Austin and

Reficco et al., 2004)

Rainforest Expeditions is an eco-tourism company operating in the

Peruvian Amazon region in the indigenous Eseje community. The company

was launched by some environmentalists who had been working in the

Eseje community with the original idea being to obtain permission to

operate tours and a lodge in the community’s rainforests, and employ some

of the community members. The international development agency that




agreed to provide start-up capital for the venture insisted on the com-

munity being an integral part of it. This resulted in a reconfiguration as a

50–50 joint venture – Posada Amazonas – integrating the company and the

community in ownership and operation, with the company training thecommunity members in the new skills that would ensure organizational

sustainability. Thus, this entity was born as an integrative relationship and

its evolution involved making that an operating reality.

3.5 VALUE-GENERATION PROCESS

The sustainability of a collaboration is dependent on its capacity to gener-

ate value for the partners, and the amount of value generated is dependenton the magnitude, type and configuration of resources deployed. Thus, the

dynamics of moving along the collaboration continuum are significantly

shaped by the value-generation process.

Defining Value

In cross-sector collaborations, value is in the eyes of the beholders. In same-

sector partnerships like business-to-business collaborations, the unit of

value is generally the same, namely financial return. However, as was indi-cated in our initial collaboration motivation action framework, businesses

and NGOs are driven to collaborate by diff erent motivations and seek dis-

tinct kinds of benefits. While there are some important points of congru-

ency, often around the shared goal of societal betterment, the specific

benefits sought, produced and harvested by the partners are not strictly

comparable. This complicates value assessment because fairness of the

exchange rests on the respective perceptions of the partners rather than a

readily measured common outcome. Nonetheless, the principle of balance

must be adhered to; each side must perceive that the benefi

ts each is receiv-ing relative to their investments are deemed fair to them. Balance does not

imply that the benefits are equal in kind; in fact, they will be diff erent in

kind because each side is pursuing diff erent forms of benefit. Balance refers

to the partners’ respective judgments that the benefits received are justi-

fiable relative to the costs expended. Without perceived fairness in the

value exchange, interests will not be aligned and the short-changed side will

lose interest and disinvest. One side may believe that it is getting more

benefits than the costs it expended, and that may be enough to sustain its

engagement in the partnership. However, the risk exists that it may perceive

that the other side is getting much larger benefits – even if these are of a

diff erent kind – than the costs it expended. This sense of unfairness in how




the pie is divided may demotivate the partner and erode trust. The collab-

oration may not be sustainable.

Type of Resources Deployed

While it is obvious that increasing the quantity of resources invested in the

alliance by the partners will likely generate greater value, the type of

resources they mobilize appears to leverage the value-generating process. If,

as is common in the philanthropic stage, they are mobilizing generic or

commonly held resources such as cash donations by companies, or the

general goodwill that emanates from most NGOs, they will certainly

produce benefits to each partner and probably society. However, greater

value generation is possible if the partners deploy their core assets, thoseelements that are central to making them successful organizations in their

respective domains. Such key assets might include their technical skills,

market knowledge, technologies, infrastructure, distribution systems, com-

munications capabilities, administrative systems, institutional and personal

networks, brand, reputation and so on. These assets have particular value

to the opposite partner because they do not possess them, yet they can

enable the production of a benefit that would not otherwise be possible for

either partner by itself. This is consistent with the partnering rationale

asserted in resource dependency theory. But rather than just deployingone’s special asset on behalf of the partner, even greater value can be pro-

duced if the partners have complementary assets that can be combined to

create an entirely new production value chain. Thus, it is the resource

configuration in addition to the resource type that determines value gener-

ation. Let us explore some examples.

In its collaboration portfolio, Starbucks also had a partnership with

CARE International, a leading NGO dedicated to relief and community

development (Austin, 2000). While this started out more as a values-driven

philanthropic relationship, it migrated into the transactional stage asopportunities for deploying key assets were discovered. For example, to

celebrate CARE’s fiftieth anniversary, Starbucks, instead of simply provid-

ing a cash donation, put on a special promotion in thousands of its stores.

There were standalone informational kiosks about CARE’s mission and

important development work in coff ee-producing communities and a col-

lection of coff ees from those countries, the purchase of which would gen-

erate profit-sharing with CARE, special CARE mugs and t-shirts and

banners. As the CARE Regional Director put it, ‘For a non-profit, this was

a died-and-gone-to-heaven promotion from a highly visible, cool, fast-

growing company’. In eff ect, Starbucks leveraged its distribution infra-

structure and its superb point-of-purchase merchandising skills to generate




enormous exposure for CARE, its mission and its good work in sustainable

development. A cash donation to CARE by the company would never have

enabled the NGO to buy such exposure. CARE, for its part, used its dis-

tinctive community development knowledge and contacts to operate projects in coff ee-producing countries, which enabled Starbucks to fulfill its

corporate values commitment to countries of origin. Starbucks could not

have done that by itself. Each partner used its core competencies to benefit

the other.

In Starbucks’ partnership with Conservation International, both sides not

only used their core competencies, but combined these complementary assets

to create a new value chain producing greater economic benefits for small

farmers, a new and more powerful performance model for CI, a distinctive

product for Starbucks, attainment of environmental enhancement and sus-tainable production systems for CI, Starbucks and the small coff ee growers.

Capturing the synergies across the partners’ asset mix and between social and

economic value is an important avenue for sustainable development.

Rainforest Expedition’s partnership with the Eseje community to create

the Posada Amazonas eco-tourism lodge also involved combining core

assets. The unique natural resource of the community and the members’

knowledge of it were fused with the environmental entrepreneurs’ capacity

to mobilize funds and organize and manage an enterprise to compete in this

international market. The global eco-tourism industry has become highlycompetitive and many companies off er experiences in the Amazon. It has

turned out that the joint venture with the community has proven to be a

distinguishing feature for Posada Amazonas, which has enabled it to win

tourists’ preference over other lodges off ering similar environments and

even lower prices but without an integrative partnership with the com-

munity. Strategic alliances can create competitive advantage.

3.6 PERFORMANCE DETERMINANTS

While there are many factors that determine the performance of a collab-

oration, I highlight some that appear from my and others’ research on

cross-sectoral collaborations of various types to be salient in many suc-

cessful and sustainable strategic alliances between businesses and NGOs

(Austin, 2000; Austin and Reficco et al., 2004):

Clarity and congruency of objectives Ambiguity about purpose causes

confusion, which can lead to disappointment or even conflict. While each

partner will have certain objectives that are specific to their partnering

motivation set, there needs be sufficient overlapping of shared objectives to




create alignment and cohesion. Strong alliances invest significant time up

front to achieve clarity and congruency.

Value generation and distribution Creating value is the focal point of strong collaborations. They know how to use and combine their core

competencies to create distinctive and powerful new value chains. The

partner’s perspective on the process seems particularly important. The

high-performing ones are guided more by the question ‘How can I create

value for my partner?’ than by the question ‘What am I going to get out

of this?’ The result is a virtuous circle of reciprocity that keeps producing

greater value than expected, which in turn raises the value-generation bar

continually.

Capabilities and accountability The partners must have the institutional

capacity to deliver on the proposed value proposition. In some instances,

part of the partnering process has been for one partner to help the other in

the development of those capacities. In the stronger alliances, the partners

set high performance standards and expectations, and then they hold each

other accountable for delivering on them. Good intentions do not suffice in

strategic alliances.

Communication and trust Fluid and frequent communication throughformal and informal channels are essential to avoiding misunderstandings

and ensuring alignment of goals and actions. It is through this interaction

that the social capital of interpersonal relationships gets built. Matching

the words with deeds produces credibility and builds trust. This intangible

asset and the personal chemistry create the organizational glue that creates

alliance cohesion.

Learning and commitment Collaborations are not born; they are built. It

is a continual learning process. As Barbara Gray pointed out in the pre-vious chapter, there are a multitude of barriers that impede the develop-

ment of cross-sector alliances, ranging from diff erent organizational

cultures, control issues, conflicting goals, stereotyping and costs (Crane,

2000; London, Rondinelli and O’Neill, 2005). Consequently, the partners

have to be open to the inevitability of diff erences of all kinds and be com-

mitted to learning how to overcome such challenges in order to learn how

to work together more eff ectively in order to create ever greater value. The

stronger alliances are characterized by a problem-solving attitude. There

is a recognition that problems will arise and errors will be made, and so

the task is to try to deal with them constructively rather thanfleeing from

them.




3.7 CONCLUSION

Business–NGO partnerships are not a panacea for sustainable develop-

ment. And there are those in the environmental community and other seg-ments of the non-profit world who express deep reservations about

collaborating with businesses, as they are perceived as part of the problem

rather than the solution (Milne, Iyer and Gooding-Williams, 1996). So, too,

are there skeptics in the business camp. Nonetheless, there is growing evi-

dence from the proliferation of such partnerships that important contri-

butions to the development process can be realized through collaboration.

The role of the academy is to accelerate its scrutiny of cross-sector part-

nering to deepen our theoretical and applied understanding of the pheno-

mena so that we can contribute to the advancement of the frontiers of knowledge and practice. This chapter, hopefully, has contributed to that

task, but there is more to be done.

In that spirit and as a closing comment on our collective future research

agenda, I raise the following question: is there anything about sustainable

development that creates distinctive dimensions to cross-sector partnering?

The partnering examples I have used in this chapter have been alliances

related to sustainable development. However, the frameworks used, the

analyses presented and the conclusions about performance determinants

stated above are also applicable to and substantiated by business–NGOcollaborations in other social value-creating areas not related to sustainable

development.

Of course, one of the accompanying imperatives and complications

is reaching agreement on what constitutes sustainable development.

Definitions can vary from very narrow environmental foci to much broader

socioeconomic dimensions. The broader the definition, the less likely the

distinctiveness of collaboration processes. At higher levels of abstraction or

conceptualization about the collaboration phenomenon, applicability

tends to become more generalizable. Thus, to discover diff

erences, one poss-ible path of inquiry is to focus on more micro-level, field-based research to

ascertain if there are distinctive characteristics of sustainable development

collaborations that emerge from the very nature of sustainable develop-

ment processes.

Embedded in this research process is comparative analysis, whereby sus-

tainable development collaborations would have to be analyzed against

other types of collaborations. In this regard, one might hypothesize that

sustainable development, particularly environmental components, might

be more likely than other social areas to give rise to conflicting objectives

as companies’ commercial activities might be detrimental to sustainability.

Thus, the barriers to collaboration and the relationship dynamics might




have some distinctiveness. More specifically, one might also hypothesize

that advocacy NGOs will find it more difficult to collaborate with busi-

nesses than service non-profits because their perceived function is to

provide oversight of companies’ activities and to force corrective or pre-ventive actions to adverse business practices. This is illustrated by our

example of the advocacy NGO Global Exchange that pressured Starbucks

on the Fairtrade issue to obtain corrective action; collaboration was simply

not in the NGO’s repertoire. In contrast, Conservation International, a

service NGO, was able to collaborate with the company because combin-

ing resources would lead to superior achievement of the social and insti-

tutional missions. Even some advocacy NGOs in the environmental and

human rights fields among others have actually entered into collaborations

with businesses, which suggests that barriers to collaboration are sur-mountable. Deepening our understanding of how this occurs is an area

meriting further research.

There is much remaining to be discovered. The potential benefits of

cross-sector collaboration have not yet been fully realized. There is urgency

in continuing our research journey.

REFERENCES

Andrioff , J., S. Waddock, B. Husted and S. Rahman (2002), Unfolding StakeholderThinking: Theory, Responsibility and Engagement, Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf.

Austin, J.E. (2000), The Collaboration Challenge. How Non-pro fits and BusinessesSucceed Through Strategic Alliances, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Austin, J.E. and G. Lozano (1999), Mexican Foundation for Rural Development,Harvard Business School Case 9-300-082.

Austin, J. and C. Reavis (2004), Starbucks and Conservation International , HarvardBusiness School Case 9-303-055 rev. 1 April, 2004.

Austin, J. and E. Reficco et al. (2004), Social Partnering in Latin America. LessonsDrawn from Collaborations of Businesses and Civil Society Organizations,

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Berger, I.E., P.H. Cunningham and M.E. Drumwright (2004), ‘Social alliances:

company/non-profit collaboration’, California Management Review, 7(1),58–90.

Child, J. and D. Faulkner (1998), Strategies of Cooperation: Managing Alliances,Networks, and Joint Ventures, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Crane, A. (2000), ‘Culture clash and mediation’, in J. Bendell (ed.), Terms of Endearment, Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf, pp. 163–77.

Gray, B. (1989), Collaborating. Finding Common Ground for Multiparty Problems,San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

London, T., D.A. Rondinelli and H. O’Neill (2005), ‘Strange bedfellows:

alliances between corporations and non-profits’, in O. Shenkar andJ. Reuer (eds), Handbook of Strategic Alliances, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,pp. 353–66.




Milne, G.R., E.S. Iyer and S. Gooding-Williams (1996), ‘Environmental organiz-ation alliance relationships within and across non-profit, business, and govern-ment sectors’, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing , 15(2), 203–15.

Selsky, J.W. and B. Parker (2005), ‘Cross-sector partnerships to address socialissues: challenges to theory and practice’, Journal of Management, 31(6),December, 849–73.




4. Partnership as a means to goodgovernance: towards an evaluationframework

Jennifer M. Brinkerhoff

‘Partnership’ has been a fad in public administration and good governance

practice for some time. The logic of working across sectors and organiz-

ations to maximize available skills, expertise and resources is taken for

granted. Conceptions of what government should be responsible for have

become starting points for discussion, not end points of allocating assign-

ments. While these developments have opened a world of possibilities and

potential innovation, the practice and success of partnership approaches in

contributing to good governance remain stymied by the absence of a

guiding theory that could serve both to inform the rationale for particular

types of partnership approaches and divisions of labor and to ensure

eff ectiveness through rigorous evaluation.

Governance is fundamentally about managing competing interests for

the common good. Broadly construed, governance can be seen as incorpor-

ating and integrating three related components: eff ectiveness, legitimacy

and security (Brinkerhoff , 2007). In the partnership context, this latter

dimension primarily concerns conflict prevention and resolution. To date,

partnership has most commonly been promoted as a means of enhancing

governance eff ectiveness; this is most evident, for example, in the new

public management. Partnership is also a value-laden endeavor, and maybe promoted for purposes of representation and conflict resolution. In

general, individual actors choose to partner for one or more of the follow-

ing four reasons (Brinkerhoff , 2002d):

1. To enhance efficiency and eff ectiveness through a reliance on compara-

tive advantages and a rational division of labor. This entails incre-

mental (though possibly dramatic) improvements in the delivery of

development initiatives.

2. To provide the multi-actor, integrated solutions required by the scopeand nature of the problems being addressed. Without this approach,

the eff ort would be impossible.

68



3. To move from a no-win situation among multiple actors to a compro-

mise and potential win–win situation (i.e., in response to collective

action problems or the need for conflict resolution). It may be possible

to continue without partnership but stakeholders would remaindissatisfied and continue to incur losses.

4. To open decision-making processes to promote a broader operational-

ization of the public good. The normative dimension seeks to maximize

representation and democratic processes; the pragmatic perspective

views this as a means to ensure sustainability.

These rationales have clear implications for good governance beyond

eff ective service delivery, and highlight, in particular, how partnership may

contribute to its legitimacy component, and to managing competing inter-ests and conflict.

Partnership among diverse actors is a mainstay of governance approaches

across technical sectors and policy issues, yet it has not yet been sufficiently

conceptually situated in broader governance frameworks, nor have the

implications of such contextualization for partnership eff ectiveness been

explored. One of the larger questions that remains surprisingly under-

addressed in partnership research is what partnership has to contribute to

improving governance as it is defined in the current dominant paradigm of

good governance.If we intend for our partnership approaches to contribute to improving

governance, we must account for the relational dimensions – as discussed

by Gray and Austin in the foregoing chapters – which can also lend them-

selves to (or against) legitimacy, and to managing competing interests

and conflict. This chapter: (1) revises my previously published partner-

ship evaluation framework (Brinkerhoff , 2002a) to account for a more

explicit assessment of partnership’s contributions to good governance;

(2) examines partnership’s potential contributions to the three facets of

governance – eff

ectiveness, legitimacy and confl

ict management; and(3) suggests assessment targets for each of these. Selected examples illus-

trate partnership’s contribution to improved governance in the environ-

mental sector.

4.1 PARTNERSHIP EVALUATION AND GOODGOVERNANCE: A REVISED FRAMEWORK

Essential to gauging partnership’s contribution to good governance is

a deeper understanding, appreciation and assessment of the relation-

ships among partners and their impact on each of the three governance

Partnership as a means to good governance 69



dimensions. As Ellinger, Keller and Ellinger (2000) found, both interaction

(meetings and information exchange) and collaboration (teamwork,

sharing and the achievement of collective goals) are positively associated

with performance, but, more specifically, collaboration mediates the rela-tionship between interaction and performance. In other words, the nature

of interaction matters. Thus, relationship dynamics are important to eval-

uating any partnership, including those intended to contribute to improved

governance. The proposed evaluation framework examines partnership’s

perceived governance impact and actual governance outcomes, answer-

ing the question: how does the partnership contribute to governance

eff ectiveness, legitimacy and conflict management?

This section adapts my earlier partnership evaluation framework

(Brinkerhoff , 2002a) in light of and for the purpose of gauging part-nership’s contribution to governance eff ectiveness, legitimacy and conflict

management, as summarized in Figure 4.1. The adjusted framework

includes related assessment targets for partnership structure, process and

outcomes.

Because partnership structure is so crucial to governance outcomes, par-

ticularly legitimacy, I have added it as a general area of assessment. I have

also added a feedback loop connecting general success factors and

efficiency to prerequisites. A key component of strategically managing

partnerships is to create and strengthen success factors. The figure illus-trates and confirms that partnerships can be initiated in the absence of

some of the prerequisites and success factors identified in the literature, as

long as these become the subject of development through partnership

processes. This is especially true, for example, for partnerships designed to

mediate among competing interests (see Brinkerhoff , 2002b). Partnerships

may have to prove their worth to contributing stakeholders before stake-


Figure 4.1 Causal chain for partnership’s contributions to good governance

Prerequisites

Partner

Performance

Partnership

Practice

Success

Factors and

Efficiency

Partnership

Structure

Structure Process Outcomes

Outcomes of

Partnership

Relationship:

Effectiveness

Legitimacy

Conflict

management





comparative advantages and a rational division of labor. This entails

incremental (though possibly dramatic) improvements in the delivery of

development initiatives. Second, it can enable actors to address problems

that otherwise would remain beyond the grasp of any one actor owingto scope or complexity. Third, it can foster agreements among compet-

ing or conflicting actors that prevent progress or solution. And, finally,

it can ensure sustainability of eff ectiveness by fostering buy-in among

participants.

North (2004) argues that in order to contribute to economic perform-

ance, or eff ectiveness, partnership must produce supporting incentives

by reducing transactions costs. That is, partnership has potential to

address information asymmetries related to: measuring the costs and

benefits of production and services in order to reduce corruption; pro-tecting individual property rights; enforcing agreements and integrating

knowledge that is dispersed throughout society. Put another way, part-

nership can respond to the three big problems of intelligent institutional

change identified by March and Olsen (1995): conflict (to be discussed

below), ignorance and ambiguity. Picciotto (2004) adds partnership’s

potential to reduce free-riding, particularly in the production of public

goods. Eff ectiveness also can be self-reinforcing. That is, to the extent that

service delivery is eff ective, stakeholders will be more willing to comply

with their expected contributions, hence sustaining eff ectiveness (forexample, in the water and sanitation sector, see Stalker Prokopy and

Komives, 2001).Partnership eff ectiveness is difficult to assess objectively. Lubell (2003)

calls attention to perceived eff ectiveness as a key element in determining

support for various policy-making mechanisms. He applies the advocacy

coalition framework to argue that ‘perceived eff ectiveness is not just a func-

tion of objective costs and benefits, but also whether or not collective de-

cisions are made in a way consistent with the normative preferences defined

by policy-core beliefs’, that is, those regarding policy-making processes andgoals within a particular policy subsystem (p. 310). Perceived eff ectiveness

is more likely to occur where there is less uncertainty (e.g., supportive

scientific research) with respect to the causes and consequences of the prob-

lems and solutions the mechanism addresses. Such values congruence and

related perceptions of eff ectiveness matter because they can become self-

fulfilling prophecies and impact both participants’ willingness to continue

to make committed contributions and other stakeholders’ perceived legit-

imacy and support.

Proposed assessment targets for partnership’s contributions to govern-

ance eff ectiveness are shown in Box 4.1.




Case example: StarTrack

In the environmental sector, multi-sectoral approaches to regulatory re-

form in the United States have enabled the incorporation of flexibility and

incentives for compliance that top-down, government-led, one-size-fits-all

regulatory frameworks could never match. Rigid, one-size-fits-all app-

roaches are a rational response to information asymmetry, but do not yield

the most efficient and eff ective outcomes. For example, the StarTrack

program in New England, United States, is a voluntary third-partycertification program (EPA New England, 1999; 2000). It addresses several

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) eff ectiveness challenges, includ-

ing: insufficient resources to inspect all regulated facilities; the limits of

environmental laws and regulations to address the full range of environ-

mental problems and lack of information and experience for leveraging

private companies’ decisions to implement environmental monitoring

systems to improve environmental quality. Under StarTrack, participating

facilities self-audit their environmental management and compliance

performance; prepare and publish an annual performance report and

submit these audit results for review and certification by an independent

third party every three years. In turn, the facilities receive recognition for

BOX 4.1 PARTNERSHIP CONTRIBUTIONS TOGOVERNANCE EFFECTIVENESS

1. Relationship effectiveness:

● partner contribution compliance;

● meeting respective partner objectives;

● value-added related to effectiveness and efficiency

(necessarily impressionistic with anecdotal evidence).2. Reduction of transaction costs. Enhanced or shared ability to:

● measure the costs and benefits of producing goods and

services;

● protect property rights;● enforce agreements;

● integrate dispersed knowledge;

● reduce free-riding.3. Effectiveness reinforcement:

● perceived effectiveness and willingness to continueexpected contributions;

● availability of scientific knowledge to support decisions.




participation and compliance, modified inspection priority and penalty

mitigation for violations corrected within designated time periods.

Partnership approaches, such as StarTrack, allow environmental regu-

lators to capitalize on incentives for voluntary compliance, with a relianceon industry associations and self-regulation, focusing on setting regu-

latory floors (minimum standards with attention to incentives), as

opposed to enforcing ceilings (see Eisner, 2004). Gains in efficiency and

eff ectiveness derive largely from the partnership between regulators and

industry associations, where these associations can be relied upon to tailor

regulatory standards to industry specifications (addressing information

asymmetries), supplement funding and attention to compliance and tech-

nical assistance, enhance responsiveness of regulations to industry needs

and enforce compliance through industry codes that set the standard formembership.

4.3 PARTNERSHIP CONTRIBUTIONS TOGOVERNANCE LEGITIMACY

There is increasing attention, including formal research, focusing on the

relationship of partnership to legitimacy. The good governance paradigm

seemed to assume that partnership approaches would yield expanded par-ticipation, which would automatically yield increased accountability.

Instead, as Glasbergen has shown in the first chapter of this book, ironic-

ally, partnership can be the source of legitimacy challenges. Indeed, audi-

tors have raised concerns about accountability, transparency and the public

interest with regard to new governance mechanisms (Bemelmans-Videc,

2003). Legitimacy derives from (1) structure: notably, who participates?

(2) process: how do they participate? and (3) outcomes: are promises kept

and expectations met?

Wälti et al. (2004) review arguments that the new governance paradigmmay actually close the space available for accountability. They find that,

while there is a rationale for these critical arguments, new governance

mechanisms do not automatically lead to unaccountable outcomes

and perceived illegitimacy. They cite potential challenges to democratic

quality deriving from two sources. First, deliberative critics argue that

new governance models bring public decision-making into expanded

technocratic spheres, where participation is limited to selected, unelected

technical experts who are not accountable to the general public. Not only

is this potentially undemocratic, it may also be ineff ective: ‘the more citi-

zens regard public policies as products of a deliberative process among

equals rather than outcomes of sheer power relations, the more likely they




accept them’ (ibid., p. 93). Wälti et al. (2004) explore the deliberativeness

of these new mechanisms according to their relationship to traditional

forms of public legitimation, including participation of elected officials,

participants’attitudes vis à vis public debate (i.e., necessary and legitimateversus noisy and unhelpful), links to political control (e.g., through

executive agencies or the legislature) and incorporation of referenda

processes.

Second, participatory critics believe that the new governance models may

limit the breadth of citizen participation and thus inhibit community

organization and solidarity. Expanded participation is an important end in

itself as it presents opportunities for learned citizenship and the emergence

and reinforcement of social cohesion. Wälti et al. (2004) find that when

partnership represents an expansion of participation, rent-seeking by a fewmay be reduced. But expanded or unlimited participation is not always

desirable. They point out that participation can also be managed so as to

combat the ‘tyranny of the majority’, that is, to overcome societal biases

and limited technical understandings, and to secure the voice of the under-

privileged and under-represented. As a caveat they argue, ‘it cannot be

legitimate to include or discourage actors simply because they do not

adhere to the dominant policy paradigm’ (Wälti et al., 2004, p. 106).

A key factor in governance legitimacy is democratic accountability.

Skelcher (2005) stresses that in democratic systems ‘citizens are enabled togive consent to and pass judgment on the exercise of authority’ (p. 89). A

fundamental requirement, then, is exit and voice (Hirschman, 1970).

Legitimacy is challenging in polycentric governance mechanisms pre-

cisely because the lines of authority are not clear. In the absence of gen-

erally accepted rules and norms, related institutions emerge as ad hoc

designs tailored to specific circumstances, yielding problematic results for

legitimacy, consent and accountability. Skelcher (2005) reviews a range of

legitimacy, consent and accountability approaches, linked to various

structures. Legitimacy can derive from and accountability may bedirected toward: members of a partnership, determined by member

assessments of cost–benefit ratios; government mandates and perform-

ance results or constituencies, deliberative processes and performance

results. He also promotes a consociational approach, where legiti-

macy and accountability are grounded in representation, and consent is

based on ‘mutual adjustment and nonviolation of entities’ core values’

(Skelcher, 2005, p. 105).

One of the perennial challenges to accountability of partnerships is

not just the how, but the who. To whom should various partnerships

be accountable? The literature and practice in all sectors concur that at a

minimum internal accountability – that is, among the partners – is one




component. But as noted above, if partnership is to contribute to good

governance, external accountability (and to more than just funders) is also

necessary. As Skelcher’s (2005) alternatives suggest, external accountability

can be targeted either directly to citizens (e.g., direct and open partici-pation, such as through polity-forming mechanisms) or indirectly to citi-

zens (through government agency mechanisms mandated by government,

sometimes with the participation of elected officials). Internal accountabil-

ity entails an emphasis on compliance, suggesting bureaucratic (rules, pro-

cedures, role descriptions) and market (e.g., contracts) mechanisms of

control, which allow for exit. Together, these are the foundation for pre-

dictability in the operational processes of the partnership.

Three types of accountability are relevant for both internal and exter-

nal accountability: (1) financial (the intended and actual use of financialresources); (2) performance (meeting agreed-upon performance targets)

and (3) political (rewarding and sanctioning partnership participants,

systems of checks and balances between the partnership and govern-

ment, fulfillment of mandate promises and public trust and ensuring the

aggregation and representation of citizens’ interests) (Brinkerhoff , 2006,

as modified with respect to partnerships). As a source of internal

accountability, Cheema (2003) includes administrative accountability, or

internal standards, incentives and ethics codes. External legitimacy

derives from both internal (among partners) and external transparency.Transparency refers to open processes of reporting, review and decision-

making.In seeking to address the legitimacy challenges of new governance

models, Barrados (2004) reviews essential elements of a governance frame-

work as proposed by the Canadian Auditor General (1999). The framework

calls specific attention to accountability (subdivided into reporting and

accountability mechanisms), transparency and the protection of the public

interest. Reporting encompasses publicly available statements regarding

the partnership’s public objectives, performance expectations and measure-ment and reporting on progress (Barrados, 2004, p. 131). Barrados (2004)

elaborates on the framework in her discussion of accountability mecha-

nisms, which encourage transparency of both structure and process,

including:

● clear roles and responsibilities of each of the parties involved;

● realistic performance expectations, given the resources, personnel

and authorities of the new arrangement;

● well-defined management structure, for example, corporate boards,

professional management and financial controls;

● appropriate monitoring regime;




● partner dispute-resolution mechanisms;

● procedures to deal with non-performance;

● specific evaluation and audit provisions; and

● appropriate audit regime (paraphrased from pp. 131–3).

Also under this framework, transparency should encompass public access

to information, and communication of information on key policies and

decisions (ibid., p. 133). Finally, with respect to the public interest, such

arrangements should include: citizen complaint and redress mechanisms,

public consultation and feedback mechanisms and policies to promote per-

tinent public sector values (e.g., fairness, impartiality, equity, honesty, pru-

dence and openness), as perhaps outlined in codes of conduct and conflict

of interest (ibid., pp. 133–4).Proposed assessment targets for partnership’s contributions to govern-

ance legitimacy are shown in Boxes 4.2 and 4.3.

BOX 4.2 PARTNERSHIP CONTRIBUTIONS TOGOVERNANCE LEGITIMACY

1. Ties to traditional forms of public legitimation:● Participation of elected officials.

● Presence of sunshine clauses, ranging from decision-

making participation to voice to observation.

● Attitude vis à vis public debate (i.e., legitimate consider-

ation or superfluous noise).

● Presence of accountability to government structures or

independent rulings (political control).

● Presence of referenda processes (i.e., citizen recourse).

2. Polity/Community (e.g., who participates?):● Do all relevant actors have a voice?

● Is the participation of the under-represented or under-

privileged increased?

● Are particularistic interests overcome?

● Opportunities for enhancing solidarity and citizenshiplearning.

3. How do they participate?

● Compliance with participation rules, for example, repre-sentation, consultation, participation in implementation,

participation in decision-making.




BOX 4.3 ACCOUNTABILITY MECHANISMASSESSMENT TARGETS (AREPROMISES KEPT ANDEXPECTATIONS MET?)

1. Giving an account:

● Structure:

– clear public statements re: public objectives and keystrategies;

– public statements of performance expectations;

– publicly available description of roles and responsi-

bilities of each party;– well-defined management structure (e.g., financial

controls, decision-making authority, legal identity and

liability);– presence of partner dispute-resolution mechanisms;

– procedures to deal with non-performance;– evaluation and audit provisions;– appropriate audit regime;

● Process:

– appropriate measurement and reporting on progress;● Outcomes:

– reporting outcomes.

2. Holding to account (compliance):

● financial accountability;

● performance accountability;

● political accountability (e.g., checks and balances,rewarding and sanctioning participants, fulfillment of

public mandates, ensuring aggregation and represen-

tation of citizens’ interests);● administrative accountability (e.g., internal standards,

incentives, ethics codes).

3. Direction of accountability:

● members/partners;

● government agencies;

● citizens;

● beneficiaries.




Case example: Sustainability North West

Shaw and Kidd (2001) provide an example of an environmental partnership

structure that contributes to governance legitimacy. Sustainability North

West is a multi-sectoral partnership that promotes sustainable developmentin the North West region of England. Its leaders are drawn from all sectors

and the organization evolved from local tradition and experience with legit-

imated environmental partnerships. The partnership took as its starting

point the vision of existing publicly and government-endorsed plans, the

North West Regional Economic Strategy and the Regional Planning

Guidance, with explicit goals to support government-mandated structures

and agencies, the Regional Assembly and the North West Development

Agency. Staff are drawn from existing active environmental voluntary

organizations, and it maintains a sector-representative board of directorsand a board of advisors with links to key regional government agencies.

Shaw and Kidd (2001) argue that this structure has earned the credibility of

citizens and direct stakeholders alike, and was particularly important in a

region with otherwise deep problems of social exclusion. The multi-sectoral

and representative organizational structure enabled Sustainability North

West to explore the meaning, implications and associated activities sup-

portive of sustainable development from a range of perspectives ‘relatively

free of the economic, political and institutional constraints facing many

public and private sector organizations’ (ibid., p. 122).

4.4 MANAGING COMPETING INTERESTSAND CONFLICT

This is perhaps the least studied governance dimension vis à vis partnership

contributions. Yet partnership’s contributions in this arena should be high-

lighted: without attention to conflict prevention and management, we do

not gain a comprehensive appreciation for partnership’s potential role incontributing to good governance more generally and we continue to lack

meaningful criteria for its assessment. Such an understanding and the use

of related criteria can help to inform potential trade-off decisions regard-

ing the three dimensions of governance and between partnership and

alternative approaches.

First, it is important to identify the ultimate target of partnership’s con-

tribution in this area. While partnership can serve to prevent conflict, it

does not necessarily eliminate latent conflict. Diff erences in interests, goals

and attitudes constitute sources of latent conflict; these are unavoidable in

any society. It is violent action that makes conflict manifest. The aim of

conflict prevention is to reduce the likelihood that conflict will become




manifest through violent action. Mobilizing individuals to violent action

entails a change in their psychological state. Northrup (1989) identifies four

stages in this process: (1) perception of threat; (2) distortion of infor-

mation; (3) rigid interpretations of the world (4) and dehumanization of other. Thus, in general, partnership potentially contributes to conflict pre-

vention and management by reducing the likelihood that latent conflict will

become manifest through reducing stakeholders’ perceptions of threat,

providing access to more complete and verifiable information, fostering

more flexible and tolerant interpretations of the world and encouraging

recognition of common ground with others.

Conflict is at the very heart of governance. In his thoughtful essay, ‘Social

conflicts as pillars in democratic market society’, Hirschman (1994, p. 209)

cites Rustow (1970) (among others) who strongly argued that democracyhas generally come into existence not because people wanted this form of

government or because they had achieved a wide consensus on ‘basic

values’ but because various groups had been at each other’s throats for a

long time and finally came to recognize their mutual inability to gain dom-

inance and the need for some accommodation. That is, the common good

that binds citizens in a polity is not one that emerges from deliberation, but

is the process of deliberation itself. Hirschman explores and nuances what

he calls the Dubiel-Gauchet hypothesis: that social conflicts produce valu-

able ties that hold modern democratic societies together (Dubiel, 1990;1991; 1993), and conflict is ‘an essential factor of socialization’ producing

integration and cohesion (Gauchet, 1980; see also Rödel, 1990). These

processes yield a ‘democratic miracle’ (ibid.), where ‘human beings and

social groups go through all the motions of out-and-out confrontation

and end up building in this odd manner a cohesive democratic order’

(Hirschman, 1994, p. 206).

Hirschman goes on to signal the need for – and make a contribution to –

the distinction of types of conflict that can yield this fortuitous result. He

argues that in a pluralist market society, demands are based on both self-interest and ‘genuine concern for the public good’, yielding both bargain-

ing and arguing (Hirschman, 1994, p. 212). This is consistent with the dual

concern model, whereby stakeholders seek to balance concern for others’

outcomes with concerns for their own, and where concern for others’ out-

comes may become instrumental, that is, ultimately serving one’s own inter-

ests (Rubin, Pruitt and Kim, 1994). Furthermore, he distinguishes between

more-or-less oriented conflicts and all-or-nothing ones, and highlights the

importance of perceptions of temporary versus once-and-for-all solutions

for the likelihood of manifest conflict. In market societies, he argues,

conflict tends to be of the more-or-less type (despite periodic claims other-

wise), yielding an impression that solutions are context- and time-specific




and that the debate can be reopened as needed. In sum, Hirschman

identifies three characteristics of conflict conducive to the ‘pillars of demo-

cratic society’: (1) frequent and diverse, making learning possible; (2) divis-

ible with potential for compromise and bargaining; and, as a consequence,(3) yielding perceptions that solutions can be revisited. Hirschman also

calls attention to the role of cross-cutting cleavages.

Drawing from the literature on ethnic conflict, Chandra (2001) calls for

a nuanced understanding of identity, which assumes instability in group

boundaries and preferences. Privileging a single dimension of identity

‘might over time destroy the capacity to organize politics along other

dimensions’ (Chandra, 2001, p. 350). Crossed categorization, where group

membership is shared or overlaps, reduces bias and hence polarization

among groups because it: (1) increases the complexity of social categoriz-ation; (2) decreases the importance of any one in-group/out-group distinc-

tion; (3) highlights the fact that the out-group consists of diff erent

subgroups; (4) increases classification of others in terms of multiple dimen-

sions; and (5) increases the degree of interpersonal interaction and trust

across category boundaries (Brewer, 2000; see also Hewstone, Rubin and

Willis, 2002). Furthermore, cross-cutting cleavages prevent conflict because

‘they create multiple loyalties, mutual dependencies, and common interests’

(Coser, 1956 quoted in Leatherman et al., 1999, p. 59).

Social capital, particularly bridging social capital, is also relevant toconflict and security. Continuing to draw lessons from ethnic conflict litera-

ture, the absence of social networks across groups can lead to tension and

distrust among groups (Fearon and Laitin, 1996). Varshney (2001) posits

that when exogenous shocks, tensions or rumors lead to intra-group

engagement, the common result is inter-group violence; but when these

lead to inter-group engagement the result may be inter-group peace.

Partnership approaches represent just this type of inter-group engagement.

Bridging social capital emphasizes heterogeneous networks, where mem-

bers have greater opportunities to access information and understandingbeyond their current intra-group resources (see, for example, Burt, 2000).

Through repeat interaction and the discovery of shared needs and interests,

bridging social capital prevents the dehumanization of ‘other’ (see, for

example, Northrup, 1989; Rubin et al., 1994).

In their examination of governance mechanisms for drug policy in

Switzerland, Wälti et al. (2004) present anecdotal evidence to suggest that

‘governance mechanisms may channel particularistic requests and create

the preconditions for reasoned and informed decisions that call for

common sacrifices in favor of stigmatized groups’ (p. 105). Or as March

and Olsen (1995) put it, ‘Clashes among private interests may be trans-

formed by deliberation into a question of what is good for the community




and acceptable in it’ (p. 84). But such outcomes rest on inclusive – or legit-

imate – processes: ‘Provided that they are sufficiently inclusive, governance

mechanisms enhance deliberative reflection and prevent participants from

acting without sufficient consideration of the consequences for others’(Wälti et al., 2004, p. 105). Wälti et al. (2004) add that lack of political

acceptance or even citizen protest about partnership outcomes is not a

good indicator for lack of public accountability. In fact, high public protest

might instead suggest that public deliberation and debate are underway in

the public sphere. Furthermore, sharp disagreements may eventually yield

more resilient solutions and agreements than superficial and premature

consensus.

Papadopoulos (2000) rightly warns that partnership approaches could

just as easily intensify conflict as actors may discover that conflicts aremore numerous and deeper than previously assumed. This realism sug-

gests that partnerships that bring together potentially conflicting parties

may demonstrate a bell curve in terms of intensity and range of conflict.

That is, one might expect a growth in conflict intensity and range as parties

come to understand the issues and respective actors and interests better,

but these are likely to diminish through continued deliberation. In fact,

in reflecting on the experience of Ireland’s social partnership, which

yielded its Celtic Tiger status, a former Director of the National Economic

and Social Council stated, ‘Partnership involves the players in a processof deliberation that has the potential to shape and reshape their under-

standing, identity and preferences. . . . This suggests that rather than being

a precondition for partnership, consensus and shared understanding are

more like an outcome’ (O’Donnell, 1998, p. 27 quoted in House and

McGrath, 2004).

Proposed assessment targets for partnership’s contributions to managing

competing interest and conflict are shown in Box 4.4.

Case example: World Commission on DamsIn the environmental sector, the World Commission on Dams represented

a partnership as a social network mediator for resolving a global conflict

(Brinkerhoff , 2002c). The issues involved in large dam projects are complex

and varied, entailing technical (engineering and geological), socio-cultural

(resettlement, cultural heritage), environmental, economic/financial, moral

(human rights) and political dimensions. It is clear that no one stakeholder

commands the necessary skills and information to understand and incor-

porate all of these. The history of conflict over large dam projects includes

murder, willful life-threatening protest, international campaigns both on

environmental and human rights grounds, resultant stoppage of dam pro-

jects and calls for the decommissioning of dams.




Building on a shared dissatisfaction with the status quo, diverse stake-

holders agreed to support a World Commission on Dams (WCD) to

develop standards, criteria and guidelines to inform future decision-

making. The WCD was comprised of 12 members, with an internationally

recognized chairperson. The commissioners represented varied perspec-

tives but were expected to shed their institutional affiliations in order to


BOX 4.4 PARTNERSHIP CONTRIBUTIONS TOMANAGING COMPETING INTERESTSAND CONFLICT

1. Provision of forums for exchange and mutual learning:

● reducing stakeholders’ perceptions of threat;

● providing access to more complete and verifiableinformation;

● fostering more flexible and tolerant interpretations of theworld;

● encouraging recognition of common ground with others;

● supporting bridging social capital.2. Nature of conflict:

● self-interest and common good;

● repeated conflict interactions (for trust building and

learning);

● more-or-less versus all-or-nothing (conducive to com-

promise and bargaining);

● perceptions that solutions can be revisited (process inplace).

3. Identity construction:● emphasizes common identities;

● respects diversity;

● multiple loyalties;

● mutual dependencies;

● access to information and understanding beyond intra-

group offerings.4. Interest outcomes:

● growing attention to common good over particularistic

interests;● public protests that confirm deliberation is under way;

● bell curve of conflict intensity and range.



overcome the conflict among positions, and to create a new spirit for the

work to be carried out by the ‘team’ (Liebenthal, 1999). Activities centered

on building a knowledge base, implementing an elaborate communi-

cations action plan, and developing the final report. The work was guidedby principles of consultation, inclusion and transparency, with a pro-

cess designed around two concepts: independence from vested interests

and balance in terms of perspectives represented (including sources of

financial support) (WCD, 1999). The WCD encountered much conflict

among stakeholder groups both in its start up and implementation. The

final report (WCD, 2000) acknowledged ‘deep fault lines’ that continue to

separate dam critics and proponents but nevertheless proposed a new

framework for decision-making, which emphasizes environmental and

social costs and introduces an inclusive ‘rights and risks’ approach thatpromotes identifying and including all stakeholders in negotiating devel-

opment choices.

4.5 INTERDEPENDENCE AND TRADE-OFFS

In isolation, partnership’s contributions to each of the governance dimen-

sions is relatively straightforward. However, these contributions, and

the dimensions themselves, are interdependent, at times mutually re-inforcing and at others, generating trade-off s. For example, perceptions of

transactions costs reduction and absence of free-riding (eff ectiveness

enablers) produce legitimacy. Similarly, transparency contributes both to

eff ectiveness and legitimacy. As noted above, eff ectiveness can be reinforc-

ing when it incentivizes stakeholders to remain committed to their

expected contributions. And conflict management contributions are not

possible without perceived legitimacy of the eff ort. Because of these

interdependencies, some assessment targets may inform all three types of

partnership’s governance contributions (eff

ectiveness, legitimacy andconflict management).

The trade-off s are often more readily recognized than the reinforcements

because of the challenges they present. Efficiency and eff ectiveness may be

enhanced by limiting the range of participation but this has trade-off s for

legitimacy in terms of accountability and democratic participation. It

furthermore limits opportunities for learned citizenship and social co-

hesion (contributors to the conflict management dimension). Moe (2001)

argues that quasi-governmental structures are sometimes selected precisely

because they have limited accountability, which aff ords greater attention

and prioritization to performance and results in the achievement of the

desired policy (Moe, 2001 quoted in Skelcher, 2005). Indeed, partnership




approaches are often couched in the language of entrepreneurism. Skelcher

points out that such a stance reduces transparency of decisions at the core

to emphasize instead the reporting of results. Caplan (2003) explicitly

emphasizes the trade-off s between accountability and innovation, puttingeach at respective ends of a continuum used for designing partnerships. He

notes that these are not mutually exclusive, though partnerships at any one

time tend to lean more in one direction than the other. A challenge, then,

is to strike a design that meets the context-specific needs for responsiveness

and flexibility on the one hand, and grievance mechanisms, results and

institutional buy-in on the other.

4.6 SOME COMMENTS ON METHODOLOGY

Those most interested in assessing governance implications of partnership

approaches may not be the participants themselves, or such an interest may

not be equally shared among them. Therefore, this discussion, the causal

chain and proposed assessment targets are off ered as a starting point from

which more precise indicators and assessment instruments may be devel-

oped jointly with participants or by independent evaluators. Given the

emphasis on governance and governance outcomes, a wider range of

methods will be needed, including stakeholder surveys and focus groups. Athorough assessment of partnership’s contribution to good governance will

also require comparison of selected assessment targets to baseline data. All

of these methods would need to be tailored to the specific objectives and

context of a particular partnership and to priority issues and questions

with respect to its contributions to good governance.

An important caveat, noted in my earlier framework, remains important.

Because many benefits of partnership work derive from the relationship

itself, and because all relationships are dynamic, partnership assessment

should be seen as an evolving process. While movement is not automaticallyuni-directional (i.e., always leading towards a positive direction) the poten-

tial for partnership’s added-value tends to develop over time and experi-

ence. This means that partnership cannot be expected to yield immediate

results, though this may occur. More likely, it is as partners become more

familiar with each other’s strengths, weaknesses, operations and represen-

tatives that synergistic rewards will emerge. This process not only entails an

increase in mutual understanding, but also trust building.

Since partnerships are dynamic, they have the potential to yield diff erent

costs and benefits at diff erent stages of their development. Furthermore,

as they become more eff ective and institutionalized relationships, one

should expect a gradual shift in emphasis within the partnership work, from




being activity-driven to becoming more strategic, looking and planning for

opportunities to yield synergistic rewards. This caveat suggests humility

in the expectations of what partnership can deliver in the short term, and

the need for diligence in ensuring that partnership dynamism moves in apositive direction, toward greater understanding, trust and consequent

efficiencies. It also confirms the need to revisit and possibly redesign assess-

ment indicators and processes periodically.

4.7 CONCLUSION

Partnership is often promoted as if it were a panacea to all ills, whether to

solve a particular policy or service delivery challenge, or, more generally, asimplicit evidence of improved governance. Its practice is consistent with the

dominant good governance paradigm that views government as a facili-

tator of private initiative, steering rather than rowing. Yet little evidence

exists that partnership’s outcomes meaningfully contribute to improved

governance outcomes. No systematic eff ort has been made to examine

governance consequences of partnership, particularly in terms of gover-

nance legitimacy and security.

Further specification and application of the framework can yield better

understandings of how to attain improved governance and, specifically, howpartnership may or may not be a contributing factor. Through experience

and in context-specific applications, indicators can be identified and refined.

Framework applications could enable quantitative analysis of component

correlations. For example, to what extent is the degree of partnership cor-

related with perceptions of legitimacy and conflict outputs? How important

are prerequisite/facilitating factors to governance outcomes?

This chapter has sought to contribute to our continuing eff orts to

improve governance, in this instance, through identifying criteria for assess-

ing partnership’s potential contributions. While good governance contin-ues to be hailed as the most important outcome of development and

political processes, general understandings of how to attain it, especially

through active interventions, remain focused on interventions that are

specifically designed to meet this objective. Yet, there is a much wider range

of possibilities to improve governance. Indeed, it may be that good govern-

ance is best achieved through deliberations that center on established con-

cerns, rather than to try to create momentum artificially behind targeted

programming. Issues around which stakeholders are already compelled to

act may be the best entry points for promoting good governance. This

chapter builds upon a limited body of knowledge that seeks to support

these broader perspectives on good governance. Notably, D. Brinkerhoff




(2000) outlined the possible linkages between sector reform eff orts and

democratic governance promotion. Partnership is an additional approach

for operationalizing these synergies.

Beyond this more general contribution, the chapter calls attention topartnership’s contributions to all three governance dimensions and sug-

gests associated assessment criteria. Attending to the full range of part-

nership’s potential role in furthering good governance may:

1. increase partnership’s desirability as a mechanism for policy and

program design and implementation;

2. call attention to trade-off s among governance dimensions and, by

extension, alternative approaches; and

3. enable actors to better capitalize on these contributions, improving part-

nership’s eff ectiveness, legitimacy and conflict management outcomes.

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PART 2

Partnerships as governance mechanisms:the instrumental perspective





5. Enabling environmentalpartnerships: the role of goodgovernance in Madagascar’s forestsector1

Derick W. Brinkerhoff

In today’s world, loss of forest cover, shrinking biodiversity, climate change

and increased global competition for natural resources (e.g., fossil fuels,

water, minerals) have all heightened awareness of the importance of

environment and natural resources (ENR) policies and management.

Developing and developed countries alike confront the need for sustainable

resource use. The challenges are particularly acute for the developing

world, where large numbers of people are directly dependent upon natural

resources for their livelihoods, poverty is widespread and state ENR man-agement capacity deficits are large.

In light of these challenges, a major analytic focus has been upon policy

regimes and institutional arrangements that support the sustainable man-

agement of common property resources. These arrangements bring

together state and non-state actors in partnerships for resources manage-

ment. Researchers have built an extensive literature on local management

of common property resources (e.g., forests, fisheries, rangeland, coastal

zones and irrigation water). Many developing countries, assisted by inter-

national donors, have experimented with such partnerships and havedevolved some control over resources to local users.

Capitalizing on the full potential of these partnerships, however, requires

attention to larger questions of state–society relations and governance.

This is an area where the natural resources co-management literature has

less to say, constituting what Agrawal (2001) identifies as an analytic gap.

This chapter looks at the role of state actors in ENR partnerships, focus-

ing on how governance enables cross-sectoral collaboration. Employing

concepts from good governance, the chapter develops a framework for

analyzing how government can support environmental partners in manag-ing resources sustainably. The chapter applies the framework to ongoing

reforms in the forest service (DGEF: Direction Générale des Eaux et

93



Forêts) in Madagascar, and assesses the challenges involved in the govern-

ance changes necessary to enable eff ective ENR partnerships. The chapter

concludes with some lessons from Madagascar’s experience that are appli-

cable to other countries and contexts.

5.1 TRENDS IN ENVIRONMENT AND NATURALRESOURCES POLICY

An examination of ENR policy evolution in developing countries reveals

two overarching trends. The first is decreased reliance on control-oriented

policies, which involves a move away from exclusive reliance on centralized

regulation and proscriptive policies toward a broader array of incentives,including market-based regulation. The second is increased participation

of resource users in policy decisions and resource management, reflected in

devolved partnerships that share ENR responsibilities between central and

local levels. These policy shifts increase the potential for partnerships

between state and non-state actors to serve as steering mechanisms for

ENR management by reducing the reliance on command and control, and

by increasing user participation. Figure 5.1 summarizes these trends and

the following sections provide elaborating discussion.

Although the matrix identifies four distinct quadrants for purposes of illustration, the two dimensions are in reality more accurately thought of

as continua. Thus, as user participation increases, reliance on command

94 Partnerships as governance mechanisms

Figure 5.1 Typology of ENR policy strategies

Extent of User Participation

Lower Higher

H i g h

e r

I

Resource protection

Centralized regulatoryenforcement and policing

II

Resource co-management

Decentralized regulatory enforcement, joint local authority and community

policing

R e l i a n c e o n C o m m a n d a n d C o n

t r o l P o l i c i e s

L o w e r

III

Resource pricing

Market-based incentives and

enforcement, centralized

regulation and monitoring

IV

Resource self-management

Local user-determined rules,

community monitoring and

enforcement



and control decreases; the relative degrees of increase and decrease allow

for a wide range of policy expression in practice.

Decreased Reliance on Command and Control

Developing countries have traditionally relied heavily on regulatory and

administrative policy strategies for environmental and resource manage-

ment, which face serious constraints on their eff ectiveness. The limitations

of centralized regulatory approaches are both operational, that is, emerg-

ing from the implementation and management burden they impose, and

structural, deriving from the incentive structures they create for regulators

and regulated inherent in the rules and regulations. Turning to the oper-

ational weaknesses first: command and control strategies emphasize regu-lation, impose quantitative restrictions on resource use or pollution

outputs and require screening of investments for environmental impacts.

These tasks are administratively intensive, and they place a premium on

information, communication, data collection and analysis. In addition, to

work appropriately, they require flexibility for adaptation to local con-

ditions. Yet in many countries this critical adaptationstep hasnot been taken.

Given the well-documented capacity deficits of developing country public

sectors, the reliance on command and control strategies, administered by

centralized agencies, has not resulted in eff ective environmental manage-ment, despite the existence of a legal framework. Morell and Poznanski’s

observation of 20 years ago remains broadly applicable today:

many of the statutes, laws, and regulations in developing countries containadmirable rhetoric: strong environmental goals, relatively strict standards,actions designed to alleviate ecological damage and avoid new environmentalproblems. In reality, however, enforcement of these laws has been weak or non-existent, particularly in rural areas. (Morell and Poznanski, 1985, p. 139)

These agencies, like the rest of the public sector, tend to be overly hierarch-ical, starved for budgets, inadequately staff ed and highly centralized. While

there isanappropriate role forregulationandlaw enforcementaspartof any

national strategy for ENR policy management, many analysts and prac-

titioners highlight the constraint that weak implementation capacity poses,

and note in particular the perverse incentives created when governments

pursue command and control policies without regard for their ability to

implement.

There are also structural limitations to the regulatory approach to ENR

policy, which is embodied in systems of rules and regulations that are essen-

tially proscriptive, imposing penalties and fines for violations. The emphasis

is on ‘don’ts’ rather than ‘dos’ or ‘mays’. Where administrative and political

Enabling environmental partnerships 95



factors lead to selective and spotty enforcement, policy implementation

opens the door to distortion of incentives as users seek to circumvent regu-

lations, and to corruption as enforcers engage in rent-seeking.

Increased Participation of Resource Users

The second ENR policy trend is in the direction of expanded involvement

of stakeholders in policy decisions and implementation. Participation has

long been recognized as instrumental for the achievement of development

objectives, particularly poverty reduction. Numerous studies cite the cen-

trality of local participation to sustainable resource utilization decisions

and practices (Shaikh et al., 1988; Chopra et al., 1990). This policy trend

has led to a gradual inclusion of economics, agriculture and social ser-vices into ENR in recognition of the fact that resource users do not com-

partmentalize their lives; thus resource conservation strategies must

incorporate sustainable livelihood considerations. On the implementation

side, this trend has led to experimentation with ENR partnership

arrangements to take advantage of the unique knowledge and capacities

of local people, and to achieve synergistic outcomes (McNeely, 1995;

Agrawal and Gibson, 1999; Agrawal, 2001; Shackleton et al., 2002;

Berkes, 2004).

The trend in addressing administrative capacity gaps in public-sectorENR agencies has been to establish partnership arrangements in which

certain implementation functions are devolved to NGOs, NGO associ-

ations, local communities, and/or private firms. One of the major forces

pushing for such partnerships is the lack of government capacity to

implement ENR programs eff ectively. The performance record of devel-

oping country public agencies in promoting sustainable NR conservation

and management is, with a few exceptions, uniformly poor. While some

ENR policy functions must necessarily reside with the state, others can

be accomplished by non-state entities. The record is clear that withoutengaging resource users in ENR management, the state alone cannot

successfully protect and manage ENR; this is the core rationale for

partnerships.

In broad terms, environmental partnerships that bring together state

and non-state actors can be defined as interactions designed to achieve

resource protection and sustainable use objectives through the combined

eff orts of both sets of actors, but where the roles and responsibilities of

each remain distinct. The objective of these partnerships is to produce

more and/or better results than if the partners operated independently; in

short, to create synergistic eff ort. To make this happen, it is important that

objectives be clearly and mutually specified; that there are appropriate






than simply government actors in the public sector. Non-state actors – the

private sector and civil society – have important roles to play. Further, the

practical manifestations of governance choices emerge from political

decisions and the exercise of political power. These choices are then oper-

ationalized in policies, institutions, rules and regulations. Figure 5.2 illus-

trates this definition, and highlights the diff erent roles that public, private

and civil society actors play in governance.

Figure 5.2 captures in visual shorthand the dominant good governancemodel that undergirds the worldwide governance reform movement. In

terms of economics, the model confirms the market as the primary organ-

izing principle of societies. Government’s role is to assure sound macro-

economic policy, maintain the rule of law and enforcement of property

rights, develop a market-supporting regulatory framework and promote

private-sector investment.

Administratively, the model advocates a downsized government that pro-

vides basic services and infrastructure efficiently and eff ectively, through a

combination of direct provision, contracting out and partnership with the

private sector and NGOs. Public administration is decentralized, res-

ponsive, flexible and participatory to bring the state and citizens closer


Figure 5.2 Governance framework

Private

Sector

Public Sector

Civil Society

Private Sector

Major source of

economic growth,opportunity and

employment

Partner with public

sector for service

delivery

Public Sector Steering

and Regulating

Government enablesprovision of:

Public services

Citizen welfare

Economic opportunity

With delivery by:

Public agencies

NGOs

Private sector

Civil Society

Voluntarism

Voice and advocacy

Aggregation of citizen interests

‘Watch-dog’



together. These features increase efficiency and eff ectiveness, as well as

off ering citizens a stronger voice in governance.

The political dimension of the model focuses on democratic governance

mechanisms, including selection of political leadership through elections,accountability and integrity systems, conflict resolution and consensus-

building institutions and procedures. Democratic governance addresses

social equity and inclusiveness, management of diversity, broad-based

legitimacy and protection of vulnerable groups. It seeks to open the policy

and resource allocation processes beyond closed circles of elites, and

devolve meaningful authority to local bodies that are accessible to citizens.

Although there is some variation in the details of how the model is con-

ceived and applied, the elements or principles of good governance are rela-

tively consistent, as identified by most analysts. The following list representsa widely accepted set of components:

1. rule of law;

2. transparency and a free flow of information;

3. accountability;

4. eff ective management of public resources;

5. control of corruption; and

6. citizen participation.

Table 5.1 off ers specifics on each of these elements.

One approach to measuring governance is assessment of the extent to

which a country’s governance processes fulfill (or fail to fulfill) the prin-

ciples of good governance. This approach has been widely used by inter-

national donors and international NGOs. For example, the World Bank has

devoted intense eff ort to developing comparative rankings of countries on

governance scores, and the US government’s Millennium Challenge

Corporation (MCC) has adopted a rating scheme to qualify countries for

assistance that incorporates – besides indicators related to ‘investing inpeople’ and ‘economic freedom’ – a set of governance indicators in a cat-

egory the MCC calls ‘ruling justly’ (www.mca.gov). Well-known indexes

that focus on international comparisons of key elements of good govern-

ance include Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index,

and Freedom House’s Democracy and Freedom Audits. These types of

scorecards are used both to make comparisons across countries and to track

individual countries’ improvements (or declines) over time.

Worldwide experience in the ENR sector clearly demonstrates how fail-

ures to meet the criteria for good governance, as embodied in the list of

components – for example, inappropriate and/or misapplied rules and

regulations, opaque procedures, unaccountable and weak institutions and




high levels of corruption – can erode valuable natural assets, fail to support

sustainable use and increase the vulnerability of the poor (e.g., Roy and

Tisdell, 1998; Barrett et al., 2001). Many countries have undertaken policy

reforms to reduce the dominance of the public sector in ENR governance

in favor of increased partnering with the private sector and with local

communities, and to revise the role of government agencies, such as forest

services, toward facilitating and regulatory functions. The next section

briefly overviews Madagascar’s experience in the forest sector in terms of

the elements of good governance.


Table 5.1 Elements of good governance

Element Definition

Rule of law Existence and application of predictable, recognizable,

systematic rules and procedures to regulate norms and

behaviors plus accepted means of adjudicating

disputes: enforceable body of law, security of contracts

and property, independent and eff ective judiciary

Transparency and free Information related to public resources, utilization

flow of information and results is made available and circulates freely

Decision criteria and decisions are disclosed

Media and civil society have access to information tokeep citizens informed

Accountability Relationships of checks and balances that allocate

power and authority; obligation to answer for actions

and decisions, provide information and submit to

sanctions

Eff ective management State assures basic public goods, fulfills regulatory

of public resources and ‘steering’ functions and pursues appropriate

economic and social policies

Private sector and civil society fulfill ‘rowing’ functions

to large extent

Control of corruption Structures, procedures and their application that

minimize illicit use of public power and resources

for private gain (monopoly discretion

accountability corruption)

Citizen participation Engagement of citizens in creating public goods; with

shared roles for government, civil society and private

sector

Includes basic civil/human rights, concern for equity

and institutional space for engagement



5.3 MADAGASCAR AND FORESTRY POLICY

Madagascar, a large island off the west coast of Southern Africa, is home

to unique biodiversity. Largely rural and poor, its growing population ishighly dependent on the NR base, and environmental pressures lead to soil

erosion, deforestation and declines in agricultural productivity. Between

1960 and 2000, Madagascar lost about 40 percent of its forest cover, and

estimates are that the country continues to lose about 1.2 percent of its

remaining forested area per year (World Bank, 2004b). In an eff ort to

shrink environmental degradation, the government launched a compre-

hensive national environmental planning exercise in the mid- to late 1980s,

assisted by bilateral and multilateral donor agencies and the international

conservation community, which established the legal and institutionalframework for coordinated environmental action (Brinkerhoff , 1996).

Since that time, this framework has guided international and national

investment in the ENR sector, including forestry.

Legal Framework/Rule of Law

A 1930 decree established the Forest Service during the colonial period

along paramilitary lines, with a resource control and protection mandate

implemented through a system of permits and policing. The comprehensivenational environmental action planning process launched a major change in

policy direction away from sole reliance on command and control policies,

which led to new enabling legislation and new institutions that integrate

conservation and development. The Forest Service, which became a separ-

ate ministry in 1991, initially resisted the new policies, but in 1995 it devel-

oped a new Forest Policy, a National Forest Action Plan and six Regional

Forest Action Plans. These led to the passage of a revised Forest Law in

1997, followed by a decree in 1998 that legally enabled local participation in

forest management. This decree and a series of subsequent administrativeregulations created the legal framework for partnerships between the Forest

Service and local communities. These joint arrangements have been organ-

ized under what are referred to as Gestion Locale Sécurisée (GELOSE) and

Gestion Contractualisée des Forêts (GCF). GELOSE and GCF established

contracts between the Forest Service, which as of 2003 became an admin-

istrative unit of a merged ministry of environment, water and forests

(MinEnvEF) and communities. The local groups establish an association

(COBA, Communauté de Base), which is the entity that enters into the con-

tractual partnership (Muttenzer, 2002; Raik and Decker, 2005).

In light of continued illicit exploitation of forest resources, the govern-

ment, donors, NGOs and the private sector engaged in dialogue that led




to new legislation and administrative regulations. These aimed to control

logging in ecologically sensitive conservation sites, control exports of high-

value tropical hardwoods, expand application of the existing environmen-

tal impact assessment law (Le Décret MECIE), reform the process of awarding logging permits and tighten financial systems for forest revenues

collected by the Forest Service (for details, see Winterbottom, 2005:

Appendix D). In addition, a 2001 law set up a Forest Sector Observatory

(OSF) to serve as an external oversight and monitoring body. In

September 2003 at the World Parks Congress, held in Durban, South

Africa, the President of Madagascar announced a new policy to increase

the country’s protected areas from 1.7 million hectares to six million in five

years.

Beyond the forest sector, Madagascar’s democratic transition, begun inthe 1990s, set in motion legal changes that allocated some powers to lower

levels of government. The transition to democracy saw the first steps

toward decentralization, and the 1992 constitution laid the groundwork

for local authority and local management of services. Commune-level

elections were held for the first time in 1995. Beginning in the mid-1990s,

sectoral ministries took steps to shift some decision-making away from the

center to lower levels, although most decisions and expenditure still take

place centrally. Because lower-level structures have little discretion in

decision-making, it is more accurate to speak of deconcentration ratherthan decentralization. Madagascar remains a highly centralized state (see

World Bank, 2004a). Current decentralization policy is in flux, 1998 legis-

lation that would have created autonomous provinces has been suspended,

but an alternative vision has yet to be fully developed, creating something

of a legal limbo. These changes have potential implications for forestry

policy and partnerships in that they increase local discretion among

commune officials; decisions about natural resources are of direct concern

to them and their constituents. In addition, the DGEF has created regional

offi

ces with delegated operational authorities for permitting, enforcement,land-use planning and interacting with local communities.

Transparency and Information Flows

In Madagascar’s centralized and hierarchical public bureaucracies, infor-

mation transparency and availability are relatively low, and the Forest

Service is no exception. There are no laws that provide for public access to

government information. As noted above, several recent legal reforms are

aimed at increasing transparency in the critical areas of the issuance of

permits and in the collection and allocation of financial resources derived

from forest exploitation. Lack of transparency has been an enduring




problem, and has encouraged lax enforcement, facilitated illicit activities

and fostered corruption. The multi-donor working group that supports

ENR programs has regularly pressured the government to address this

issue. In late 2001, the Madagascar affiliate of the World Wide Fund forNature published a list of all existing permit holders in an eff ort both to

expose illicit dealings and to push the MinEnvEF to make information

public.

Reporting on revenues generated by the Forest Service, their allocation

and utilization is also not transparent. Fees and fines collected locally are

transferred to two forestry funds, one national (FFN) and one regional

(FFR). Recent reforms include the creation of management committees for

the two funds.

Besides information about permitting and the forestry funds, availabilityof a variety of legal and technical information is limited. Resource users,

including the COBAs, remain relatively uninformed regarding the details

of ENR laws and regulations. Even some forest agents are ignorant of

aspects of the laws they are charged with enforcing.

Accountability

In moving from authoritarianism to democracy, Madagascar’s path to

democratic governance has been somewhat rocky. In 1992 the economicfailure of the socialist model led to popular dissatisfaction and unrest, cul-

minating in a referendum on a new constitution that created a parliamentary

regime, the stepping down from power of Didier Ratsiraka, and the start of

the Third Republic. In 1993 Albert Zafy was elected president. Zafy’s inabil-

ity to manage a coalition government and deliver results led to impeachment

proceedings in the National Assembly and a political comeback for

Ratsiraka, who was elected president in 1996. The December 2001 presi-

dential election pitted Ratsiraka against the former mayor of Antananarivo,

Marc Ravalomanana. Both candidates claimed victory, leading to a politi-cal and economic crisis in 2002 with two competing governments. After

several months of civil strife and economic disruption the stand-off ended

with victory for Ravalomanana and the departure of Ratsiraka into exile

in France. Since then, Ravalomanana has maintained his popularity, con-

solidated his hold on power, won significant international donor support

and campaigned successfully for re-election, winning a second term in

December 2006.

While democratic accountability through the electoral process has been

established, the institutional structures that would support the checks and

balances necessary to build a strong system of popular accountability are

weak. Elements of the neopatrimonialism of the past remain in place today




(Marcus, 2004). The major sources of accountability – internal insti-

tutional norms of procedure and externally mandated and enforced sanc-

tions – function poorly or are absent. Public officials tend to look upwards

to their hierarchical superiors in terms of accountability, rather than down-wards to citizens, the country’s steps toward decentralization notwith-

standing. The judiciary is not a strong force for accountability; the justice

system has severe problems in maintaining basic operations. The courts are

clogged with large backlogs of cases, while incompetent and often venal

judges preside over cases, and prosecutors can bend the law for personal

gain.

Similar to most sectoral agencies (cf. Brinkerhoff , 2004) and given its

command and control heritage, the DGEF does not have a strong down-

ward accountability ethic. The lack of transparency regarding rules andregulations, the weak oversight of forest agents and the opportunities these

create for illicit gain, means that accountability within the service is rela-

tively weak. Local residents and COBAs have little eff ective recourse in the

face of malfeasance and abusive practices. A particularly difficult problem

faces communities with resource management contracts when outsiders,

often agents of wealthy private sector interests, come in to exploit the

forests armed with ‘legal’ permits obtained outside regular channels.

The creation of the OSF is intended to increase accountability in the

sector, though its capacity is relatively limited. Similarly, the new anti-corruption agency mentioned below could serve to reinforce accountabil-

ity and the rule of law.

Eff ective Management

Management capacity in all sectors is weak, especially outside the capital

and the few major urban centers. The government of Madagascar has

launched a number of good governance reforms, coordinated by a new

Offi

ce of Good Governance, attached to the presidency. A program toimprove the efficiency and eff ectiveness of the state, with the World Bank

as the lead donor, includes measures to improve basic incentives for public

employees, align incentives with performance, encourage political will and

leadership for reform (e.g., integrity workshops) and inculcate new values

and practices (e.g., codes of conduct and training).

The DGEF, like most public sector agencies, has limited technical and

managerial capacity relative to the challenges it faces. Dealing with the eco-

logical diversity of Madagascar’s forests, the range of users and the

exploitation–conservation trade-off s pose enormous problems (McConnell

and Sweeney, 2005). The forest service is seriously under-resourced, with an

annual budget of around US$400000 to manage over six million hectares




of natural forests and to carry out bush and forest fire management nation-

wide (World Bank, 2004b, p. 6). The human resource base of the Forest

Service is aging, with a significant percentage of staff at or past official

retirement age. Many field posts are unfilled, with existing staff serving inmultiple positions. The personnel mix is heavy on people in administration

and finance positions, and light on technical expertise and field agents.

Weaknesses in information, reporting, oversight, monitoring and financial

systems compound human resource deficits, impede eff ective planning,

undermine enforcement activities and fail to discourage and control

corrupt practices.

The critical eff ectiveness gaps in the DGEF point toward the need for

ENR partnership in order for the Forest Service to fulfill its mandate.

Indeed, the GELOSE and GCF mechanisms described above seek to buildENR co-management partnerships that can enable the Forest Service to

increase its efficiency and eff ectiveness through cooperation with non-state

actors. Yet, the DGEF’s weaknesses also constrain its ability to engage with

communities, NGOs and the private sector as eff ective partners. Over the

years since major international assistance in the ENR sector began, the

Forest Service in its various institutional incarnations has had a difficult

relationship with the donors and international NGOs. Frequently criticized

as ineff ective and incompetent, and jealous of resources assigned to newly

created environmental agencies, Forest Service staff reacted ‘by imple-menting a strategy of systematic obstruction at their level of competence’

(Ramamonjisoa, 2001, p. 4, quoted in Muttenzer, 2002). These behaviors

have not been conducive to partnerships between the Forest Service and

communities or private businesses. The donors recognize that these prob-

lems and weaknesses exist, and currently USAID, in cooperation with

other international agencies, is providing support to strengthen the DGEF.

Control of Corruption

Corruption in Madagascar is systemic and pervasive. Petty corruption at

the lower levels of the public service is the most widespread form of cor-

ruption, although large-scale corruption is also a problem. The latter reput-

edly permeates government contracting procedures, issuance of business

licenses and permits for exploiting natural resources (noted above), the

operations of the customs service, the justice system and the electoral

process. A major contributing factor to widespread corruption is poverty,

particularly for petty corruption. But poverty alone is not responsible for

corruption in Madagascar, particularly larger-scale corruption at the

higher levels of government; there is a structural dimension that creates the

conditions conducive to the emergence of corruption: monopoly plus






conditions associated with the World Bank’s HIPC (Highly Indebted Poor

Countries) Initiative. The PRSP emerged from an extended participatory

consultation process during September 2000–May 2003, organized by a

small secretariat, supported by the International Monetary Fund and theWorld Bank. Ten thematic workshops were held throughout the country on

education, health, HIV/AIDS, gender, rural and urban development,

governance and the environment. The draft report was vetted at six regional

workshops and one in the capital, and the final version was presented at a

national conference with over 500 participants (see IMF, 2004). While a

laudable eff ort to develop public policy through broad participation, the

PRSP process has done little to change the standard operating procedures

in government offices to increase citizen participation, although one com-

ponent of the PRSP elaborates the good governance agenda that led to thegovernment’s governance improvement program.

In the ENR sector, citizen participation has primarily served an instru-

mental function as a mechanism to implement partnership strategies, as

illustrated in quadrants II and IV of Figure 5.1. Various co-management

structures have been in use since the early 1990s, particularly in protected

areas and park buff er zones, supported by organizations created and sup-

ported by the international donors (see Froger, Meral and Herimandimby,

2004; Chaboud, 2005). The Association for the Management of Protected

Areas (ANGAP), for example, has worked with local resource user groupsand international NGOs on integrated conservation and development

projects since it was created in 1990. In 2006, ANGAP was formally estab-

lished as a semi-autonomous park and wildlife management service, with

law enforcement authority, under the System of Protected Areas of

Madagascar (SAPM). As noted above, the Forest Service trailed the con-

servation community in moving toward co-management and user partici-

pation. But such practices are now established as a key element of forestry

policy. Currently, 300 GCF contracts are in eff ect throughout Madagascar

(Raik and Decker, 2005). Forest areas under GCF contract are zoned intothree parts: a conservation zone (no extraction of any resources), a sus-

tainable use zone (for daily-use resource extraction) and a commercial zone

(where forest products may be harvested for sale).

While resource user groups engage with the Forest Service’s decon-

centrated field units as implementing partners, their ability to fulfill an

accountability function is limited. In this sense, citizen participation

remains relatively state-directed, reinforced by the attitudes of many

forestry agents who continue to view resource users as threats to the en-

vironment rather than partners in its protection and sustainable use. Beyond

community groups, the private sector has been mobilized to participate in

ENR management. Private sector operators have organized three entities






● establish/reinforce constraints on forest governance actors through

increased accountability, transparency checks and balances;

● build actors’ capacities to fulfill their roles in forest governance

through increased skills and improved management eff ectiveness;● track progress through indicators of outcomes, for example, improved

permitting processes, service user satisfaction surveys, community

management contracts, and so on.

Establishing or Reinforcing Constraints

In developing countries where governance is weak, the power of state

actors is, in most cases, exceptionally high relative to that of non-state

actors. Thus, an important step toward better governance is establishing orreinforcing constraints on the state. These constraints can reinforce the

rule of law, limit corruption, ensure that citizens can gain access to infor-

mation so as to understand what government is doing and hold state actors

accountable, and so on. Partnerships do not operate eff ectively where one

partner dominates the relationship. For example, partnership mechanisms

like the GCFs discussed above assign local communities NRM responsi-

bilities without necessarily giving them rights and recourse to countervail-

ing power to enforce those rights (see Ribot, 2004).

The Madagascar case illustrates some progress on this front, and the stepstaken are applicable to othercountries as well. Theestablishment of theAnti-

corruption Council and the BIANCOrepresents a positive move toward lim-

iting corruption. The OSF and the Forestry Commissions, as independent

mechanisms intended to oversee and report on the actions of state and non-

state actors, are also sources of accountability. Other steps include increas-

ing the public availability of information on permit awards, forest zoning,

forest fundreceiptsand expenditures and community management contracts.

Decentralization is important in creating the conditions that will support

the operation of transparency and accountability (see Baumann andFarrington, 2003; Ribot, 2004). Madagascar, as well as other countries with

a legacy of strong central control, is pursuing measures to increase decen-

tralization, though progress has been slow. At present, local governments

(communes) have very limited revenue-raising and service-delivery func-

tions; the majority of services are provided by deconcentrated units of

central ministries (cf. World Bank, 2004a). The DGEF has regional and

local offices, as noted above, but these entities remain largely accountable

upward to the center and oriented toward law enforcement. Partnership-

oriented activities, such as joint land-use planning (zonage), GFC con-

tracts, or bush fire prevention campaigns, call for downward linkages and

collaborative relationships.




Experience shows that changing field staff behaviors toward collab-

oration and downward accountability depends upon strong central

determination of standards along with local participation in providing per-

formance feedback and accountability (Tendler, 1997). Madagascar’sprogress toward democracy and decentralization, and how it aff ects local

politics and administration, will influence whether such incentives emerge

and the extent to which they can contribute to the viability of ENR part-

nerships and the achievement of resource protection.

Building Capacities

Besides an institutional environment that addresses power issues between

state and non-state actors and that puts in place checks and balances, ENRpartnerships call for increased capacities for actors to play new roles. In

many developing countries, state actors in the public service function in

organizational systems that are hierarchical, internally focused and reward

loyalty and following rules rather than taking initiative and achieving

results. The Madagascar case shows how some governments are seeking

to make changes. The government’s good governance reform agenda, still

in its early stages, aims at a fundamental shift in civil servants’ mentalities

and behaviors. Each ministry is charged with including good governance

in its annual work plan and with developing indicators to measureprogress. The MinEnvEF’s Good Governance Program concentrates on

increasing internal organizational eff ectiveness, which is important;

however capacity building needs to take place within the context of a refor-

mulation of the Forest Service’s mandate beyond command and control.

USAID is currently assisting the DGEF with technical and managerial

systems improvements and strategic planning for a revised vision that inte-

grates co-management with command and control.

This vision looks beyond the DGEF to consider other actors involved in

the forest sector, and to address the technical and management capacitiesnecessary to implement the government’s evolving ENR policy agenda. A

limiting factor on making progress is the dominance of senior DGEF staff

who remain imbued with the command and control mentality. However, a

younger cadre is coming up the ranks, which will lead to progressive

replacement of the ‘old guard’ in the DGEF. The DGEF has set up a

reform working group that is leading the visioning eff ort, with support

from the USAID technical assistance team.

Besides the state agencies involved in ENR partnerships, other actors

need to build capacity as well. The new OSF is still in the early stages of

operation. Civil society, as noted above, is relatively weak. The inter-

national conservation NGOs have worked extensively with ANGAP and




with community groups on protected areas, and are open to working with

the DGEF; they constitute a key source of capacity. Private sector oper-

ators are another set of actors whose capacities are important, especially

for reforestation and plantation operations.It also needs to be recognized that in some situations what is lacking is

not capacity, but incentives. Partnerships depend upon shared objectives,

and as Agrawal and Gibson (1999) point out, ENR strategies have often

made unfounded assumptions about the homogeneity of interests of those

living in proximity to natural resources by virtue of classing them as com-

munities. Thus in terms of engaging non-state actors, unpacking their

objectives and their implicit cost–benefit calculations will help separate

capacity from incentive deficits (e.g., Sander and Zeller, 2004).

Focusing on Outcomes

Advancing any reform eff ort – including expanding the use of ENR part-

nerships – depends upon establishing milestones that provide indications of

progress and sources of incentives to move forward. The Madagascar case

demonstrates the importance of selecting appropriate outcome indicators.

As noted, the DGEF’s concentration on good governance as largely con-

cerning efficient management has led to under-attention to the role of other

actors in forest governance, and to over-concentration on DGEF exerciseof control and enforcement at all levels. Based on the monitoring principle

that ‘what gets measured gets done’, focusing on progress measures that

address multi-actor participation and target the Forest Service’s relation-

ship to service users/citizens would: (1) help to shift the DGEF’s focus

beyond its organizational borders to its local partners; (2) fill a gap in the

existing ENR indicators used by both the government and the donors to

reflect more fully the principles of good governance.

Selecting governance indicators that reflect how good governance can

enhance partnerships can help to move the reform agenda forward,strengthen the reform constituency and help to enable ENR partnerships

more strongly. By developing measures that target accountability, trans-

parency and participation, reformers can strengthen incentives to enact the

principles of good governance in support of improved ENR management

through partnerships.

5.5 CONCLUSION

To protect its biodiversity and help the majority of its citizens to emerge

from poverty, Madagascar needs to engage all societal actors, state and




non-state, in sustainable development and conservation of its natural

resources. It is clear that centralized, state-controlled ENR management

regimes are neither feasible nor desirable, thus partnerships are essential for

the protection of Madagascar’s forest resources and its biodiversity.Eff ective state–society relations, embodied in the principles of good govern-

ance, are central to the design and implementation of collective action

necessary to achieve sustainable development, of which partnerships are a

key example. A focus on the components of good governance provides a

way forward to pursue reforms that will enable partnerships that tap the

capacities and motivations of forest sector actors. Given the diversity of

forest types, uses and users of forest products and management regimes, no

single form of partnership will serve the needs of sustainable ENR man-

agement. This variation reinforces the need to adapt partnership arrange-ments to fit the physical dynamics of the forest resources to be managed,

the specific uses envisioned and the capacities and interests of the users.

Donor perspectives on good governance tend to emphasize its techno-

cratic aspects. Yet, to view collective action as divorced from politics is

myopic; indeed, one of the key issues for ENR partnerships is how com-

munity organizations can coordinate with state actors while retaining

sufficient autonomy and clout to serve as a local check on those actors’

behaviors. Thus, included in the governance focus is the recognition that

state–society relations involve distributions of power, authority and inter-ests. To the extent possible, these must be managed and – in the inevitable

case of conflict – adjudicated equitably in order to achieve broadly

beneficial outcomes. This focus holds implications not just for Madagascar

but beyond.

NOTE

1. Portions of this chapter are based onfi

eldwork conducted in September 2005 for theSustainable Environment and Forest Ecosystems Management (SEFEM) Project, fundedby the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The views expressed aresolely those of the author and should not be attributed to USAID.

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6. Environmental partnerships inagriculture: reflections on theAustralian experience1

Neil Gunningham

At the beginning of the 1990s, ‘environmental partnerships’ were virtually

unknown. Relationships between business and non-governmental organ-

izations (NGOs) were largely adversarial, and little attention was given to the

prospect of constructive engagement between them. Relationships between

business and government regulators, while sometimes less strained, were

rarely based on the establishment of mutual trust, or the pursuit of ‘win–win’

solutions. Today, things are very diff erent. We find numerous examples of

environmental partnerships not just in the war-torn arena of industrial

pollution (where many of them first emerged), but also in a variety of other

environmental contexts. Of these, none is more important than that of agri-

cultural production.

Partnerships in the area of agriculture have many potential benefits,

described below. However, the gap between aspiration and achievement

may be a large one, and identifying the circumstances in which such part-

nerships can most beneficially be formed, the design factors that will

influence their success (in terms of their contribution to sustainability), and

their major commercial and environmental benefits, is a work in progress.

This chapter examines a number of agricultural environmental partner-

ships in one particular country: Australia. There is, of course, a risk of gen-eralization from case studies and even more so from case studies selected

from one particular jurisdiction. Yet, as we will see, the pressures and

opportunities that caused partnerships in agriculture to evolve in Australia

were similar in many respects to those experienced in a wide variety of

developed countries. The reasons for their relative success and failure also

resonate with experience elsewhere, particularly that of Western Europe

and North America.

Australia, in any event, is a sensible place to embark on an investigation

of environmental partnerships in agriculture. It is a country whose agricul-tural practices have caused widespread and systemic damage and, as a

115



result, faces more than its share of serious environmental challenges. These

include loss of biological diversity, loss of natural habitats, pollution of

off -farm ecosystems and on-farm pollution causing loss of productivity.

Notwithstanding the severity of these problems, only a small number of policy instruments have been employed to address them, and most of these

have performed poorly (Gunningham and Grabosky, 1998, Chapter 5).

In contrast, some early environmental partnerships for sustainable agri-

culture appear to have achieved substantially more than the policy status

quo (Thrupp, 1996; Gunningham and Sinclair, 2002a). However, our

knowledge of what works and what doesn’t work in the agricultural context

remains extremely limited. This is unfortunate because the challenge of sus-

tainable agriculture is not only one of the most important issues con-

fronting humankind, but also one desperately in need of more imaginative,constructive and, above all, successful, policy instruments. The central

questions for this chapter are whether, to what extent, and in what circum-

stances, environmental partnerships in agriculture have these qualities.

The remainder of the chapter consists of five sections. First, a number of

case studies relating to Australian environmental partnerships in the agri-

cultural sector are summarized. In the next section, drawing from these

case studies, a number of circumstances are identified under which en-

vironmental partnerships are most likely to be successful in achieving both

economic and environmental goals. This is followed by an examination of ‘the new environmental governance’: a highly ambitious experiment in agri-

cultural environmental partnerships involving multiple stakeholders and

levels of government, as well as industry and civil society engagement over

a broad geographical scale. The next part recognizes that successful part-

nerships will not necessarily evolve spontaneously (although some do), and

for this reason considers the role of government in facilitating and devel-

oping such partnerships. The last section concludes.

One qualifying comment is in order before engaging in these tasks. There

are, of course, inherent limitations in a case study approach, not least in theextent to which it is possible to generalize from a limited and not necessar-

ily representative set of studies. This qualification is particularly apposite

in the present case. As will become apparent, the four principal case studies

are very diff erent in nature. This diversity has both attractions (it enables

examination of a broad range of contexts) and limitations (one is not com-

paring like with like). One consequence is that there are limitations to the

extent to which this approach enables systemic evaluation of successes and

failures. On the other hand, when dealing with a relatively new and imma-

ture field such as agricultural partnerships, which has been subject to little

previous analysis, then the sort of explorative and provisional analysis that

follows may nevertheless advance knowledge in the field.




6.1 ENVIRONMENTAL PARTNERSHIPS

Environmental partnerships may take many diff erent forms. For example,

‘industry participation’ may be either collective or individual, and there arealso a substantial number of possible partnership combinations. These

include not only many possible permutations of bipartite partnerships,

but also tripartite (or even multipartite) combinations. Participants

might include individual companies; a collective arrangement of

companies (including industry associations); government (federal, state

and/or regional); quasi-government bodies (such as standard-setting bodies

and universities); retailers, wholesalers and consumers; and community

organizations (including environmental and other public interest groups).

And diff erent partnerships also involve very diff erent terms and conditions.Given the large number of possible permutations, the case studies chosen

below can, at best, cover only a sample. Those chosen involve:

1. a single company and a single NGO;

2. an industry association and a number of NGOs;

3. an industry association and a government agency;

4. a variety of local businesses, community groups, local and state

government.

These cases were selected not only to explore the diversity of partnership

arrangements and the stakeholders who engage in them, but also to explore

the diff erent types of reciprocal benefits that parties hope to gain from such

partnerships, and the obstacles to their achievement. For reasons of space,

a shortened description of each of the case studies is given below, and

readers are referred to other sources for more detailed accounts.

Case study: Southcorp Limited and the Australian Conservation

FoundationIn July 2000, Southcorp Limited (a major Australian wine producer) and

the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) launched an environmen-

tal ‘alliance’ to fight rising salinity in Australia. This was the first time the

ACF, arguably Australia’s most influential environmental NGO, had

entered a formal partnership with an individual corporate entity (although

the ACF has partnered with the National Farmers Federation, in the for-

mation of Landcare and the Repairing the Country policy program).

Under the partnership, Southcorp agreed to using its corporate standing

and its financial resources in two principal ways. First, it committed to

using its leadership position to impress on government and business sectors

the magnitude of the salinity crisis. It did this by forming a ‘Business

Environmental partnerships in agriculture 117



Leaders Roundtable’, chaired by the CEO of Southcorp, to ‘look at ways

of leveraging private sector funds for mutual obligation in the environ-

mental arena’. Second, it funded two full-time positions within the ACF to

run the latter’s national salinity program, encompassing both politicaladvocacy and practical implementation.

In return, the ACF agreed to promote Southcorp’s eff orts, and name, in

relation to the program, including joint press releases using ACF and

Southcorp logos; promotion of Southcorp’s initiative through a variety of

public fora; and assisting Southcorp in developing its environmental poli-

cies and programs. ACF has been quick to reject suggestions that this might

imply some sort of sponsorship arrangement, emphasizing instead the re-

ciprocal nature of responsibilities and the importance of the exchange of

information and expertise (Gunningham and Sinclair, 2002a).Southcorp respondents identified a number of potential benefits from

the partnership. In essence, their view was that the wine industry is distinc-

tive in that not only is its product destined very largely for international

markets, but consumers are particularly discriminating as to the source and

content of the product. Wine consumers tend to come from a higher socio-

economic bracket, and to seek out wines with particular characteristics

(including region, variety, company and particular attributes). This con-

sumer concern with the origin of wines increasingly extends to environ-

mental characteristics, especially in the case of key Northern Europeanexport markets. In short, wine companies have the opportunity to market,

and ultimately benefit commercially, through the fostering of a ‘clean and

green’ image – and an alliance with a major environmental group will

enhance the credibility of such claims.

It may appear somewhat odd, then, that Southcorp thus far has resisted

the idea of environmental labeling of wine products. It is particularly

intriguing given its strong export bias and the fact that international

markets/consumers are unlikely to be aware of its positive public relations

in Australia. Possible (and not necessarily mutually exclusive) explanationsfor this are threefold. First, Southcorp may be more driven to pursue its

environmental agenda as a result of the prospect of onerous environmen-

tal regulations in Australia, rather than export market potential. It thus

may see the alliance as a way of influencing or forestalling future regu-

latory obligations. Second, it may see the alliance as a means of meeting

any future purchasing requirements by European retailers. Finally, it may

simply be that the marketing division of Southcorp, unlike other parts of

the organization, is slow to recognize and exploit the full benefits of the

ACF alliance (Gunningham and Sinclair, 2002a).

In responding to the benefits to its organization, ACF suggested that,

apart from the chance to obtain a significant injection of funds into its




national salinity program, the primary attraction of the alliance was the

opportunity to greatly enhance its voice in the business sphere and to add

weight to its policy campaigns with government. However, the formation

of such a novel alliance with a commercial entity also involves potentialrisks to the ACF. In particular, such an arrangement might undermine the

capacity, either real or perceived, of an environmental NGO to act as an

uncompromising advocate for the environment. This may be described as

a variation on the regulatory capture thesis, whereby regulatory author-

ities/inspectors begin to identify and sympathize with the plight of regu-

latory entities to the extent that they discount or overlook breaches of

environmental regulations. For example, might such an arrangement

incline an NGO to hesitate in criticizing, or at least tone down its criticism

of, its commercial partners? This has led some commentators to criticizethe formation of such relationships (Steketee, 2001).

At the very least, ACF is aware of the risks and has sought to develop an

‘engagement protocol’ to govern its future dealings and arrangements with

the private sector. When Southcorp was prosecuted for a serious pollution

off ence, the question of a conflict of interest was particularly stark. ACF

responded by publicly releasing a statement condemning the breach and

calling for the full force of the law to apply, and the incident does not seem

to have damaged either ACF’s credibility or the partnership itself.

With hindsight, the ACF still views the Southcorp alliance in a positivelight, claiming that it spurred its thinking and practices in engaging with

the corporate sector (private correspondence with ACF, August 2006). It

also cites a number of tangible outcomes of the alliance, including: a joint

publication with Southcorp on damage caused by dry land salinity; the

holding of a ‘Business Leaders Roundtable’ in 2001 and a subsequent

report on leveraging private investment; the ‘The Ecovine Project’ (Ecovine,

2002) and co-sponsoring a ‘farms to landscapes’ seminar.

The Southcorp alliance terminated in 2005 as a result of Southcorp

being taken over by a rival company, Fosters. Nevertheless, ACF has con-tinued a relationship with the new owners and a biodiversity management

framework is currently being developed with them.

Case study: the Australian cotton industry

In a little over three decades, Australian cotton farming has developed into

an AUD1.5 billion dollar industry and the third largest exporter of cotton

in the world. But that growth has come at a substantial cost to the en-

vironment and to workers’ health. Of greatest concern have been the risks

associated with agricultural chemicals. In the late 1990s, the use of endo-

sulfan, in particular, posed a serious threat not only to the environment, but

also to the cattle industry, whose export markets were threatened by high




pesticide residues found in export beef produced on mixed farms or on

properties adjoining cotton producers. Cotton-related pesticides have been

connected with fish kills and other damage to aquatic life, raised occu-

pational health concerns amongst agricultural workers, and has been asource of community concern when residues were found in domestic water

tanks and elsewhere. Overall, the cotton industry’s tarnished environmen-

tal image provides a substantial threat to its legitimacy (and indirectly to its

economic viability).

Against this backdrop, how might the industry best preserve its ‘social

license’ (that is, the expectations of local communities, the wider society

and various constituent groups), rebuild trust and credibility with key

stakeholders and improve its overall environmental performance?

Initially, the cotton industry responded by unilateral action, producingwhat it terms an ‘industry-wide environmental management system

(EMS)’ and developing a variety of industry-level self-regulatory initiat-

ives through its best management practice (BMP) program that also

seeks to nurture a ‘custodianship ethic’. These initiatives have achieved

mixed results. On the positive side, pesticide residues are down, as are other

indicators such as the number of fish kills and external complaints.

On the other hand, this initiative has lacked independent and credible

environmental targets, or eff ective monitoring and reporting mechanisms

(Gunningham, 2004).But even if such mechanisms were put in place, such forms of self-

regulation almost invariably lack credibility with external stakeholders.

They are widely regarded as a sham and as a cynical attempt to give the

appearance of regulation while serving private interests at the expense of

the public, thereby avoiding more direct and eff ective forms of environ-

mental control such as direct government regulation. Critics point to an

inherent incentive for unmotivated members to ‘free ride’ on the eff orts of

others (explaining why a substantial minority of cotton growers do not par-

ticipate); an unwillingness and/or incapacity on the part of the responsibleindustry association to monitor outcomes eff ectively, detect compliance

failure or impose sanctions on recalcitrant members; and a lack of trans-

parency and accountability (Priest, 1998).

Arguably, one means of compensating for these perceived weaknesses of

self-regulation would be an environmental partnership with sectoral inter-

est groups such as environmental and community groups or NGOs.

Potentially at least, developing partnerships with such groups off ers con-

siderable benefits to both sides. For the industry it would provide much-

needed credibility, protecting its image and reducing the risk of adverse

publicity, hostility from various constituent groups, tougher regulation and

a total ban on certain activities. For environmental groups it might provide




an opportunity to engage directly with the industry and the leverage

necessary to insist upon the industry demonstrably improving its environ-

mental performance. For example, an NGO might insist upon environmen-

tal targets, transparency, independent monitoring and third-party auditing,as the price for its participation.

The cotton industry has already advanced some way down this path

towards collaboration with moderate national environmental groups. In

particular, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and ACF have entered

a dialogue with the cotton industry and have participated in various round-

tables and other meetings providing input into particular processes.

However, formal partnerships have not been successfully negotiated. Under

a draft agreement between environmental groups and Cotton Australia,

key environmental groups were to provide advice to Cotton Australia ondeveloping and implementing the industry’s Code of Sustainability. This,

in turn, was intended to lead to positive marketing and branding of

Australian cotton internationally. However, the agreement did not proceed

because of concern from members of some of those groups about the risks

of co-option and compromise (Gunningham, 2004).

Whether the industry can ever answer its more strident and uncompro-

mising environmental critics, or whether there is sufficient common ground

and ‘win–win’ outcomes to develop partnerships of the type described

above remains doubtful. For example, one environmentalist interviewedstated: ‘for it to try to be sustainable is unsustainable. You can’t justify the

industry’s environmental impact on the country. If they had to internalize

their costs, likely there would not be a viable industry’. In essence, parts of

the environmental movement remain convinced that the industry is unsus-

tainable in its land use, water use and chemical practices, and the industry

is still ‘a long, long way from any concept of sustainable agriculture or a

workable model of how on-farm practice should link to catchment

resources and targets’.

But for the minority of environmental groups who believe that the indus-try can be made sustainable, the question is how best to achieve it?

Environmental partnerships, notwithstanding theirflaws, arguably provide

a more viable vehicle through which to pursue this goal than any of the

alternatives. In the context of the cotton industry, where government

resources are very limited, problems are complex and do not readily lend

themselves to conventional regulatory solutions, and the industry itself has

the capacity and the self-interest to take at least a substantial part of the

regulatory burden, there are plausible reasons to embrace it. Even in these

circumstances, the industry association faces considerable challenges: if it

goes too slowly it will gain little credibility or external recognition for its

eff orts. Yet if it goes too fast it may generate such a level of resistance from




its members that too many withdraw. How the next phase of the cotton

industry’s journey towards sustainability plays out, or whether this is a

‘goal too far’, remains to be seen.

Case study: the Victorian vegetable growers

Like an increasing number of agricultural sectors across Australia, the veg-

etable growers of Victoria have determined to develop a strategy for

improved environmental performance (Gunningham and Sinclair, 2002b).

The vegetable growers had a number of reasons for pursuing cleaner

production:

● Community pressure. In Victoria, community pressure has arisen

because of the close proximity of many vegetable growers to urbanfringes and the increasing concern of residents and others about

some of the growers’ environmental practices.

● International and domestic trends. On the international front, the

growers are well aware of dramatic changes in purchasing policy

being introduced by major supermarket chains, a vitally important

commercial market for vegetable growers. On the domestic front,

industry representatives had become aware of moves within other

agricultural sectors to introduce environmental management codes

of practice and of the increasing concern of the principal super-market chains to demonstrate their environmental credentials by

demanding high standards from their suppliers.

● The prospect of regulation. While existing regulation has been rela-

tively unimportant in the past, industry representatives point to inap-

propriate environmental regulations being a substantial potential

threat to the industry in the future, with a recent report addressing

the issue of spray drift being highlighted as a prime example.

Recognizing the potential for the industry and the government regulatorto achieve reciprocal benefits from a collaborative arrangement, both sides

set out to develop its specific terms. This was done through the development

and implementation of an environmental improvement plan (EIP), which

had an emphasis on cleaner production. The purported aims of the plan are:

to better understand the real impacts of market gardens on the environment;

to increase grower awareness of their environmental responsibilities; to

provide a venue for growers to demonstrate good environmental perform-

ance; to reduce compliance costs and to satisfy regulators and the com-

munity that the vegetable industry is environmentally aware and responsible.

The environmental improvement plan began with a pilot phase, involving

four key elements: a pollution audit; an awareness program and management




audit; environmental management guidelines and a training program. The

guidelines act as a form of self-audit, and are designed to be highly practical

and easily understood, so as to gain the maximum chance of uptake by the

majority of growers. In return (in addition to providing its credibility),the principal Environment Protection Agency contribution was a modest

financial one, intended to facilitate the development of the EIP and its

various components (Gunningham and Sinclair, 2002b).

However, if the vegetable growers’ cleaner production initiative is to

prosper rather than merely survive, then further measures will be necessary.

Not least, EPA may need to provide additional resources and contribute ad-

ditional incentives to encourage widespread and genuine participation. Such

incentives have not been provided at the time of writing and the partnership

has not advanced further. Rather, the partnership has transformed into whatis essentially an industry self-regulatory initiative, funded in part from the

National Vegetable Levy and known as ‘Environveg’. This is a national

program undertaken by the national industry association (AUSVEG Ltd)

and is exclusively industry owned and managed. Its goals are modest, being

‘a simple self-assessment tool that allows growers to demonstrate that they

are environmentally responsible managers’ (AUSVEG Ltd, 2006).

Case study: neighborhood environmental improvement plans

The State Government of Victoria has initiated a number of policies thatare explicitly community-oriented, collaborative and partnership-based,

and that engage with a multiplicity of stakeholders. As part of this agenda,

it has introduced neighborhood environmental improvement plans (NEIPs)

with the intention of engaging with the entire gamut of stakeholders who

are in some way or other responsible for environmental problems at a neigh-

borhood level. In the agricultural context, this involves, for example, a

partnership-based approach to addressing the cumulative impact of non-

point source agricultural pollution on a local scale (Gunningham, Holley

and Shearing, 2007).According to the relevant second reading speech, an NEIP is:

a statutory mechanism to enable those contributing to and those aff ected bylocal environmental problems, to come together in a constructive forum. In thisforum, the members of the local community, including residents, industry andlocal government, can agree on the environmental priority issues for the neigh-bourhood. They can then devise a plan to address their agreed environmentalissues in a practical manner. (Minister for Environment and Conservation, 2000)

In other words, the NEIP is a regulatory mechanism to facilitate the pro-

duction and implementation of a plan by a ‘community’ to improve certain

environmental issues within a defined geographic area or ‘neighbourhood’.




In practice, while an NEIP is a flexible means of engaging more holistic-

ally with complex local environmental challenges, such as the cumulative

impacts of multiple small sources of agricultural pollution, and of doing

so at an appropriate scale, its implementation has so far been problematic.The main limitation of the current NEIP process relates to its reliance

upon voluntary collaboration. NEIPs have been successful in facilitating

for the first time some industry, government and non-government organ-

izations to work together in addressing a significant environmental issue at

neighborhood level. And the negotiation inherent in the collaborative

process has helped each entity to better understand the interests of others,

and the development of an integrated vision and a shared agenda.

However, a number of key stakeholders have chosen not to participate, and

the NEIP instrument lacks the leverage or incentives to persuade them todo so. Although some informal arm twisting or shaming could be used to

get buy-in from some reluctant partners, by and large this has proved

insufficient to persuade key polluters to engage in the process in any mean-

ingful way, far less reduce their pollution. Moreover, even where industry,

businesses and other parties have agreed to collaborate, the NEIP has

apparently had insufficient ‘clout’ to persuade them to take positive follow

up action (Gunningham, Holley and Shearing, 2007).

The problem is a familiar one: that polluters, for whom pollution pre-

vention measures would often be costly, lack sufficient self-interest to par-ticipate in the process, and certainly to take action. This is hardly a new

point, but unless and until it is grasped, the potential role of NEIPs will be

substantially constrained.

A related limitation of the current NEIP process relates to the issue of

resourcing. To date, only a small amount of direct state funding was pro-

vided to each NEIP, with the proposal and planning process, as well as

activities under the approved plan, being supported by partner resources or

external funds.

Although this was clearly the regulator’s intention, it is, however, highlydoubtful whether this is a viable approach. Nearly all respondents reported

that their NEIPs were severely under-resourced. Indeed, the harsh reality

may be that the very nature of the NEIP approach (facilitative regulation)

may require the state regulator to spend more money rather than less.

For instance, for the NEIP to be viable and eff ective, a coordinator is

required who can administratively support inexperienced volunteers or

time-strapped professionals, generate convincing external funding appli-

cations and coordinate various partners to ensure they remain interested

and active in the process. Such funding is unlikely to come from over-

stretched, under-resourced local governments or other sponsors. Moreover,

even in situations where NEIP partners do obtain external funding that




could be used to fund coordinators or other activities, NEIP partners, par-

ticularly individuals or non-government members, may still struggle with

such funding as it rarely provides for sufficient opportunity to monitor and

learn, and generally imposes burdensome administrative requirements. Inshort, unless the Victorian Environment Protection Authority is prepared

to spend substantially more on the NEIP program, it may not be possible

to sustain eff ective or meaningful involvement from NEIP partners

(Gunningham, Holley and Shearing, 2007).

6.2 CREATING SUCCESSFUL (ANDUNSUCCESSFUL) ENVIRONMENTAL

PARTNERSHIPS

Notwithstanding the almost exponential growth of environmental part-

nerships in the agricultural sector, only limited systematic evaluation has

been conducted as to what types of partnerships succeed and in what cir-

cumstances (Gunningham and Sinclair, 2002a; National Environmental

Partnership Summit, 2006). It may also be that the diverse and disparate

nature of environmental partnerships has worked against comparative

analysis.

Against this backdrop, this section seeks to identify relevant factorsbehind the ‘success’ or otherwise of environmental partnerships – defined

in terms of their contribution to promoting more sustainable practices. In

so doing, it focuses on those internal and external conditions that are most

likely to generate a fertile environment within which partnerships can grow

and prosper.

Because it is based on only four case studies, the analysis is far from

exhaustive. For example, the role of government was important in each of

these particular partnerships examined and yet we are aware that in other

contexts, successful partnerships sometimes evolve spontaneously, withoutstrong state intervention.

Nevertheless, although these four studies by no means span the full range

and variety of environmental partnerships, they are representative of some

common agricultural partnership types. Furthermore, what we found in the

Australian context resonates with what has been found in other developed

countries. For example, the experience of the Victorian vegetable growers

is in many respects similar to that of the Wisconsin potato farmers

(Gunningham and Sinclair, 2002a; Protected Harvest, 2006), that of the

Australian cotton industry is not very diff erent from that of the Californian

rice growers (Gunningham and Sinclair, 2002a; McGilton, 2006) and that of

Southcorp and the Australian Conservation Foundation parallels various




WWF initiatives internationally (International Institute for Sustainable

Development, 2006). Even the study of the neighborhood environmental

improvement plan, which is less easily classified, has commonalities with

multi-party partnerships in North America and Europe (AWQA, 2006;British Columbia Agriculture Council, 2006), some of which have experi-

enced similar problems of collective action and free-riding.

The most important lessons we can draw from our selection of case

studies, in terms of their eff ectiveness in promoting sustainability practices,

are listed below.

A high coincidence between public and private pro fit Successful partner-

ships between business and NGOs are largely confined to win–win oppor-

tunities (where both parties believe they will be better off as a result of entering the partnership). There is insufficient incentive for either party to

participate unless they believe this to be the case, given the substantial

transactions costs involved in developing such partnerships (see, for ex-

amples of such win–win opportunities, Greenall and Rovere, 1999).

Making environmental improvements that are endorsed by environmental

groups made good business sense for Southcorp, for the cotton industry

and for the vegetable growers. It was the absence of such win–win oppor-

tunities that partially explained the difficulties encountered by the neigh-

borhood environmental improvement plan initiative.

Exposure to green markets A prominent motivation for industry groups

to participate in environmental partnerships is the perception that their

products will compete more successfully on ‘green markets’. This was cer-

tainly a driver for the Victorian vegetable growers and, to a lesser extent,

for the cotton industry, since consumers are far less sensitive to, or pre-

pared to pay a premium for, what they wear compared with what they eat.

While Southcorp might have been expected to take advantage of ‘green

labeling’ opportunities in its partnership with the Australian ConservationFoundation, it has not so far done so. Southcorp’s initiative can be viewed

in broader terms as part of the company’s risk management strategy.

Companies or sectors that trade o ff their public image Some companies

and/or industry sectors have high public profiles, which in turn is crucial to

their commercial success. For example, the cotton industry, having suff ered

severe damage to its social license and credibility, had more reason than

most to protect its public image through a partnership with environmental

groups. The Victorian vegetable growers were motivated by similar con-

cerns. Large retailers, such as Southcorp, which deal directly with the

public, are strongly motivated by pressures to maintain and enhance their








The context for this new development is the twin recognition (1) that

natural resource management in Australia is in crisis – there are massive

problems relating to rising water tables, increasing salinity, water scarcity,

land clearing, loss of topsoil, diff use pollution from broad-scale rural landuse and biodiversity loss and (2) that traditional approaches to address this

environmental challenge have manifestly failed.

In response, the Commonwealth, in conjunction with the States, has

embarked upon a far-reaching new approach to natural resource manage-

ment. Through AUD4.4 billion of government funding provided by the

National Heritage Trust (NHT) and the National Action Plan on Salinity

and Water (NAP) (since 1997 and 2001 respectively), NRM decision-

making power is being devolved to the regional level. Fifty-six regional

natural resource management bodies have been created across Australia(Australian Government, 2006). These bodies generally comprise a mix of

community, rural and other stakeholders. They have responsibility for

undertaking NRM consultation, planning and priority-setting. They must

each develop a regional plan and regional investment strategy and imple-

ment these under a collaborative partnership-based decision-making

process. These plans and strategies are subject to performance indicators

and other controls imposed by the Commonwealth.

This collaborative regional approach involves a style of governance

in which power is exercised through multi-stakeholder participation indecision-making (including local land managers, local communities,NGOs

and other ground-level stakeholders), coupled with monitoring, evaluation

and oversight. The formal establishment or enhancement of existing

regional bodies introduces what is in eff ect a ‘fourth sphere of governance’

located at the ecosystem/catchment level (because eff ective solutions must

cut across ecologically arbitrary political boundaries). This hybrid govern-

ance is a radical departure from most previous NRM strategies, which

(depending on jurisdiction and context) ranged from traditional ‘top-

down’ legal and institutional arrangements (albeit often honored in thebreach), to education, exhortation and rural ‘extension programs’. It

involves non-hierarchical and participatory means to address the NRM

crisis, de-centers the state and restructures relationships between govern-

ments, markets and civil society.

This new approach is widely referred to as a new and ambitious form of

multi-party environmental partnership. For example, the Australian

Commonwealth Government states explicitly that ‘both the NAP and the

NHT are partnerships between all levels of community and Government,

working together to protect our environment and natural resources, and

sustain our agricultural industries and regional communities’ (Australian

Government, 2006).




However, the new regional approach might equally be treated as an

example of what is being referred to internationally as the ‘new governance’

(de Burca and Scott, 2006) – in this case the ‘new environmental govern-

ance’ – an ambitious experiment in engaging multiple stakeholders throughcollaborative approaches to address complex, contested and hitherto

intractable NRM problems.

This experiment is similar in its general contours to forms of new col-

laborative environmental governance that have emerged in a number of

other places. In New Zealand they are provided for under the Resource

Management Act, which locates decision-making within regional organ-

izations (Frieder, 1997). In the United States they can be found in Habitat

Conservation Plans under the Endangered Species Act and in the

Chesapeake Bay and San Francisco Bay Delta Programs (Karkkainen,2002; Freeman and Farber, 2005). Within the European Union, new col-

laborative environmental governance is expressed in increased flexibility in

the setting of Community norms, accompanied by a ‘proceduralization’ of

Community law, increasingly open-ended environmental standards and an

increased role of a range of stakeholders in decision-making processes

(Scott and Trubek, 2002). Examples can also be found in parts of Africa,

where the reach of state law is often limited. Some of these initiatives,

including the CAMPFIRE initiative, arguably achieved significant success

even absent a strong state underpinning (Virtanen, 2003).These initiatives require further examination from institutional, regu-

latory and governance perspectives. Certainly we lack systematic, empirical,

comparative or theoretical understanding of the nature and challenges of

the new collaborative environmental governance. For example, empirically,

these initiatives raise questions about the extent and ways in which new col-

laborative environmental governance involves deliberative problem-

solving, about the impact of a new ‘fourth level of government’ and about

how various conflicts between agencies within and between diff erent levels

of government can be resolved. In explanatory terms, what does the newcollaborative environmental governance involve in terms of ‘mentalities’ of

governance, and in terms of a diff usion of power beyond neo-liberal steer-

ing functions? At a normative level , what are the ways in which the existing

forms of new collaborative environmental governance fall short of what is

required to achieve eff ective, efficient and democratically acceptable NRM,

and how might these deficiencies be overcome?

It would be premature to attempt to answer such questions at a time

when the new environmental governance is still in its infancy. However, the

new regional approach is considered below, alongside all the other case

studies, in terms of its implications for government.






the circumstances. Possible incentives include preference in govern-

ment procurement contracts, a less attractive regulatory backdrop for

those who do not wish to participate in partnerships, a legal underpin-

ning to prevent free-riding, the use of cross-compliance mechanismsor, as with the new collaborative environmental governance, substan-

tial payments from central government that fundamentally drive the

entire initiative. In the absence of such incentives, embryonic environ-

mental partnerships often struggle. In the case of the cotton industry,

for example, had government regulation been seriously implemented

(as the cotton industry association and the NGOs would have wished)

and action taken against the recalcitrant, then the free-rider problem

might have been substantially addressed.

4. Regulatory negotiation. Since negotiating partnerships between stake-holders with very diff erent interests and worldviews is never easy, an

additional role for government may be in facilitating regulatory nego-

tiation: a process for developing regulations or policies by consensus

using a committee whose members represent all sides of an issue

(Freeman and Langbein, 2000). While this strategy may only be appro-

priate in a limited range of circumstances (where government contem-

plates regulation, or proposed regulation as an incentive to drive the

partnership), it may, in these circumstances, provide considerable

benefits.5. Reducing risk . One of the difficulties in developing partnerships is

the risk involved in moving from one system of production (e.g., inten-

sive pesticide use) to another (e.g., integrated pest management).

Government may have a short-term role in reducing these risks if the

private insurance market fails to do so. Part of the funding under the

new environmental governance initiative may be used for precisely this

purpose.

6. Building the social license. Recent research suggests that businesses are

constrained by a multi-faceted ‘license to operate’ and that corporatebehavior can be explained by interactions between regulatory, social

and economic licenses (Gunningham, Kagan and Thornton, 2003). It

also suggests that there is often a considerable imbalance of power in

partnership negotiations between business and NGOs. Government

can play important roles in compensating for asymmetry of infor-

mation and by otherwise empowering NGOs and civil society, thereby

ensuring that partnership negotiations take place on a less unequal

footing.

As the above section makes clear, government can potentially play a

major role in the establishment and implementation of partnerships, even




when it is not directly a party to them. The very modest number of part-

nerships in Australian agriculture may largely be explained in terms of

government reluctance (given the political power of the agricultural sector

and close ties between government and agriculture at federal level) to takeon such roles and, in particular, by its unwillingness to create the sorts of

incentives that would incline industry to enter into such arrangements.

6.5 CONCLUSION

While an emerging concept internationally, relatively few environmental

partnerships have emerged in the Australian agricultural sector. Yet the

potential exists for agricultural producers to achieve major benefitsthrough participating in such partnerships, at least in the circumstances

described earlier. These include: providing a marketing edge to participat-

ing producers and retailers/wholesalers in markets that demand high en-

vironmental standards; improving the quality consistency of agricultural

products; pre-empting the imposition of de facto international environ-

mental trade standards; anticipating and avoiding the imposition of future

mandatory environmental regulations and improving the long-term viabil-

ity of the land itself.

However, notwithstanding the limited number of partnerships in theagricultural sector, a number of broader points emerge from the various

empirical studies and analyses conducted to date, and from studies in

related areas. First, in the case of government and industry environmental

partnerships, there are well-known and readily identifiable benefits in

including third parties in the process of developing and overseeing such

agreements, suggesting the value of multipartite partnerships over bipar-

tite agreements.

A second broad point is that environmental partnerships, like voluntary

agreements more generally, are often best used when an environmentalproblem is in its early stages and it is premature to regulate it directly. As

the OECD has pointed out:

in this regard voluntary approaches can be regarded as a policy instrument witha transitional function, i.e. to work until time is ripe for other regulations tocome into force. They are particularly suitable for this role, since they are likelyto generate soft eff ects and learning, and hence can help improve the futuredesign of more traditional instruments. (OECD, 1999, p. 134)

This point is particularly pertinent to environmental partnerships in the

agricultural sector, where many problems are not only complex and do not

readily lend themselves to a conventional regulatory solution, but where




such a solution would engender massive resistance and hostility from a

sector that has been largely free from such intervention in the past

(although there are an increasing number of exceptions).

Third, the weaknesses of voluntary environmental partnerships canoften be compensated for, and their strengths enhanced, by combining

them with most, but not all, forms of command and control regulation.

While regulation in the agricultural sector has not been the prevalent policy

response, it is nevertheless relevant to point out, as our vegetable growers

case study demonstrates, that such combinations of instruments can work

better than partnerships in isolation. For example, voluntary partnerships

can be used to complement conventional regulation by encouraging the

use of environmental management systems or other management tools

that facilitate meeting legal standards and achieving better environmentalperformance.

Fourth, the OECD makes the broader point about voluntary agreements

(VAs) generally that:

if carefully designed and crafted into the policy mix, VAs can play a useful rolein ‘lubricating’this policy mix; increasingflexibility, paving the way for new regu-lations without a stringent and brutal implementation, inducing industry todevelop innovative approaches. Filling enforcement deficits, participation of stakeholders, codes of conduct and guidelines, can all contribute to this ‘lubri-

cating’ function. (OECD, 1999)

However, much work remains to be done in terms of identifying the extent

to which, and the mechanisms by which, voluntary approaches can be

combined with other policy instruments to obtain efficient and eff ective

outcomes.

Fifth, environmental partnerships do seem to generate major positive

‘soft eff ects’, such as collective learning, generation and diff usion of infor-

mation, learning by doing and demonstration eff ects, increased stakeholder

participation and consensus building, which are arguably a key objectiveand virtue of many negotiated agreements. Since many partnerships aim at

increasing environmental awareness of the industry, rather than short-term

environmental impacts, these learning and innovation eff ects should not be

lightly dismissed.

Sixth, the evaluation of environmental partnerships requires a dynamic

analysis: the second generation of such partnerships may be somewhat

diff erent from the first, and considerably more likely to provide public inter-

est benefits. For example, in the closely related area of voluntary agree-

ments, targets now tend to be set by government rather than by industry,

government negotiators are much more sensitive to the risks of setting

targets that merely reflect improvements that would happen anyway, and




there is a movement towards linking negotiated agreements with other

policy instruments, such as taxes, or to complement rather than replace

existing regulations. Greater eff orts are also being made in terms of trans-

parency and third-party input. Whether these developments will justify thefaith of advocates of the partnership approach, and whether the additional

transactions costs of building in essential checks and balances will render

such instruments too costly, remains to be seen. But that question must be

asked in the context of a comparison with the other available alternatives.

In the light of the relatively modest success, of most traditional mechan-

isms at least, the yardstick for comparison may not be that high.

Finally, the relative dearth of partnerships in the Australian context

cannot be understood without an appreciation of the political context in

which partnerships arise, and the importance of providing incentives, forbusiness in particular, to enter into them. At a federal level, the current

Australian government, which has been in power for over a decade, has

shown no inclination to impose onerous environmental controls on agri-

culture and one of the coalition parties in that government is closely tied

with the agricultural sector. While at state level the picture is more complex

and variable, nevertheless Australian agriculture has only rarely experi-

enced the threat of direct intervention in its aff airs. Strikingly, when the

cotton industry came under fire, it was largely because it had threatened the

export markets of another agricultural sector. But, for the most part,lacking external pressure to enter into partnerships with other groups, few

agricultural enterprises or sectors have sought to do so. Overall, in the agri-

cultural context at least, the evidence suggests that providing the appropri-

ate incentives to enter into partnerships would be the single most powerful

driver for their creation.

NOTE

1. The author would like to acknowledge the funding support of an Australian ResearchCouncil Discovery Grant, which facilitated this research.

REFERENCES

Agriculture Water Quality Alliance (AWQA) (2006), www.awqa.orgAustralian Government (2006), Natural Resource Management website: http://

www.nrm.gov.au/about-nrm.html

Australian Vegetable and Potato Growers Federation (AUSVEG,) (2006), http://www.ausveg.com.au/flash_download.htmBritish Columbia Agricultural Council (2006), www.bcac.bc.ca/efp






Protected Harvest (2006), available at: www.protectedharvest.orgScott, J. and D. Trubek (2002), ‘Mind the gap’, European Law Journal , 8(1), pp. 1–18.Southcorp, ACF and Land and Water Australian (joint report) (2002), ‘From

Agricultural Management Systems to Regional Outcomes’, The Ecovine project.Steketee, M. (2001), ‘Of the gold and greens’, The Australian, accessed on 7 April.Thrupp, L. (1996), New Partnerships for Sustainable Agriculture World Resources

Institute, Washington, DC: World Resources Institute.Virtanen, P. (2003), ‘Local management of global values’, Society and Natural

Resources, 16(3), 179–90.




7. Partnership as governancemechanism in developmentcooperation: intersectoralNorth–South partnerships formarine biodiversity1

Ingrid J. Visseren-Hamakers, Bas Arts

and Pieter Glasbergen

North–South relationships in development cooperation are almost per

definition relationships between unequal partners. Traditionally, the

‘Northern’ donor government finances development projects in the devel-

oping ‘Southern’country, a process strikingly described by Glasbergen and

Miranda as a ‘one-way transfer of both money and morals’ (Glasbergenand Miranda, 2003, p. 1). For decades, eff orts have been made to improve

these relationships in terms of equality and mutuality. These improvements

are a necessity for realizing several main goals of development cooperation,

improving autonomy and self-determination of the South (Maxwell and

Riddell, 1998).

Defining North–South relations in terms of partnership has been an

important part of these eff orts to make development cooperation a more

two-way street. In development cooperation, the term partnership is used

to describe diff erent types of relationships, sometimes referring to the re-lationship between a Northern and Southern government only, and some-

times including actors from other sectors of society, like market or civil

society actors. ‘Literature about partnership between North and South

tends to focus on donor–recipient relationships, in particular on the dimen-

sions of power, participation, trust and sustainability, as well as mutuality’

(Johnson and Wilson, 2006, p. 72).

Examples of early eff orts to change the relationship between donor and

recipient countries are the Lomé Conventions between the European Union

and a group of countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacifi

c (the ACPgroup) and the sustainable development agreements (SDAs) between the

Netherlands and Benin, Bhutan and Costa Rica. The Lomé Conventions,

138



dating back to 1975, enabled the recipient country to take the lead in defining

objectives and means of implementation of the development cooperation

agreements. During the course of time, these principles of partnership were,

however, gradually replaced by more control by the donors, because theNorthern countries disapproved of the choices made or ‘could not accept

that aid should be provided irrespective of human rights violations’ in some

countries (Maxwell and Riddell, 1998, p. 261). The SDAs from the 1990s

were grounded on the principles of equality, reciprocity and participation,

with the aim of establishing a new pattern of relationships between North

and South (Verhagen and Dorji et al., 2003). The agreements strived for a

more equal relationship between the donor and developing country. Also,

because the goal of the SDAs was sustainable development, the agreements

implied change not only for the developing but also for the developedcountry, since both needed to change in order to achieve sustainability.

Therefore the principle of reciprocity was adopted. The idea behind the prin-

ciple of participation was the need to strengthen the position of civil society

in the developing countries. The SDAs were not successful for many reasons,

but mainly because the Northern country had difficulties with the principle

of reciprocity (Glasbergen and Miranda, 2003; Rinzin, 2006).

These examples raise the question of whether partnership can actually

improve North–South relations in development cooperation. The major

challenge is how to handle existing unequal relations between partners(Johnson and Wilson, 2006). If these inequalities are not addressed ade-

quately, there is even a danger of partnership actually ‘reinforcing power

asymmetries’ (Lister, 2000, p. 236).

This discussion on the role of partnership in development cooperation is

part of a broader debate on the role of partnership in sustainable develop-

ment. This debate is concentrated less on partnership as a tool for the

emancipation of the South, but more on partnership as a mechanism for

the participation of all actors necessary for sustainable development. The

focus is on intersectoral partnership, partnership between state, marketactors and/or actors from civil society, since attaining sustainable develop-

ment is increasingly seen as a responsibility of all sectors of society instead

of governments only.

The objective of this chapter is to better understand the role of partner-

ship as governance mechanism in development cooperation in this broader

context of sustainable development. We will focus on the role of partner-

ships in the governance system for marine biodiversity, since several devel-

opments are taking place on this issue that are especially relevant for both

development cooperation and sustainable development.

We have developed a transactional model for the analysis of inter-

national partnership, which we present in the next section. We will focus

Partnership in development cooperation 139



our analysis on a form of partnership that is especially relevant for devel-

opment cooperation, intersectoral North–South partnership. In these part-

nerships, the governments, market actors and/or civil society groups in both

a developing and a developed country cooperate, thus combining a part-nership for development cooperation approach and a partnership for sus-

tainable development approach. Intersectoral North–South partnerships

have mainly evolved between countries with an economic relationship,

usually between a Southern country that produces a certain product for a

market in a Northern country. One of the goals of the partnership is often

to make the production more sustainable, a common problem of the pro-

ducing and buying countries. Since this type of partnership represents a

specific part of the total arena of partnerships, our results will be especially

useful for North–South partnerships that focus on a combination of devel-opment cooperation, sustainable development and trade.

We analyze the performance of two intersectoral North–South partner-

ships: the shrimp partnership between Indonesia, Malaysia and the

Netherlands and the anchoveta partnership between the Netherlands and

Peru. These partnerships were chosen because they are a few years old and

thus both their start and development over time can be researched; they

involve the same Northern country (the Netherlands) enabling compari-

son; they play a role in the governance of the most important current sus-

tainability issues in marine biodiversity. The lessons learned through thesetwo case studies can deepen our understanding of the potential of part-

nership as governance mechanism for development cooperation.

The results are based on the analysis of partnership documents, desk

research of literature and 26 interviews with marine biodiversity and

fisheries experts and participants in the partnerships representing the

sectors of society in all countries involved.

7.1 A TRANSACTIONAL MODEL FORPARTNERSHIP ANALYSIS

Partnerships can be analyzed from diff erent theoretical angles. Van Huijstee

and Francken et al. (2007) make a distinction between actor and insti-

tutional analysis of partnerships. In the actor approach, interactions between

the partners are the key unit of analysis. Topics like how partners com-

municate, exchange information and influence each other are analyzed. An

example is Bendell and Murphy’s (2000) analysis of the Forest Stewardship

Council (FSC), where they assess the role of the non-governmental organ-

ization (NGO) WWF, the timber industry and governments from the actors’

perspectives. An institutional analysis, on the other hand, takes another




point of departure. Here, the emergence of partnerships from institutional

dynamics in a society is studied. According to Arts (2002), for example,

partnerships are an expression of recent political modernization processes.

During the last decades the political roles of state, market and civil societyhave been redefined and their boundaries have become blurred, due to the

impact of neo-liberalism, privatization, governance and so on. This has

enabled the emergence of new policy arrangements ‘beyond the state’, such

as intersectoral partnerships.

This chapter combines the actor and institutional approach, while empha-

sizing the former. Therefore we call the framework we use for our analysis a

transactional model on partnerships. With that, intersectoral and inter-

national relationships between Northern and Southern partners from state,

market and civil society are the key units of analysis. This focus is chosenbecause we are theoretically interested most in what the diff erent partners do,

think and decide, individually or together. An empirical argument is that the

marine biodiversity partnerships dealt with in this chapter are only a few

years old, so there is not much ‘path dependency’ to study. Yet, we will also

show that the interactions in and among partnerships are colored by the rules

of the game and the power relations of the past (such as diplomatic tra-

ditions and donor–recipient dependencies among governments).

In Figure 7.1 our theoretical framework is presented. Its starting point

is the triangle of the ‘state’, ‘market’ and ‘civil society’ sectors withincountries (and beyond). Such distinctions are rather common in sociologi-

cal and political analyses and are often applied to the analysis of environ-

mental governance (Dubbink, 1999; Van Tatenhove and Arts et al., 2000;

Driessen and Glasbergen, 2002). Figure 7.1 distinguishes such triangles in

two countries, in our case a developed and a developing country. As a con-

sequence, intersectoral relationships are not only horizontally established

(within countries), but vertically as well (among countries). At this vertical

axis, dynamics among the sectors are to be distinguished, however, not only

intersectoral dynamics (e.g., state–market or market–civil society), butintrasectoral as well (e.g., state–state or market–market). Exactly on the

crossroads of such horizontal and vertical relationships, the establishment

and embedding of intersectoral North–South partnerships take place.

The model also distinguishes three situational contexts: two national and

one international situational context. These refer to specific regulatory

practices on certain issues on the one hand (in our case, existing fishery and

marine biodiversity regulations) and to specific market conditions regard-

ing certain products and services on the other (in our case, fish products

and environmental standards).

The final concept of Figure 7.1 to be elaborated upon is partnership

performance. Performance is defined as the extent to which a partnership




realizes its potential in terms of establishing new relationships and produc-

ing new outputs. This can be achieved at diff erent levels:

1. bringing together relevant stakeholders for a specific sustainability

problem;

2. bringing together relevant views on a problem and thus realizing integrative solutions;

3. introducing or increasing intersectoral cooperation in developing (and

developed) countries;

4. strengthening the position of civil society in developing (and devel-

oped) countries;

5. increasing attention for sustainability issues in developing (and devel-

oped) countries.

It is hypothesized that the performance of partnerships is dependent on:

(1) the situational contexts; (2) intersectoral relationships (between state,

market and civil society within countries) and (3) international sectoral


Figure 7.1 Transactional model for partnership analysis

Situational

Context 2

Situational

Context 1

International

Situational

Context

Market Civil Society

State

Partnership Performance

Market Civil Society

State



relationships (between state, market and civil society among countries). The

situational contexts may have a considerable impact on partnerships and

their performance. For example, if there is already much regulation in place

or market conditions are unfavorable, it is probably hard for a partnershipto emerge and institutionalize. Also, the added-value of a partnership in a

situational context in which many other governance initiatives already exist

will probably be smaller than in a situational context with fewer other

mechanisms in place. Partnerships will probably also have difficulties insti-

tutionalizing when intersectoral and international sectoral relationships

are troubled.

Conceptually, interactions can be studied from many angles: contacts,

conflicts, communication and so on. We decided to study the intersectoral

and international sectoral relationships at the level of three dimensions:discourses, power and rules, comparable with the policy arrangement

approach (Van Tatenhove and Arts et al., 2000).

Discourse, first, is an important concept to understand how groups of

people frame reality in a certain way, through particular ideas, concepts

and narratives (Hajer, 1995). This concept helps us to analyze the various

sustainability discourses in diff erent sectors and countries. Our hypothesis

is that these diff erent discourses will color interpersonal relations in part-

nerships, although implicitly most of the time.

Power is an important concept in political and social analyses alike(Clegg, 1989), but even more so in this case, given the (potential) power

inequalities among developed and developing countries on the one hand

and among the three sectors of society on the other. It is relevant to see how

and to what extent these inequalities co-determine interactions in partner-

ships, enabling or constraining some agencies more than others in achiev-

ing their goals.

Rules, finally, refer to established norms, conventions, routines and the

like, which shape interaction among agencies (Giddens, 1984). Through

‘rules of the game’one can explain how new partnerships are aff

ected, evenparalyzed sometimes, by ‘patterned interactions’ from the past. It should

be mentioned that in applying these three concepts – discourse, power and

rules – we do not aim at a full systematic analysis. Our starting points are

the interactions themselves and only when one or more of the dimensions

seem relevant to explain what is actually happening in the partnership, we

will pay attention to them.

Below, we will assess whether and to what extent the marine biodiversity

partnerships achieve the five levels of partnership performance. Success

and failure will be linked to the situational contexts and the three dimen-

sions of interaction (discourses, power and rules) in both the intersectoral

relationships and the international sectoral relationships.




7.2 DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION AND MARINEBIODIVERSITY

One of the most important services of marine ecosystems for humans is theprovision of food in the form of fish. Marine products are in demand as

luxury food, subsistence food and as feed for aquaculture and livestock.

Because of the growing demand for fish, the rapid expansion of fishing

fleets in the twentieth century and the use of destructive fishing methods,

fishing has become one of the largest threats to marine biodiversity world-

wide. Marine fisheries are in a global crisis (Pauly and Christensen et al.,

1998). Most industrial fisheries are either fully or overexploited (UNEP,

2006): about 47 percent of the main stocks or species are fully exploited, 18

percent are over-exploited and 10 percent are significantly depleted orare recovering from depletion (FAO, 2002). The global fishing industry

is ‘fishing down marine food webs’, first depleting the large, long-lived,

slower-growing, predatory fish that have a position high in the food

web, like tuna, and then moving on to smaller fish species (Pauly and

Christensen et al., 1998, p. 860). Research suggests that the global ocean

has lost more than 90 percent of large predatory fishes (Myers and Worm,

2003). Several commercially valuable marine species are considered en-

dangered or commercially extinct (ICTSD, 2006).

The most important trend in global fisheries today is the emergence andrapid development of industrial aquaculture. Aquaculture is one of the

fastest-growing food producing industries, with an annual global growth

rate of about 9 percent since 1950. Today almost half of the fish consumed

is produced by aquaculture (FAO, 2006). Aquaculture could become a sus-

tainable alternative to catching fish in the wild, lowering the pressure on

marine biodiversity. However, the current aquaculture industry has several

sustainability problems of its own. The industry copes with polluted waste-

water (Tacon and Forster, 2003) and the farms are often built in ecologi-

cally important areas, which are destroyed or impacted due to thesedevelopments. Furthermore, the industry often has a negative impact on

the livelihoods of local communities.

One of the most important sustainability issues in aquaculture is the fact

that most fish produced in industrial aquaculture are carnivorous species.

This type of aquaculture is dependent on industrial feeds, of which a major

ingredient is wild-caught fish (Deutsch and Gräslund et al., 2006): industrial

aquaculture is ‘farming up the food web’ (Naylor and Goldburg et al., 2000,

p. 1018). Already, almost one-third of the fish caught globally is used to

produce fishmeal and fish oil, most of which is used as fish feed in aquacul-

ture (FAO, 2002). Around half of the produced fishmeal and about three-

quarters of the produced fish oil is used by aquaculture; the remainder is




mostly used for animal feed. The feed often comes from fully or over-

exploited fisheries. Moreover, the protein conversion rate is very high: the

weight of thefish caught to produce fish feed is often higher than the weight

of the fish that is farmed. So, when aquaculture uses wild fisheries capturefor fish feed, it is not only considered to be unsustainable in an environ-

mental sense (Pauly and Watson, 2003; UNEP, 2006), it also contributes

little to world food security (Naylor and Goldburg et al., 1998). Aquaculture

of carnivorous species is not intended to provide food, but to generate rev-

enues (Deutsch and Gräslund et al., 2006). The industry is working towards

improving the protein conversion rate, and is researching alternative sources

for fish feed. Soy is an important replacement for fishmeal and fish oil.

However, this only moves the problem to a diff erent type of ecosystem, since

in South America large areas of primary forests are already being convertedinto agricultural land for soy production.

Another important development in fisheries is the globalization of the

production chain (Deutsch and Gräslund et al., 2006). The international

trade in fish has grown tremendously over the past decades, spurred on by

a growing international demand for (high-quality) fish, increased aquacul-

ture production and the demand for fishmeal and fish oil for animal feed.

This demand is expected to remain equal or increase. An important part of

the trade in reality means that fish produced in developing countries is

exported to developed countries. Developing countries were responsiblefor about half of all exports in 2002. Japan, the United States and the

European Union were responsible for about 75 percent of all imports

(ICTSD, 2006). The international trade has increased the quantity and

quality of fish available in developed countries (UNEP, 2006).

The question is whether the development of an export industry, like

industrial fisheries or aquaculture, can contribute to sustainable develop-

ment in developing countries. Export-driven fisheries over-exploit the

resource base in developing countries, and divert food away from the local

market. Often only a few companies profi

t from this industry and it hasproven to be extremely difficult to let local populations also profit from this

development. Moreover, large industrial fishing fleets that focus mainly on

export markets often compete with artisanal fisheries for local markets

(Pauly and Christensen et al., 2002). Fish is extremely important for the

food security of these local fishers. At least six million artisanal and small-

scale fishers worldwide earn less than US$1 per day.

Because the rapid development of aquaculture and export-driven fish-

eries has great impact socially, environmentally and economically, these

issues are of great relevance for development cooperation initiatives for sus-

tainable development. The analyzed intersectoral North–South partner-

ships play a role in the governance of these important current issues. The




shrimp partnership is active in one of the most important aquaculture

sectors that uses industrial feed. Shrimp, a high-value luxury seafood, is the

main fish trade commodity in terms of value and is the most traded seafood

product internationally (FAO, 2002). It is produced mainly in developingcountries for markets in industrialized countries (Naylor and Goldburg

et al., 1998). The anchoveta partnership is focused on the world’s largest

fishery. Peruvian anchoveta was the largest single species catch in 2000

(FAO, 2002). Peru is the world’s main supplier of fishmeal and fish oil: more

than a third of the world production comes from the Peruvian anchoveta

fisheries. Fishmeal and fish oil are the fifth largest type of fisheries trade in

terms of value (ICTSD, 2006).

7.3 THE SHRIMP CASE

Shrimp and Sustainability

Shrimp is both caught in the wild and produced in aquaculture. About

30–40 percent of the global shrimp production comes from aquaculture.

Tropical shrimp aquaculture is the second largest aquaculture sector in

terms of market value, and sixth in terms of quantity (FAO, 2006).

Shrimp aquaculture causes several sustainability problems. Shrimpfarms are frequently developed in mangrove forest areas. About 38 percent

of mangrove loss worldwide can be attributed to shrimp aquaculture

(UNEP, 2006). The loss of wild fisheries stocks due to habitat conversion

by shrimp aquaculture is large (Naylor and Goldburg et al., 2000), since

these mangroves are important nursery habitats for many juvenile fish

caught as adults in coastal and off -shore fisheries. In Southeast Asia,

mangrove-dependent species account for about one-third of the total wild

fish catch. Moreover, mangroves impact the condition of coral reefs, which

account for about 10 percent of global humanfi

sh consumption. The devel-opment of shrimp aquaculture also has negative consequences for local

communities, who use the mangrove forests, for example to fish. When the

forests are destroyed, these sources of income and food disappear.

Formerly publicly accessible land with many resources is transformed into

privately owned farms (Naylor and Goldburg et al., 2000). Shrimp aqua-

culture also copes with pollution, and still depends on natural supplies of

shrimp from the sea. In some cases, small shrimp is caught and raised in

farms. In most other cases, adult females are caught in the wild and brought

to hatcheries to produce larvae (CREM, 2004). Wild shrimp is over-

exploited in many parts of the world (ICTSD, 2006). Finally, because of its

dependence on wild-caught fish for feed, intensive shrimp farming actually








jurisdiction. Diff erent Malaysian legislations are relevant for shrimp aqua-

culture, most of which are of voluntary nature. The national ‘Inland

Fishery Rules (Aquaculture)’ are being developed and adopted at a very

slow pace. According to the rules, state governments are required todevelop aquaculture development plans that ensure sustainable develop-

ment of aquaculture. The Environmental Quality Act requires an EIA for

land-based aquaculture projects that involve clearing of mangrove swamps

covering 50 hectares or more. However, because most farms are smaller

than 50 hectares, an EIA is usually not required. In the Guidelines on

Development of Aquaculture, recommendations are made for the selection

of sites for aquaculture development. The Malaysian Code of Conduct for

Responsible Aquaculture provides non-binding guidance for aquaculture

producers. In the Code, mangrove areas are discouraged as sites for aqua-culture development. The Malaysian government has also developed its

own ‘Malaysian Aquaculture Farm Certification Scheme’ (SPLAM), based

on the FAO Code of Conduct for responsible fisheries. It includes both

food quality and sustainability issues, however, it is not clear how stringent

the scheme is (AIDEnvironment, 2005).

Besides these national regulations, the production of shrimp is an issue

that is also covered by several international private initiatives and partner-

ships. The most important ones are international initiatives to set standards

for and/or certify sustainably produced shrimp. Some of them are stilldeveloping their standard; others are already certifying shrimp. The most

influential are the following. The first one, the International Principles for

Responsible Shrimp Farming were developed by the FAO, the Network

of Aquaculture Centres in Asia-Pacific (NACA), the United Nations

Environmental Programme (UNEP), the World Bank Group (WB), and

the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) (NACA, 2006). The principles

were welcomed by the 50 countries attending the UN FAO (COFI) Sub-

committee Aquaculture meeting in September 2006, and can serve as a har-

monization tool for the large number of certifi

cation initiatives for shrimp(Gianni, 2006). The second, the Global Aquaculture Alliance (GAA) is an

international business initiative. The shrimp farm standards are developed

by a technical committee in which conservation NGOs are represented.

Governments are not involved. The Aquaculture Certification Council

(ACC) has been given the exclusive right to certify farms using GAA stan-

dards. The GAA/ACC could have a large impact on the industry over the

next few years, primarily because two major seafood retailers in the United

States have recently endorsed the GAA standards and ACC certification

scheme (Gianni, 2006).

Maybe even more influential is the initiative of the company Heiploeg,

the main Dutch shrimp importer to propose to integrate sustainability




criteria for shrimp in the Eurep Gap certification system. Eurep Gap is a

commonly used certification system of the European retail industry focused

on food safety issues. The initiative is the result of a dialogue between Dutch

shrimp importing companies and Dutch NGOs that started after an NGOcampaign on shrimp. The dialogue developed parallel to the shrimp part-

nership analyzed in this chapter, and the participants of both initiatives

largely overlap. In the Dutch dialogue, importers and NGOs agreed on

minimum criteria for the sustainability and transparency of shrimp imports.

The NGOs developed the minimum criteria into detailed environmental and

social criteria for sustainable aquaculture shrimp. Eurep Gap has set up a

working group, chaired by Heiploeg, to further develop the sustainability

criteria for shrimp. The criteria adhere to the International Principles for

Responsible Shrimp described above. If Eurep Gap adopts these criteria,this would mean the certification criteria for sustainable shrimp aquaculture

would be endorsed by the majority of the European retail industry, and,

more indirectly, that most large shrimp farms would have to adhere to the

criteria. In addition, it could be the start of Eurep Gap including more sus-

tainability criteria in its system, also for other products. It must be said that

caught shrimp is not included in this system.

A last private initiative is Naturland that certifies organically produced

shrimp, including farms in Indonesia. It is and will probably remain a

certification scheme for a niche market.Based on this overview of international and national initiatives and regu-

lations on the sustainability of shrimp, the question is really what the part-

nership between Indonesia, Malaysia and the Netherlands analyzed in this

chapter can contribute to this already almost overcrowded governance

system for sustainable shrimp.

Partnership Background

The shrimp partnership between Indonesia, Malaysia and the Netherlandswas agreed at the World Summit for Sustainable Development (WSSD) in

Johannesburg in 2002 (Anonymous, 2003). It is part of a larger WSSD

partnership called ‘Market Access Through Meeting Quality Standards for

Food and Agricultural Products’, with more countries involved and on

more products, for which the Dutch government has reserved €8 million.

Here, we focus on the partnership for shrimp.

At the beginning, food safety standards, and not environmental or social

issues, were the main focus of the partnership. Later, environmental and

social issues were incorporated, but the struggle for the aims of the part-

nership continued. The organization of the shrimp partnership was unclear

for some time. For several partner organizations the decision-making






The fact that one sector of society, civil society, was absent at the start of

the partnership had major consequences for its focus. Most of the partners

involved from the start were part of the first development cooperation dis-

course in which its main goals are promoting economic development andstrengthening the position of a country or industry in the global economy.

Therefore they easily agreed that solving the existing problems with the

export of shrimp to the European Union should be the main focus of the

partnership. It also explains why the partnership was agreed upon as a

WSSD partnership called ‘Market Access Through Meeting Quality

Standards for Food and Agricultural Products’. In particular, the govern-

ments of Indonesia and Malaysia wanted the partnership to focus on

ensuring that farmed shrimp from these countries fulfilled the European

food safety and quality demands. The European Union had rejected someshrimp imports from Asia due to residues of antibiotics, and the govern-

ments wanted support from the Netherlands in improving their control

systems for food quality and safety. They were not particularly interested

in sustainability issues of shrimp farming in the partnership; they wanted

improved market access. Also, within the Dutch government, ministries

diff er in their perspectives on development cooperation. The Ministry of

Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality (LNV) is interested in improving the

market access from developing countries, since it supports the more eco-

nomic discourse on development cooperation. The Ministry of ForeignAff airs, however, supports the other discourse, in which sustainable devel-

opment is the main goal. The fact that within the Dutch government the

Ministry of LNV has the lead in this partnership, strengthens the market

access orientation of the partnership.

In the diff erent countries, the partners sharing the same discourse on

development cooperation often had existing rules for working together in

order to achieve their common goals. In Malaysia, for example, the gov-

ernment and industry are used to cooperating in order to further develop

the shrimp aquaculture industry; they have an existing good relationship.The expansion of shrimp aquaculture is an official governmental target,

because of its potential as a high-value export product. The government

sees its role as facilitating the industry, and the industry wants to be sup-

ported by the government. Both viewed the partnership as an opportunity

for capacity building in order to fulfill international food safety standards.

When governments did try to involve civil society in the partnership,

this was especially problematic in Indonesia and Malaysia. This can be

explained by the existing rules for intersectoral cooperation for sustainable

development in the diff erent countries. In the Netherlands, the actors were

used to discussing sustainable development issues in an intersectoral

setting; in Indonesia and Malaysia this was not the case. In these countries,




government and industry are generally not used to consulting NGOs

regularly. Even though the Dutch partners were able to ensure the partici-

pation of the Southern NGOs, they never had a large input in the partner-

ship. An exception is WWF Indonesia, which already had a goodrelationship on sustainability issues with the Indonesian government before

the partnership, and has improved its relationship with market actors

through the partnership. In Malaysia, the relationship between the govern-

ment and NGOs has improved because of their cooperation in the man-

grove rehabilitation project. Thus, the partnership has enabled some

increased understanding between societal sectors and countries. However,

the rules for intersectoral relations in general have not been changed.

Moreover, because all three governments mostly did not involve civil

society as equal partners – instead treating them, in the ‘old-fashioned’manner, as lobby groups – the old rules for intersectoral relationships were

able to dominate the partnership.

Also, because of the dominance of the market access goal of the part-

nership, organizations with a more sustainable development approach to

development cooperation and with fundamental concerns towards shrimp

aquaculture were less eager to become partners. This was especially the case

for many Southern NGOs, whose main constituency is focused on local

socioeconomic issues. The Southern NGOs that did become involved

mainly used the partnership for implementing individual sustainabilityprojects, like the mangrove rehabilitation project in Malaysia and the ‘road

show’ in Indonesia. However, the Southern NGOs did not have enough

power in their intersectoral relationships to tilt the balance between atten-

tion for market access and sustainability towards the latter. Through their

role in the partnership, the Dutch NGOs’ achievement was that the part-

nership as a whole adopted sustainable shrimp production as a formal goal

on paper, even though the balance between economic goals and social and

environmental goals was never found in practice, as described above.

International Sectoral Relationships: A Divided Civil Society

The government and business partners involved at the start of the partner-

ship represent the discourse on the sustainability of shrimp aquaculture that

views the industry as not fundamentally problematic. This is coherent with

the international debate on shrimp aquaculture, in which international devel-

opment agencies, the majority of governments, and the industry represent

this discourse and most NGOs the more fundamental one. There is a degree

of agreement among NGOs, but there isalsoconflict of opinion (Béné, 2005).

This conflict of opinion among civil society groups has had a large impact

on the performance of the partnership. Most NGOs that have been involved




in the partnership had fundamental critique on shrimp farming. Only

WWF, IUCN NL and Oxfam Novib had a more pragmatic perspective on

the sustainability of shrimp aquaculture. These organizations took the

industry as a given and wanted to work on making the industry more sus-tainable. With this pragmatic approach, the NGOs manifested themselves

as part of the less fundamental discourse in the debate on shrimp aquacul-

ture. Within the Friends of the Earth network, the partners in Indonesia,

Malaysia and the Netherlands had diff erent opinions. During the course of

the partnership, all Friends of the Earth representatives adapted the more

fundamental view. Although the NGOs with a pragmatic position repre-

sented a minority position in the international NGO community, they were

the larger, powerful ones, who most often cooperate with market and state

actors in partnership. Nonetheless, in the shrimp partnership, the inter-national more fundamental NGO community was successful in pressuring

the Dutch NGOs to discontinue their participation in the partnership.

There are several explanations for this remarkable outcome. As described

above, the NGOs involved in the partnership had great difficulty getting

attention for sustainability issues in the partnership, so their willingness to

stay involved deteriorated over time. Second, the partnership was meant to

be a ‘true’ intersectoral North–South partnership, and therefore a lot of

eff ort was put into involving Southern NGOs. Through them, the more

fundamental discourse received a voice in the partnership. However, due tothe weak position of Southern NGOs in intersectoral relations they were

unable to influence the core focus of the partnership. Yet, they were able to

influence the Northern NGOs. Third, diff erences in perspectives on the

phenomenon of partnership are also part of the explanation. Some organ-

izations view partnership as a process in which partners meet new actors,

can discuss common issues and try to influence one another, learn to under-

stand each other and build trust. Also, in this discourse, partnership is seen

as a way to have more relationships in which all three sectors of society are

involved. Others see partnership as a way to reach concrete goals by imple-menting projects. The Dutch and Malaysian NGOs supported the latter

view. They wanted to make the shrimp aquaculture industry more sustain-

able through specific projects. WWF Indonesia, on the other hand, has a

more process-oriented perspective on partnership. It regarded the partner-

ship as a means of meeting new actors and build trust. The Northern

NGOs could not realize their specific goals, and felt strong pressure from

the civil society community, both in- and outside the partnership. They felt

they had no other choice but to withdraw from the partnership.

At the same time, the Dutch government was not eager to take a critical

stance towards its Indonesian and Malaysian counterparts in order to

increase attention for sustainability issues. Their existing diplomatic




relations did not allow such criticism. After all, the Dutch government and

the Malaysian and Indonesian governments have a long diplomatic history

of negotiations on natural resources, especially timber. The Dutch repre-

sentatives in the partnership were the same people as in international forestnegotiations. These existing relations and prior experiences have influenced

the shrimp partnership process. The Dutch government, acting as the part-

nership coordinator, became ‘stuck’ between the wish of the Indonesian

and Malaysian governments to focus mainly on market access issues, and

civil society groups to focus more on social and environmental issues.

As described above, the Indonesian and Malaysian market actors were

mainly interested in fulfilling international food safety norms. The Dutch

importers were divided in their interest in sustainability. The Dutch com-

panies that were interested in sustainability chose to be active in a morepractical, direct manner, working on certification of shrimp through the

Eurep Gap system, an initiative that seems to be far more eff ective than

the intersectoral North–South partnership itself. Moreover, the Dutch

importers had already lost their powerful position as buyers to convince

their counterparts to pay more attention to sustainability. After the rejec-

tion of shrimp imports from Asia, most of the import of Indonesian and

Malaysian shrimp moved to other EU countries. In general, the partnership

has enabled a better understanding between Northern and Southern gov-

ernments and market actors, and enabled the discussion of sustainabilityissues between these actors for the first time, even though the relationships

have not really changed.

7.4 THE ANCHOVETA CASE

Anchoveta and Sustainability

The present Peruvian industrialfi

shing industry dates back to the 1950swhen anchoveta started to be processed into fishmeal and fish oil (Pauly

and Tsukayama, 1987). There are two stocks of anchoveta: the northern

stock is found in Peruvian national waters only; the more southern stock

appears in both the Peruvian and Chilean exclusive economic zones (EEZ).

Anchoveta is therefore considered a transboundary fish stock. The species

has been declared fully exploited (Zuzunaga, 2002).

The anchoveta stocks are part of the Humboldt Current Large Marine

Ecosystem, in the Southeastern part of the Pacific Ocean, one of the most

productive marine areas of the world, due to the Humboldt Current, an

upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich waters. The fish resource is periodically

highly impacted by ‘El Niño’ Southern Oscillation (ENSO). In El Niño




years, catches have declined to about a quarter of the catch in normal years

(Hatziolos and de Haan, 2006). This natural extreme volatility makes fish

stock management especially complicated. Both the impact and the delays

in recovery of El Niño are likely to be deepened by overfishing (Deutschand Gräslund et al., 2006). In 1972 the anchoveta population collapsed due

to both heavy fishing pressure and a strong El Niño (Brainard and McLain,

1987). Other El Niño events occurred in the early 1980s and in 1998

(Huntington and Frid et al., 2004). Climate change models predict more

frequent occurrences of El Niño, and it is expected that the anchoveta

stocks will become even more volatile (Hatziolos and de Haan, 2006).

Anchoveta sustains a large and diverse food web, including sea lions,

seals, dolphins, sea birds and other fish species. Since the development of

the industrial anchoveta fishery, the amount of anchoveta available for seabirds has declined significantly. The sea bird population has declined

from about 20–30 million in the 1950s to about three million today (Majluf

and Barandiarán et al., 2005). This was already recognized by Tovar and

Guillen et al. in 1987. They concluded that ‘The fishery thus aff ects the

guano bird populations, by reducing their food base before, during and

after an El Niño event’ (Tovar and Guillen et al., 1987, p. 217).

Because Peru has become the world’s main supplier of fishmeal and fish

oil, the global aquaculture industry is increasingly dependent on this one

marine ecosystem (Deutsch and Gräslund et al., 2006). The sustainablemanagement of anchoveta is therefore of interest for the international

aquaculture industry and global markets for fish.

Two main discourses can be distinguished on the issue of sustainable

fisheries. The first discourse, with a less inclusive approach towards sus-

tainable fisheries, mainly focuses on the state of the managed fish stock.

The goal in this approach is to ensure the long-term sustainability of the

fish stock. Over-exploitation of the stock is prevented by regulating the

fishing industry. The second discourse uses a more inclusive definition of

sustainablefi

sheries, including the ecosystem approach and equity issues.An ecosystem approach

considers ecosystem interactions and the ‘health’of the marine ecosystem in themanagement of marine resources. The goal of the ecosystem approach is todevelop and manage fisheries in a manner that addresses the multiple needs anddesires of societies, without jeopardizing the ability of future generations tobenefit from the full range of goods and services provided by marine ecosystems.(Huntington and Frid et al., 2004, p. 4)

This second discourse also questions the sustainability of the current extent

of the use of fishmeal andfish oil to produce fish feed. In Peru, the discussion

on whether it is sustainable to view anchoveta purely as a fish to produce




fishmeal and oil has recently intensified. Since the whole industry is set up as

a feed production export industry, a local campaign has started to try to get

people to view anchoveta as food instead of feed. In this view, anchoveta is

seen also as food for Peruvians. Also, exporting anchoveta as a table fish nextto feed would be an opportunity for the industrial fishery.

The Situational Context: Few Other Initiatives

For Peru, the anchoveta fishery is one of the major sources of income.

Fisheries exports are the second largest earner of foreign exchange

(Hatziolos and de Haan, 2006). Main buyers are China and Europe.

The Peruvian government started regulating the anchoveta fishery in the

1960s (Castillo and Mendo, 1987). The Peruvian General Fisheries Lawdates back to 1992. It prohibits expansion of the fleet and processing capac-

ity. The law intends to comply with the FAO Code of Conduct for

Responsible Fisheries (Hatziolos and de Haan, 2006) and includes pro-

visions for a third-party self-monitoring system to fight illegal fisheries. The

law has been adapted several times since then, weakening the legislation.

There have also been difficulties with enforcement. The governmental

measures are mainly focusing on managing the anchoveta stocks.

Government controls include satellite tracking systems on vessels, closed

fishing seasons, limits on minimum size of fish landed and consideration of stock assessment in setting harvest limits (Huntington and Frid et al.,

2004). Yet several problems remain, including the eff ects of the fisheries on

marine biodiversity and the ecosystem, the management of the Southern

stock of anchoveta, which is shared with Chilean fisheries, overcapacity of

the fishing fleet, social issues, pollution by the factories and the public avail-

ability of information. One of the main problems is the overcapacity of

both the fishing fleet and processing industry (Hatziolos and de Haan,

2006). For example, due to the number of vessels and their large carrying

capacity, thefl

eet is only allowed tofi

sh for 120 days a year, even thoughthe anchoveta stocks could allow for a 200-day fishing season (Majluf and

Barandiarán et al., 2005). The overcapacity is both economically inefficient

and creates continuous pressure to allow for more fishing.

As described in Section 7.2, the main use for fishmeal and fish oil is the

aquaculture industry. Even though the level of fishmeal and fish oil use in

fish feed will continue to decline, the total demand will keep rising, due to

the ongoing expansion of the aquaculture industry (Huntington and Frid

et al., 2004). This demand for fish feed creates a continuous pressure to

maximize fishing eff orts, even though the anchoveta fishery is already

fully exploited. Moreover, this seemingly inexhaustible demand does

not support eff orts for innovation or change. However, the aquaculture




industry is looking into substitutes for the long term. Main replacements

named are the further improvement of the use of plant material, the use of

bycatch and the development of alternatives through biotechnology (ibid.).

Compared with the almost overfull situational context in the shrimp case,the context of the anchoveta partnership is extremely quiet. A large part of

the international fisheries governance system is not relevant for anchoveta.

Even though it is a transboundary fish stock, it is not considered a ‘strad-

dling fish stock’ or a ‘highly migratory fish stock’. Therefore the inter-

national agreements on these stocks are not applicable to anchoveta. Also,

the anchoveta partnership is the only known international partnership in

this field. In fact, the partnership could turn out to be the beginning of an

internationalfish feed governance system if a roundtable for sustainable fish

feed will become reality (see below). Because of the relatively ‘empty’governance system for sustainable anchoveta, or in a broader sense, sus-

tainable fish feed, the potential added-value of the partnership, both for the

Peruvian and the international context, is high.

Partnership Background

The anchoveta partnership started as a Dutch intersectoral partnership

between the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Aff airs, IUCN NL and the

company Nutreco, whose daughter company Skretting is the world’s largestfish feed producer, with a 40 percent market share. The partnership devel-

oped out of the ‘transition biodiversity’ process organized by the Dutch

government, an interactive process to develop long-term strategies to con-

serve biodiversity. The Dutch partners were all involved in this process.

The partnership has organized two conferences. Even though the organ-

izational form and membership of the partnership are not formally

arranged, one could say that in the process of organizing these conferences,

the Peruvian government and industry and the International Fishmeal and

Fish Oil Organisation (IFFO) have joined the partnership. Peruvian civilsociety groups are not partners.

The first conference was held in Peru in 2005. It was hosted by the govern-

ments of Peru and the Netherlands, and was co-hosted by the Sociedad

Nacional de Pesquería (SNP), which represents over 70 percent of the

fishing industry in Peru. The meeting was co-sponsored by Nutreco and

IUCN NL. The conference was attended by about 50 people, representing

diff erent governments, intergovernmental organizations, research insti-

tutes, certification organizations, industry and local and international civil

society groups. The meeting produced a joint statement by the Peruvian

and Dutch governments. The governments wanted to develop a joint work-

plan, in which the following subjects needed to be included: ‘evaluation




criteria for economic and social eff ects of the fishery, mechanisms to dis-

perse the latest scientific and technical experience to the public in and

outside Peru, and further development of integrating the ecosystem com-

ponents in the anchoveta fisheries management’ (Anonymous, 2005).The second conference was organized by the Dutch and Peruvian

governments, SNP, IFFO, Nutreco and IUCN NL and took place in the

Netherlands. Many of the people who attended the first meeting were

present again. During this meeting, the idea for a roundtable for sustain-

able fishmeal came up. The roundtable would not only focus on Peruvian

fishmeal and fish oil but would try to involve other regions. Conclusions

of the meeting included the initiative of IFFO to research the possibilities

of a global roundtable for sustainable fishmeal and fish oil, the initiative of

Nutreco for a business-to-business working group between Peru and theNetherlands to map potential issues and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign

Aff airs to coordinate the follow-up actions.

Until today, the partnership has mainly been successful in agenda-setting.

Major contributions of the partnership are attention for transparency,

ecosystems and independent certification in regard to the anchoveta fishery.

No new sustainability measures have been implemented due to the partner-

ship. The partnership could develop into a roundtable, an outcome not fore-

seen at the start. An important reason for trying to organize a global

roundtable is to involve other major actors, like the Chinese. A negative side-eff ect of the development of a global roundtable could be that there will be

less attention to the specific Peruvian problems and the implementation of

the partnership action plan. It seems like this is already the case. The part-

nership process is slowing down, while the development of the roundtable

is also extremely slow.

Intersectoral Relationships: A Powerful Industry

All three Dutch partners have a process-oriented perspective on the partner-ship phenomenon. They are convinced of the potential of an intersectoral

partnership approach. They are cooperation-oriented and are used to

working together. Even though their relationship is not formally equal – for

example, the Ministry of Foreign Aff airs subsidizes the work of IUCNNL in

the partnership– the partners in practice seem equal.Also, because theDutch

partnership evolved from an earlier initiative in which all three partners were

involved, all of them joined at the same time, enabling these equal positions.

In Peru, the existing rules of the game guiding intersectoral relations are

quite diff erent. Due to the rule of authoritarian regimes until the end of the

twentieth century, civil society does not have a powerful position in

Peruvian society. Government and industry are not used to consulting




NGOs regularly. The position of civil society is slowly improving, however.

The first partnership conference was the first time that the Peruvian

government, fisheries industry and civil society groups, universities and

international civil society groups were all active participants during thesame meeting on the issue of anchoveta. This was a major step for the

parties involved and it was confrontational at times. Peruvian representa-

tives of the less and more inclusive discourses on sustainable fisheries

exchanged views for the first time. The meeting enabled civil society and

university groups to bring issues from their more inclusive perspective onto

the agenda, among others the ecosystem approach and the inaccuracy of

and lack of transparency onfishing statistics. For some NGOs, the meeting

was also an eye-opener; they realized that the government and industry

were really trying to manage the anchoveta fishery properly. Only, theirdefinition of ‘properly’ was very diff erent from that of the NGOs.

The partnership has not (yet) changed the existing rules of intersectoral

relations in Peru. The main reason is the fact that the Peruvian intersectoral

relationship has an extremely unequal power balance. The Peruvian

anchoveta fishery is so important for the Peruvian economy that the industry

finds itself in an extremely strong power position. The fishery is an important

political issue, the lobby of the industry is very influential, several of its rep-

resentatives are politically active and the relationship between government

and the industry is in general very close. Not surprisingly, the anchovetafishery representatives are part of thePeruvianelite. Consequently, thevisions

of the government and industry are in general the same.

For NGOs the story is quite the opposite. Few Peruvian NGOs are active

on the issue of anchoveta fishery because the issue is simply ‘too big’, and

the fishing industry is simply too powerful. However, the NGOs also have

not prioritized the anchoveta issue themselves; the eff orts in Peru of the

international environmental movement are more focused on forest conser-

vation because of the high biodiversity in Peruvian forests. Other explan-

ations are that the partnership conferences were not organized with equalrepresentation among societal sectors in mind. During the first conference

of the partnership, for example, some representatives of the more inclusive

discourse on sustainable fisheries felt more like observers than partners,

and experienced the participation between societal sectors as unevenly bal-

anced. In addition, artisanal fishers were not represented, excluding equity

issues from the meeting.

International Sectoral Relationships: Careful First Steps

Power relations were also the main drivers in the international sectoral

relationships. The company Nutreco is aware of the strongly increasing




demand for natural resources; ‘We have to start managing scarcity’, as the

interviewee put it. Nutreco wants to cooperate with Peru to produce sus-

tainably because the company realizes sustainable management is simply a

necessity in order to ensure its supplies in five to ten years. It also feelsincreasing pressure from society to guarantee that its products are sustain-

able. Even though Nutreco is a large customer of the Peruvian anchoveta

fishery and a major player in the international fish feed sector, its economic

power was not strong enough to convince the Peruvians to increase their

eff orts towards sustainability. Due to the booming aquaculture industry,

the global demand for fishmeal and fish oil, especially from China and

Chile, is so high that if Europeans stopped buying from Peru for sustain-

ability issues, there would still be plenty of other customers. Furthermore,

Peru is a powerful IFFO member, which decreases the opportunities forIFFO to play a more independent role.

Right from the start of the partnership, the Peruvian industry distrusted

the interest of the Northern parties in the way Peru manages its fish stocks.

The industry feels very strongly about maintaining the autonomy to

manage its national natural resources, and does not want to share the man-

agement with other countries or organizations. The industry felt pressured

to start working with the independent certification scheme Marine

Stewardship Council (MSC), among others, because diff erent fish feed

fisheries in South America are already working with or are thinking aboutMSC certification. During the partnership conferences, certification was

discussed, despite the sensitivity of the issue. In particular, the Peruvian

industry does not want external mingling on social issues. Moreover, the

industry is skeptical about private international standards; working with

(governmental) FAO-based standards is considered more acceptable. Until

today, the industry has been of the opinion that they are managing the

anchoveta stock sustainably and they feel that they do not need an inde-

pendent certificate to prove this. Moreover, the industry does not have a

tradition in external accountability. The industry realizes, nonetheless, thatsooner or later it will have to start working with eco-labeling. Also, because

of the partnership, the Peruvian anchoveta industry has gained more

understanding of the sustainability concerns of its clients and other actors

and the value of communicating about its own sustainability eff orts. The

partnership gave the Peruvian government and industry the opportunity to

inform an international forum about the measures already taken to make

the anchoveta fishery more sustainable.

All three involved Dutch organizations are convinced of the added-value

of the partnership given the fact that government, business and civil society

are all involved on the Dutch side. They very consciously made the eff ort

to engage the right counterparts of all three sectors of society from Peru.




Consequently, the Dutch partners succeeded in finding the right Peruvian

people in their own sectors. However, because all three Dutch organizations

have a process perspective on partnership and therefore view partnership

especially as a way for new actors to work together and build trust, therewas little pressure to attain concrete sustainability measures. This discour-

aged some participants with an output-oriented view, especially those who

also have a more inclusive perspective on the sustainability of the

anchoveta fisheries. The diff erent actors involved therefore have diff erent

opinions on the added-value of the partnership conferences.

7.5 CONCLUSIONS

In this chapter, we have tried to improve our understanding of partner-

ship as governance mechanism in development cooperation, using the

marine biodiversity empirical field for our research. Although our work is

relevant for understanding the role of international intersectoral partner-

ship in general, our conclusions are especially useful for intersectoral

North–South partnerships that focus on a combination of development

cooperation, sustainable development and trade. The presented trans-

actional model used in this chapter has proven a useful tool for analyzing

international intersectoral partnership. The model unravels the diff erentinfluences on partnership performance by focusing on the situational con-

texts and on discourse, power and rules in intersectoral and international

sectoral relations. Because in practice these causes interact, the model can

be used as a beneficial instrument to weigh the relative influence of each

dimension.

Both the shrimp and the anchoveta partnership did not fully realize the

potential of working through international intersectoral partnership. Of

the five levels at which intersectoral North–South partnerships were

expected to establish new relationships and produce new outputs (engagingstakeholders, realizing integrative solutions, increasing intersectoral co-

operation, strengthening civil society and promoting sustainability) only two

were partly realized. Both partnerships did bring together relevant stake-

holders from all three sectors of society, and thus did bring together several

relevant views on the sustainability problems at hand, even though not all

relevant stakeholders were involved. The main successes of the partner-

ships therefore can be found in the sphere of agenda-setting and increased

understanding among partners. However, the concrete outputs that were

produced hardly integrated the perspectives of the diff erent partners; thus,

integrative solutions were only partially developed. Also, the partnerships

did not contribute to improved intersectoral cooperation in the longer run,




and attention for sustainability, including all its dimensions, has not

increased. These conclusions cannot be seen as definite, since both part-

nerships are relatively recent initiatives and are ongoing.

Both cases show that important success and failure factors may lieoutside of a partnership, in the situational contexts. In the shrimp partner-

ship, the pressure from the international NGO community outside the part-

nership on the NGOs inside was overwhelming, and in the anchoveta

partnership, earlier societal pressure on the company Nutreco to become

more sustainable was one of the driving forces to start the initiative.

Moreover, the potential added-value of a partnership is dependent on the

number of other initiatives that are working on the same issues. In the

shrimp case, the question is really what the partnership can contribute to a

governance system in which numerous public and private governancemechanisms are already in place. The contribution of the anchoveta part-

nership to the governance system in Peru, on the other hand, could become

significant, since the partnership has been able to place new issues on the

agenda, for example the ecosystem approach. The partnership’s contri-

bution to the international governance system could become influential if

the partners succeed in enabling an international roundtable on sustainable

fish feed. With that, the partnership could actually become the start of an

international governance system for sustainablefish feed. The development

of the roundtable is, however, extremely slow.The case studies have also made clear that partnering is extremely prob-

lematic when diff erent discourses meet. It seems that a basic consensus

among partners on the strategies for sustainable development, on develop-

ment cooperation and on the role of partnership as governance mechanism

is needed in order for partnership to be successful. The consequences of

this prerequisite can already be seen in the current practice of partnership,

not only in the field of marine biodiversity but also, for instance, in thefield

of forest biodiversity (see also Visseren-Hamakers and Glasbergen, 2007).

Often the NGOs with more pragmatic strategies towards sustainability andwith more process-oriented perspectives on partnership as governance

mechanism become and remain involved in partnership. The NGOs

with more inclusive views on sustainability and more output-oriented

approaches often do not become involved or leave partnerships due to the

perceived lack of progress. This practice has substantial impact on the

role of partnerships. It means that some discourses are not represented or

are under-represented in partnerships, disabling their potential in address-

ing certain sustainability issues.

This is exactly what happened in the shrimp case, where ‘true’ partner-

ship, in which all actors cooperate towards a common goal, was impossible

due to the domination of one discourse. Because of the late involvement of




civil society, the partners with an economic discourse on development

cooperation and with less fundamental objections towards the develop-

ment of shrimp aquaculture as an export product were able to set the tone

of the partnership. Due to this positioning of the partnership, NGOs withfundamental critique on industrial shrimp aquaculture were hesitant to

play a role and finally convinced most of the more pragmatic NGOs to

leave the partnership. Both cases show that discourses on the phenomenon

of partnership also influence partnership performance. In the shrimp case,

some of the partners that viewed partnership as a way to reach concrete

goals are cooperating successfully in a diff erent setting, the dialogue

between Dutch importers and NGOs working on Eurep Gap certification

criteria. In the anchoveta case, the partnership did enable the representa-

tives of less and more inclusive discourses towards sustainable fisheries toexchange views, but because the Dutch partners all have a more process-

oriented perspective on the partnership phenomenon, there has been little

momentum for concrete steps towards increased sustainability. In fact, the

development of both partnerships is losing momentum due to the fact that

few partners are proactive. It seems that working in partnership is viewed

by many as additional work and not as part of their core business. This atti-

tude is preventing the partnerships from realizing their potential in the

longer term.

Existing rules also have a large influence on partnership performance.Both case studies demonstrate that, in particular, existing rules in intersec-

toral relations have a large impact. Most organizations in both the North

and the South are not used to working together in intersectoral partner-

ships that include all three societal sectors. Generally, the Southern

governments and industries have a good and close working relationship to

further develop export industries. It is difficult for them to view civil society

as an equal partner, since the Indonesian, Malaysian and Peruvian govern-

ments and industries do not have a tradition in proactively involving civil

society; civil society usually has a weak position in Southern intersectoralrelations. In both the North and the South, if civil society is invited to

become involved, it is often through consultation, and not as an equal

partner. In the cases when NGOs do become partners in intersectoral part-

nership, the relationships within the partnership are of a very diff erent

character, because the partnership for the government and industry means

the continuation of an existing relationship and for civil society the part-

nership means a new type of relationship with both government and indus-

try. Also, civil society groups sometimes have difficulty fulfilling this new

role as partner. They have to commit themselves publicly to the partnership

and have to implement projects, while some NGOs have little experience in

implementation. Businesses especially show little patience when NGOs




have trouble committing to the often incremental improvements achieved

by intersectoral partnership.

In conclusion, the existing rules for intersectoral relations are so strongly

established that the analyzed partnerships have not been able to improvethis cooperation structurally. Moreover, the existing weak position of the

Southern NGOs in local intersectoral relations has been incorporated in

and reinforced by the partnerships. Practice shows that it is a tall order for

partnerships to change existing rules and that the potential of partnership

to increase intersectoral cooperation is difficult to realize.

Existing rules in international sectoral relations also impact partnership

performance. The core business of most civil society groups is campaign-

ing, trying to bring about change in governments and industries by showing

their current unsustainable behavior and proposing improvements. Theyare less used to working in partnership with these organizations in order to

enable more sustainable behavior step by step, making compromises and

taking public accountability for these compromises. Some NGOs that are

increasingly using the partnership approach instead of the campaigning

approach are criticized by other civil society groups. The shrimp case is a

good example of this split in civil society. In this case the campaigning

NGOs convinced most of the NGOs that were willing to work in partner-

ship to make shrimp aquaculture more sustainable to discontinue their

involvement in the partnership. Existing rules for intergovernmental re-lations also aff ect partnership performance. Governments are used to co-

operating with each other in bi- or multilateral governmental arrangements

that generally include a number of specific formalities. These intergovern-

mental formalities sometimes stand in the way of a more informal manner

of cooperation in partnership.

The case studies point out that power inequalities, both in intersectoral

and in international sectoral relations, have large impacts on partnership

performance. Also, it is extremely difficult to change power imbalances

through partnership. Especially in the anchoveta case, ‘true’ partnershipwas hampered mainly by existing unequal power relationships. The import-

ance of the anchoveta industry, both for the national economy and for the

global supply of fish feed, dominated both intersectoral and international

sectoral relations.

The traditional power imbalance in North–South development cooper-

ation relations, as described in the introduction, was less present in the ana-

lyzed partnerships. This was not only due to the fact that the partnerships

did not follow ‘the rules of the game’ of traditional development cooper-

ation, with the Northern country bringing a large budget into the relation-

ship, since relatively little money was spent on the analyzed partnerships.

Another explanation can be found in the inclusion of the market sector








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PART 3

Partnerships and the liberal-democraticgovernance structure





8. Partnerships for sustainability:an analysis of transnationalenvironmental regimes

Philipp Pattberg

Governance for sustainability is one of the great challenges humankind is

facing at the beginning of the third millennium. The perennial question

is how to organize the co-evolution of societies and their surrounding en-

vironment.Withinthelastdecade, theconceptof ‘partnership’hasgainedcur-

rency in these discussions, both as an empirical observation and a normative

programme. This chapter takes a governance perspective on recent devel-

opments in global environmental politics – in particular on partnerships

between divergent actors such as business and non-profit organizations –

and asks what we can learn from research about the formation and influence

of transnational environmental regimes for the burgeoning partnership

debate.

Innovative forms of partnership can be observed in a range of diff erent

organizational settings and issue areas. Firms may engage in strategic

alliances with suppliers and competitors, develop informal industry norms

and practices or even formal inter-firm regimes, regulating the behaviour of

a wide range of business actors in sectors ranging from chemicals to min-

erals and mining. International organizations seek the assistance of corpor-

ations in implementing universal social and environmental norms or

engage in partnerships with business actors and non-governmental organ-izations to introduce globally applicable schemes for sustainable corporate

reporting. Civil society representatives take part in deliberations involving

corporations, governments and international organizations with a view to

establishing a sustainable framework for the planning and operation of

large-scale dams.

Some forms of institutionalized rule-making and implementation even

deliberately exclude public authorities and create social obligations that

are private in their nature, but transcend national boundaries in issue areas

ranging from forestry to organic farming and corporate environmentalreporting. Take, for example, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), a

173



transnational partnership of environmental and social NGOs, timber

producers and traders, labour activists and retailers that sets detailed rules

and procedures to regulate the behaviour of economic actors along the

supply chain in global forestry. In the words of Stephen Bass (2002, p. 7):‘It is notable how FSC has been able to: develop norms of behaviour;

develop procedures for compliance; tackle the issue of multifactor coher-

ence; and ensure a case-based approach to judgement and appeal. In other

words – to develop “law” ’. However, the FSC is not an exceptional case.

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), the Marine Stewardship Council

(MSC), but also initiatives such as the Rugmark Foundation labelling

scheme for carpets produced without child labour, the Earth Island

Institute’s ‘Dolphin Safe’ label for tuna, the Common Code for the Coff ee

Community (4C) or the Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development(MMSD) initiative are further illustrations of a growing market of non-

state processes in which issues are defined, rules are made and compliance

with these rules is monitored. As far as their output is concerned, these

partnerships resemble international cooperation, with the important

diff erence that it is not predominantly states, but non-state actors who

generate the principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures and

the expectations associated with them. Hence, we might speak of private

rule-making partnerships as specific types of transnational regimes that

have emerged in many areas where international regulation is either absentor weak.

As a result of this similarity, key questions with regard to transnational

regimes resemble many of the questions posed in international institutional

theory – for instance, ‘What accounts for the emergence of instances of

rule-based cooperation in the international system?’, ‘How do inter-

national institutions aff ect the behaviour of state and non-state actors in

the issue areas for which they have been created?’ or ‘Which factors, be they

located within or without the institution, determine the success and the

stability of international regimes?’ (Hasenclever, Mayer and Rittberger,1997, p. 1). In analogy to these questions, this chapter is interested in the

institutionalization of transnational governance; its particular aim is to

understand the emergence of rule-making partnerships in the field of

global sustainability politics and the causal pathways through which these

transnational regimes gain influence in world politics. The relevance of

these questions is underlined by the growing trust the international com-

munity and a host of non-state actors are putting in governance beyond the

state, often without a thorough discussion of the interests and pay-off s

involved.

174 Partnerships and the liberal-democratic governance structure



8.1 TRANSNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTALGOVERNANCE RESEARCH: FROM NON-STATEACTORS TO NON-STATE RULES

Given the increasing interest in non-state actors of all kinds – including civil

society organizations, business corporations and scientific communities –

the view that the discipline of international relations (IR) is firmly based on

a state-centred ontology can hardly be substantiated. Nonetheless, most

research on non-state actors in world politics has focused on the influence

these actors have on intergovernmental policy-making. In contrast, the

governance role that non-state actors fulfil beyond their cooperation with

public actors has frequently been overlooked.

A notable exception is the debate on private authority in world politics,which focuses on inter-firm cooperation and its impacts on the inter-

national political system. Studies on private authority have paid consider-

able attention to processes of institutionalization in the form of informal

industry norms and practices, cartels, production alliances and private

inter-firm regimes (Cutler, Haufler and Porter, 1999). Other studies have

focused on the emergence of private authority in the field of international

political economy more generally, distinguishing between moral, market-

based and illicit forms of authority (Hall and Biersteker, 2002).

Second, a more actor-centred perspective on transnational governance inworld politics can be found in Peter Newell’s (2001) assessment of novel

strategies taken by environmental NGOs to target business actors. From

the perspective of international political economy, strategies of consumer

boycotts, shareholder campaigns and the general exposure of corporate

misconduct are analysed as instruments of governance because they induce

behaviour that is rule-bound and socially regulated (ibid., p. 89).

As a third contribution, the management literature on strategic alliances

and partnerships (Hartman and Staff ord, 1997; Austin, 2000) particularly

focuses on the ways in which the new relationship of business and othernon-state actors aff ects corporate business goals. Among others, better risk

management, cost reduction and productivity gains, the development of

new products and the intrusion into new markets, the reorganization of

production chains and the construction of barriers to other companies

through distinction are seen as incentives that explain the proliferation of

business–NGO collaboration at the global level (cf. Waddell, 1999). Finally,

in the context of a growing body of literature on so-called ‘new forms of

governance’, the issue on non-state global governance has gained popular-

ity (see e.g., Reinicke et al., 2000; Cashore, 2002; Börzel and Risse, 2005).

In parallel to the above-mentioned perspectives on transnational govern-

ance, scholars have attempted to understand the relationship between

Partnerships for sustainability 175





standards for forest managers and enterprises along the supply chain

(FSC, 2000).

8.2 THE EMERGENCE OF TRANSNATIONALENVIRONMENTAL REGIMES

Beyond Demand-side Explanation

The emergence of transnational governance and its theoretical implications

are evolving into a prominent field within the study of IR in general and

global sustainability politics in particular. Diff erent theoretical approaches

and single or comparative case studies off er promising explanations for theformation of private institutions that regulate business activities at the

global and transnational scale. However, the problem seems to be that most

theoretical approaches are not specifically tailored to the newly emerging

phenomena and that empirical studies that address them tend to isolate

causal factors or at least fail to specify their relationship and the causal

pathways operating in the process of institutional formation. One common

assumption, for example, is that partnerships to regulate business behav-

iour have emerged as a reaction to increased capital flows across borders

and the assumed decline in the regulatory capacity of states (Evans, 1997;Haufler, 2003). Yet, such a mono-causal demand-based explanation is

hardly convincing because it leaves open whose ‘demand’ for transnational

regulation is sufficient for the establishment of new institutions. Other

approaches from institutional theory either highlight transaction costs and

changing market dynamics (North, 1990) or the fundamentally political

nature of institution-building in the global economy (Fligstein, 1996).

However, most explanations fail to account for the interaction of larger sys-

temic transformations (i.e., change at the macro-level) and the decisive con-

ditions at the organizational level (i.e., change at the micro-level).To avoid the shortcomings of a single-factor account, I introduce four

factors that help to illustrate the formation process of transnational

regimes in global sustainability politics (cf. Pattberg, 2005b), building on

organizational theory, institutionalism and constructivist approaches:

1. macro-systemic transformations, such as globalization or hegemonic

reconfiguration, as well as contextual factors at the macro-level;

2. problem structure, characterized by interdependent interests as well as

diff erent levels of information and knowledge;

3. organizational resources that enable actors to reduce transactions costs

or improve their strategic position;




4. ideas and models that allow actors to agree on a common framework

for their collaboration.

The four conditions form an integrated set of conditions that describesthe emergence of private transnational regimes because distinct variables

are systematically interacting with each other and thus jointly produce a

certain result (Efinger, Mayer and Schwarzer, 1993, p. 273). This approach

draws our attention to a variety of interlinkages between diff erent con-

ditions that would not be observable using a single-factor account.

Consequently, three assumptions guide the empirical analysis. First, I

assume that a lack of eff ective public regulation at the domestic or inter-

national level forces non-state actors to address problems bilaterally.

Second, I assume that civil society pressure creates demand for regulationthat is not adequately addressed by public sources. Therefore, emphasis is

laid on the social construction of the demand for transnational regulation.

Third, I assume that a supportive ideational environment is a further pre-

requisite for the cooperation of antagonistic actors that is characteristic for

many transnational regimes; as a result, macro-level discourses are

analysed with regard to their adaptiveness to a ‘partnership agenda’.

Case study: the origins of CERES

The original demand for a new institutional arrangement of corporateenvironmental reporting and performance had grown mainly out of the

concerns of institutional investors and their clients about the adequacy of

corporate environmental information. In the words of one board member

of the Social Investment Forum (personal communication CERES staff

member, 2004):

Big companies had little coherent information on the issue [of environmentalperformance]; advocacy group information was not always applicable and accu-rate. Some of us had the idea of approaching environmental groups to do work

on the environment to try to find out how to get information more consistentlythat would benefit the environment and serve investor interests.

Although reluctant in the beginning, environmental organizations soon

began to support this new approach because strategic perceptions were

already changing profoundly. Environmental NGOs increasingly realized

that with a regulatory environment favouring voluntary approaches and

systematic deregulation, both at national and international levels,

companies were of paramount importance with regard to realizing mea-

surable environmental improvements. According to Deborah Doane (2005,

pp. 23–4), NGOs realized that ‘more momentum could be achieved by part-

nering with the enemy’. The processes of economic integration and the




increasing velocity of globalization dynamics have given transnational

corporations (TNCs) a stronger voice in influencing policy outcomes.

However, these processes also exposed companies to public scrutiny and

thereby led to the imposition of external rules on these actors (Clapp, 2005,p. 284). The decisive event that convinced companies of the usefulness of

corporate codes of conduct coupled with a reporting obligation was the use

of shareholder petitions by institutional investors.

On this account, social investors came together with environmental

NGOs with a view to building bridges with business, understanding that

the success of many programmes to protect the environment would depend

on designing an economy that is sustainable over the long run, requiring

corporate involvement and commitments. Among investors and environ-

mental activists, there was growing agreement that companies are one of the central causes for many current environmental problems because it is

they who emit pollutants, extract the raw materials and use high quantities

of energy. As one observer (personal communication CERES board

member, 2004) of the early negotiations comments: ‘We came together with

a view that we could influence corporations in a positive way by entering

into a dialogue’. To conclude, it seems that the emerging demand for dis-

tinct private regulation in the field of corporate environmental perfor-

mance and reporting has largely been driven by the macro-systemic

transformations in the nature of global capital formation and the resultingstrategy changes, both withinfirms and NGOs (cf. Bartley, 2003). After this

analysis of the demand for a transnational regime in the area of corporate

environmental reporting and management, I now turn to arguments about

the actual supply of solutions, both at systemic and organizational levels.

When institutional investors and the representatives of major environ-

mental organizations convened at Chapel Hill, North Carolina in April 1989

to discuss ways to improve the environmental and social impacts of invest-

ments, a whole range of controversial issues was waiting to be solved. For

social investors and their clients, the lack of information about the environ-mental performance of companies was a real risk for their businesses. Either

information came from the companies themselves, displaying advanced

public relations skills rather than substantial information, or from advocacy

groups addressing their specific constituencies. Neither served the need of a

growing social investment community. Little help came from governmental

regulation at that time, because measures focused on specific substances, like

in the case of the Toxic Release Inventory established in 1987, rather than

on environmental performance in its entirety. NGOs, for their part, began

to realize that conventional lobbying strategies aimed at governments were

becoming less eff ective, while at the same time business actors emerged as

the real threats to the environment. In particular, the catastrophe of Bhopal




in 1984 and the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 brought corporate mis-

behaviour to the forefront of public concern. As a result, companies,

althoughreluctant atthe beginning, started tolook forcredible ways tosecure

brand reputation and profits in the midst of a hostile public environment.After a couple more meetings among the original coalition members, the

negotiations led to the formulation and public announcement of the Valdez

Principles on 7 September 1989, resulting in considerable media coverage

and attention. Already this early phase of negotiations showed a remark-

able feature. Debates were not based on positional negotiation and con-

frontational strategies, but on a common framework of reference from

where future visions could develop. Two ideas, one practical, the other

more visionary, served as influential institutional models. First, there is the

system of standardized financial accounting that emerged in collaborationbetween public and private actors in the United States and is controlled and

monitored by the Financial Accounting Standards Board. As Nash and

Ehrenfeld comment (1997, p. 512): ‘Ceres ambitiously aspired to play a role

like that of the Financial Accounting Standards Board and to eventually

formulate generally accepted principles for environmental reporting’.

The second idea that had a considerable impact on the coalition

members in finding mutual grounds for common action, was the approach

of using shareholder petitions to change corporate behaviour, as in the case

of the Sullivan Principles applied to US companies operating in SouthAfrica under the apartheid regime. The Sullivan Principles originated in

1977 when Reverend Leon Sullivan, a Baptist minister, issued his code of

conduct in an attempt to end discrimination against black workers in South

Africa oppressed by the nation’s policy of apartheid. This initiative helped

to focus attention on the issue of racial injustice in South Africa within

international business by promoting criteria for socially responsible invest-

ment practices. This strategy to pressure corporate behaviour in South

Africa served as ‘the basic blueprint for CERES’ (Nash and Ehrenfeld,

1997, p. 513). On this account, both the idea of fi

nancial accounting andthe Sullivan Principles were of considerable importance in the process of

institutionalization, because they created a common framework of refer-

ence under which adversarial standpoints could be integrated into a shared

practical vision.

Shortly after the public announcement of the Valdez Principles, coalition

members engaged in an intense dialogue with corporations to test their

willingness to adopt the principles and commit themselves to periodic

reporting. However, although the Aveda Corporation became the first sig-

natory to the Valdez Principles on 22 November 1989 (CERES, 1999), it

took another three years to institutionalize cooperation with a wider range

of corporate actors. In its own words (CERES, 1998, p. 4):




[i]n the early years (1989–92), the CERES Principles were mainly adopted bycompanies that already had strong ‘green’ reputations, as exemplified by suchfirms as The Body Shop, Ben & Jerry’s, Seventh Generation and Aveda. But the

momentum behind the CERES concept continued to build.

This happened as a result of strategic changes within the coalition. After

the campaign to win corporate supporters to the CERES Principles had

not produced the envisaged results – as only a handful of companies signed

the Valdez Principles after their public announcement in 1989 – the various

investment groups represented in CERES began to place resolutions before

the stockholders of influential companies, gaining widespread media atten-

tion. In many cases, shareholder resolutions are the first step towards

intense dialogue with corporations, often at the highest executive level, thatleads to formal endorsement of the Principles. Sunoco became the first

Fortune 500 company to endorse the new CERES Principles in February

1993; General Motors followed in 1994.

When CERES started to get more institutionalized, neither the invest-

ment community and the environmental organizations, nor the endorsing

companies knew what the precise outcome would be in terms of joint gains

and mutual benefits. A good example is the engagement with GM, the

world’s largest automobile corporation. The CERES Performance Reviewof GM (CERES, 2002a, p. 5), conducted in 2001 and covering the first five

years of institutional cooperation, notes:

The world’s largest corporation was joining hands with a relatively unfamiliar,yet potentially very influential, coalition of environmental groups and sociallyresponsible investors. The outcomes were uncertain, and there were many scep-tics on both sides. . . . Together GM and CERES hoped to harvest potentialbenefits in admittedly unknown and probably rough terrain.

What has proved more important than a clear understanding of future

gains were four distinct organizational resources involved in the process of institutionalization: the ability to frame the problem in a way that is mean-

ingful to other stakeholders, the information necessary to solve it, the

impact to make an actual diff erence in the given issue area and the credi-

bility to construct a joint solution acceptable to all the participants. Social

investors were able to address the problem of corporate environmental per-

formance because they not only represented social visions, but substantial

capital interests as well. Through filing shareholder petitions, they made

companies aware of the growing demand for environmental disclosure. But

investors needed the support of non-partisan environmental organizations

to off er corporations the reputational benefit and added-value necessary to

engage them in cooperation. The companies, for their part, provided the






case, it has been the practice of financial accounting and the experience

activists had gained through anti-apartheid shareholder campaigns that

served as a blueprint for action. In the case of the FSC, it has been the

instrument of certification that was already operational in other sectorscombined with a visionary approach towards ownership (granting similar

decision-making powers to economic, social and environmental actors)

that was derived from the general idea of sustainable development rising to

prominence around that time. In sum, the ideational environment therefore

appears as an important background factor for the emergence of trans-

national environmental regimes.

Finally, what is the role of changes in the relations between state and

non-state sources of authority? Where do actors see more eff ective strat-

egies? With regard to these questions, the empirical examples support theassumption that the formation of transnational environmental regimes

reflects a general shift in the configuration of actors in world politics. With

public actors either unable or unwilling to provide regulation on a range of

issues, private actors increasingly approach problems bilaterally. Business

has emerged as an influential and at the same time highly visible actor in

world politics, while civil society organizations react to the privatization

of politics by targeting companies directly instead of lobbying states.

Therefore, a reconfiguration of actor relations and the subsequent broad-

ening of the strategic toolkit are equally essential background factors forour understanding of the emergence of novel institutional arrangement in

global sustainability politics.

8.3 THE INFLUENCE OF TRANSNATIONALENVIRONMENTAL REGIMES

How Do They Matter?

Similar to research on international regimes, the question of eff ects and

eff ectiveness follows from the initial interest in the emergence of new insti-

tutional phenomena. After having established a preliminary understanding

of the reasons for their emergence, the question now is: do they matter?

Potential influences of transnational environmental regimes can be broadly

classified in three categories: regulatory in fl uences related to the establish-

ment of new norms, rules and standards at various levels of community;

cognitive and discursive in fl uences related to the framing of issues and key

concepts of the decision-making process as well as to more general

processes of social learning; and a variety of more direct material and struc-tural in fl uences ‘on the ground’.




Regulatory influences occur when actors change their behaviour to

accommodate existing rules and regulations that derive from a transnational

regime. They relate to changes of social norms or of local, national or

international rules on the subject matter of a transnational environmentalagreement. For example, changes in the behaviour of actors that are the

primary target of transnational regimes – often measured as standard-

uptake and rule-compliance – can be considered the regulatory influence of

a specific transnational regime. In addition, where governments adopt new

legislation based on the norms and rules codified in a transnational agree-

ment, we would speak of regulatory influence, although of a more indirect

nature.

A second type of influence can be labelled cognitive and discursive. In

relation to cognitive and discursive eff ects, transnational environmentalregimes usually operate within a field characterized by scientific uncer-

tainty. The development of adequate standards for sustainable forestry, for

example, will depend on expertise in issue areas ranging from biodiversity

conservation to the global timber trade and consumer preferences.

Brokering knowledge and organizing eff ective learning processes among

diff erent stakeholders is therefore key to influencing the behaviour of rele-

vant actors. In this view, transnational regimes produce and disseminate

knowledge through a network of actors bound together by the constitutive

rules of the institution. In addition, a regime may activate learningprocesses that enable actors to fulfil new roles and take over new responsi-

bilities. Ultimately, a regime may bring about changes in the discourse

about an environmental problem – for instance, by successfully defining the

content of key normative concepts such as, in the case of forestry, ‘sus-

tainable forest management’.

Finally, where we observe changes in market access, market shares or

cost structures that can be linked to a transnational agreement, we would

speak of direct material or structural influences. In discussing the social

and political eff

ects of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the follow-ing section examines what types of influence can be ascribed to this specific

transnational regime on sustainable forestry.

Case study: the Forest Stewardship Council and its eff ects on stakeholders

In the case of the FSC, regulatory influences can be attributed to the

process of certification that forms the basis of the FSC’s work. In

September 2006, approximately 74 million hectares of forest area world-

wide were certified in FSC terms. That amounts to roughly 1.8 percent of

the total global forest cover, which stands at 3.9 billion hectares, including

commercially operated as well as protected areas. The FSC has issued more

than 5000 certificates to forestry companies and businesses. Conservative




estimates are that 100 million cubic metres of timber from FSC-certified

sources reach the market each year, while the total supply of certified

timber products is estimated at about 234 million cubic metres on an annual

basis (Atyi and Simula, 2002). However, only a small fraction of certifiedtimber is actually traded as a certified forest product, while the large

majority of certified timber reaches the market without reference to its

certification status.

Next to the regulatory influence of private environmental regimes on

their primary stakeholders, a number of observations can be made that

relate to the integration of FSC norms and regulations into public regu-

latory systems. First, governments might endorse the FSC, for example

through their public procurement policies. A recent forest products market

review by the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and theFood and Agriculture Organization (FAO) (Rametsteiner, 2002, p. 163)

finds that public procurement has become a growing source of demand for

certified forest products. In addition to a range of policies already existing

at the community level, several governments have announced public pro-

curement measures that directly or indirectly favour certified timber. The

German government, for example, decided in 2002 that public procurement

should exclusively rely on the FSC for wood products. In addition, the

Red–Green coalition government also clearly stated its commitment to

forest certification in general and the FSC in particular in its 2002 coalitioncontract (cf. World Wide Fund for Nature Deutschland, 2002). In a similar

vein, the British government has enacted the ‘Central Government Timber

Procurement Policy’, while the government of Denmark, within the context

of the fight against illegal logging, has taken a decision in 2001 to recognize

the FSC label as an example of a credible instrument to provide assurance

that timber is not only sustainably, but also legally, produced. Altogether,

procurement policies and public endorsement of forest certification exist in

Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden,

Switzerland, the United Kingdom and some states of the United States.However, as a strong environmental consciousness among voters is largely

confined to OECD countries, and consequently governmental action to

accommodate such views is limited, endorsement seems to have little

impact beyond industrialized countries.

A second form of integration can be observed in the influence of the FSC

on national policies and the corresponding empowerment of actors in

national debates. The multi-stakeholder process of the FSC is credited with

having had a beneficial influence on policy discussions and stakeholder

relations, especially in countries with otherwise weak forestry governance

(cf. Bass, Font and Danielson, 2001). A study of South Africa (Mayers,

Evans and Foy, 2001) has revealed that stakeholder consultations on




forestry have contributed to bringing actors to national debates that have

so far been excluded. With regard to the actual influence of private forest

governance on national forest policies, a recent study argues that, while

certification has in most cases been a complementary instrument to inducecompliance with national laws, ‘[i]n countries like Bolivia, there has been

a more interactive process between recent legal forest reforms and

certification, where incentives to landowners that engage in certification

have been specifically introduced into the forestry law’ (Segura, 2004, p. 9).

A second example is Mexico, which has reacted to the increase of FSC

certification occurring after 1996 (the FSC headquarters was situated in

Oaxaca until 2002) with a national forestry law closely mirroring the FSC

standards on sustainable forest management.

The second broad category of influence that private environmentalregimes exercise is cognitive and discursive. Cognitive and discursive

influences occur predominantly through a number of social learning

processes among organizations and within the FSC itself. On this account,

the FSC constitutes a learning network that includes diff erent organiz-

ational actors. This organizational diversity, both in structure and content,

seems to facilitate eff ective learning processes. Consider the example of

leading retailers of wood products. It was the specific structure of the FSC

as a network of local, regional and global organizations that has led to suc-

cessful learning. Only the involvement of local and regional experts, forestmanagers and producers enabled retailers to learn about the many un-

necessary intermediate traders participating in the business. The result was

not only a cheaper product for the retailers and a higher profit margin for

local producers and managers, but also a decline in illegal logging activities

in the respective areas (personal communication environmental NGO rep-

resentative, 2004).

In addition to new knowledge about their supply chain, leading retailers

have also benefited from insights into the environmental community and

their strategies. One representative of a leading retailer for home and woodproducts sums up his experience (personal communication business repre-

sentative, 2004):

What we have learned in the process of partnership through both FSCInternational and FSC Germany was what others expected from us as a leadingcompany in home-construction and do-it-yourself products in the field of environmental management and engagement. In addition, we also learned whatwas possible and what not in terms of strategies and policies with regard toenvironmental issues.

In return, what the environmental community learned from business was a

better understanding of economic thinking and basic concepts of business




strategy. This provided the environmental organizations with information

that changed their strategic approach to business, too. As one observer to

this learning process notes, it was quite difficult at the beginning to reach

an understanding because environmental organizations had a lot of bril-liant ideas, but little knowledge of the internal processes of business and

the hard facts of economic life. Some seven years later, however, the two

sets of organizations are close partners with a good understanding of each

other’s goals and strategies (personal communication business representa-

tive, 2004).

In addition to processes of social learning that occur within the FSC

network, a number of discursive influences can be observed. Most import-

antly, the FSC has established itself as the most credible system in global

forest certification and thereby substantially shaped the discourse on whatsustainable forest management actually is (or should be). The eff ects of this

discursive power can be observed not only within the forestry arena, where

a number of certification schemes have been established as a reaction to

the FSC’s success, but also beyond forestry, for example in the diff usion of

the stewardship model to other issue areas such as fisheries or sustainable

tourism.

With reference to direct material or structural influences, a number of

observations can be made. A central question in this context is: what are

the costs of certification and who pays for them? Stated diff erently, howdoes the FSC as a transnational environmental regime aff ect the economic

incentive structures and the distribution of costs and benefits within the

forest arena? Although comparative empirical data on the costs of

certification is largely absent or simply does not keep up with the steady

growth of forest certification, both in area and geographical distribution,

some cautious conclusions can be drawn. First, the incremental costs of

forest management will largely depend on the general management level

within a particular forest economy. As the prevailing levels of infrastruc-

ture, management know-how, information systems and human resourcesvary from country to country, and often from region to region, costs will

also vary accordingly. With regard to the direct costs of forest management

certification, there is evidence that FSC certification in the tropics is more

costly than in temperate or boreal forest for two reasons: first, non-tropical

forests are less complex and thus require less auditing time and prepar-

ation; and second, temperate and boreal forests often already have well-

established management procedures in place. Hence, raising management

standards to the required level is less costly. In addition, smaller forests are

also disadvantaged because the unit cost per hectare is considerably higher

than for larger forests (de Camino and Alfaro, 1998). With regard to the

question of who bears the additional costs of certification that derive from




raising existing forestry standards to the level of FSC rules and regulations,

studies have shown that costs have not been evenly distributed but tended

to be concentrated at the lower end of the value chain. Bass and colleagues

conclude that ‘[f]or the most part, costs borne at the producer end of thechain have not been passed on to buyers in the retail sector’ (Bass et al.,

2001, p. 71).

The initial expectation of most forest managers with regard to certi-

fication has been a rise in exports and higher profits through premium

prices. However, evidence for such a development is scarce. Early market

studies (e.g., Winterhalter and Cassens, 1993) have shown that some will-

ingness to pay a premium price exists, but the analysis at that time sug-

gested that ‘there is not yet convincing evidence of an existing price

premium for sustainably produced, certified timber’ (Baharuddin andSimula, 1994). This assessment seems still valid today. A recent study from

the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) finds

that premium prices are rare in DIY retailer supply chains. The only situ-

ation where premium prices for certified timber have occurred is ‘when

there has been a mismatch between supply and demand, if buyers are com-

peting for certified wood with few sources’ (Bass et al., 2001, p. 64). To con-

clude, the incentive structures prevalent in most tropical countries do not

lend support to the assumption that there will be rapid increases in the area

of certified forests in the near future, although premium markets may existin some areas for some time.

Reconsidering the Influence of Transnational Environmental Regimes

The previous section has illustrated the existence of various types of

influences of the FSC. Next to influences that derive from the regulatory

content of the FSC regime, a number of cognitive and discursive influences

as well as more direct material and structural eff ects also seem to be rele-

vant. In particular, two observations are noteworthy. First, although theregulatory influence seems to be rather modest when measured by standard

uptake and compliance only, the transnational forestry regime of the FSC

has not only induced a number of unintended direct material and structural

eff ects, but has also been integrated in a number of public policy systems,

thereby considerably widening the scope of transnational governance. And

second, cognitive and discursive processes have not only strengthened, and

in many cases also changed, the roles and responsibilities of private non-

state actors in the field, but also triggered a remarkable convergence of

organizational models within and beyond the global forestry domain.

Broadening the empirical perspective, these observations seem to hold for

other regimes, too. For example, as one of the major impacts of CERES, its




media strategy and its generation and dissemination of knowledge have con-

tributed to changing the perception of climate risk among large trans-

national business corporations. Moreover, CERES later evolved into the

Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), implying both a mainstreaming and aglobalization of the idea of environmental – or, in the case of the GRI, sus-

tainability – reporting.

Although comparative data on transnational regimes is scarce, a number

of scope conditions for the influence of transnational environmental

regimes can be identified. First, the regulatory influence of a given trans-

national environmental regime may depend on – the real or perceived –

legitimacy with regard to its principal stakeholders. In particular, in a

competitive environment of numerous transnational regimes existing in the

same issue area, the support of a credible civil society may be a key asset.In addition to soft factors like legitimacy, the influence of transnational

regimes may also depend on the willingness of states to support such

governance forms (Raustiala, 1997). However, the ‘shadow-of-hierarchy’

argument seems to be of minor importance, since most transnational

regimes in the environmental field have emerged in issue areas where public

regulation was absent or at least fragmented and weak. Second, the cogni-

tive and discursive influence of transnational environmental regimes may

largely depend on their internal setup as a learning organization (Pattberg,

2005a; Siebenhüner, 2005) and their ability to link themselves to largerexisting discourses. For example, the FSC’s strong influence on the global

discourse on sustainable forestry and labelling can be interpreted as a result

of its successful attempt to emphasize its link with the broader concept of

sustainable development and the embodiment of a tripartite stakeholder

architecture therein (Bass, 2002).

Finally, material and structural influences, for example the shifts in costs

and incentive structures among producers, depend on larger systemic fea-

tures of the international system. In particular, the integration of countries

into world markets, and particularly into ‘green markets’ in the North, is acentral condition for direct influence. This assumption is plausible in par-

ticular with regard to transnational regimes that predominantly rely on

market instruments (e.g., certification). However, direct material and struc-

tural influences may well be induced by transnational regimes that have a

less market-driven approach. For example, although the WCD does not

employ a certification system for sustainable large dams, it still seems

reasonable to expect that changes in economic incentive structures may also

occur as a result of the WCD recommendations.

In sum, the analysis of a number of transnational environmental regimes

suggests that measurable influences of novel institutional arrangements go

far beyond a narrow problem-solving account. Not only have a number of




unintended consequences of transnational regimes occurred, but also the

existing discourse that surrounds the issue areas of forestry and corporate

environmental reporting triggered the diff usion of the organizational

model and, as a consequence, the emergence of a wider organizationalfieldof transnational governance in general.

8.4 CONCLUSIONS

In this chapter, I have discussed both the formation and the actual impacts

of rule-making partnerships in global sustainability politics. With regard

to the question of emergence, I have argued that four key factors help to

understand the formation of the transnational regimes analysed in thischapter. First, in the absence of eff ective public regulation, initial demand

for private regulation tends to be created by non-state actors who manage

to transform the practices to be regulated (e.g., timber trade, corporate

reporting, construction of large dams) into a business case. In the cases I

analysed, the initial response of business actors was to seek solutions on

their own. Examples include the wide array of self-labelling that occurred

in response to civil society campaigns against large timber retailers and cor-

porate environmental mission statements in the wake of the Exxon Valdez

oil spill. However, industry responses were heavily contested, because aneutral frame of reference was missing. In addition, evaluating the accu-

racy of environmental claims made by business actors was difficult, if not

impossible. In this situation, supply for a solution came from the distinct

mixture of organizational resources available. NGOs and other civil society

actors traded their credibility and knowledge for the possibility of com-

panies making concrete environmental improvements. As a fourth factor, a

supportive ideational environment – including broad concepts such as

sustainable development that provided space for a common language, but

also more practical issues such as certifi

cation – helped to bridge existingdiff erences and unite actors around a shared vision for future action.

In terms of the influence of transnational regimes, I observe that trans-

national environmental regimes certainly have regulatory and structural

eff ects. However, the analysis suggests that their strongest eff ects lie in the

least tangible area of cognitive and discursive eff ects. This may not be par-

ticularly good news for those wishing to ‘measure’ the eff ects of trans-

national regimes. However, this finding is a cautionary note for researchers

not to restrict their evaluation of the success of transnational regimes to

those numbers that are easily available, because in isolation they are likely

to miss the more interesting eff ects of transnational regimes. In particular,

the normative and discursive influences that are found in a number of




empirical cases indicate that interest-based strategies of business actors,

NGOs and governments take place within an increasingly organized

transnational arena.

Following from these findings, what are the implications for our ongoingdiscussion about the partnerships paradigm in global sustainability politics?

First, formation processes should not be understood in a mono-causal way.

Similar to our case of transnational environmental regimes, partnerships in

sustainable development, or examples of the numerous Type II partnerships

of the 2002 Johannesburg Summit, may not evolve as a simple reaction

to demand for alternative governance mechanisms. Rather they may be co-

produced by various push and pull factors. In addition to a combination of

macro- and micro-factors in explaining the emergence of transnational

regimes, as shown in the analysis provided above, field-level dynamics playan increasingly important role in understanding the process of partnership

formation. Second, the discussion of influence of transnational environ-

mental regimes guides our attention to the fact that unintended conse-

quences such as shifts in costs to small-scale forest operations might be more

relevant for our assessment of this new phenomenon than a strict focus on

indicators such as standard uptake and compliance. Therefore, research on

partnerships for sustainable development needs to reflect these findings

when theorizing and empirically assessing the eff ectiveness of partnership

approaches. In addition, a number of scope conditions that I have discussedwith reference to transnational environmental regimes might also apply to

partnerships for sustainable development.

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9. Democracy and accountability: thechallenge for cross-sectoralpartnerships1

James Meadowcroft

This chapter examines the democratic credentials of strategic cross-sectoral

partnerships for sustainable development. Over the past decade, collabor-

ative interactions that draw together novel combinations of actors from

government, business and civil society have increasingly come to be seen as

critical to promoting sustainable development (WSSD, 2002). But worries

about the real impact of such partnerships remain. For the most part,

debate has focused on eff ectiveness: can partnerships actually promote

better environment and development outcomes? Here I would like to

address a related anxiety – that partnerships have weak representative and

participatory foundations, and that their widespread deployment will

ultimately undermine democratic norms and practices. The argument is

organized into six parts: (1) a brief introduction; (2) a presentation of the

democratic critique of partnerships; (3) an initial reply to this critique;

(4) a more positive statement of the democratic potential of partnerships;

(5) consideration of the additional complexities posed by international

partnerships and (6) the implications for the future.

9.1 INTRODUCTION

Today partnerships are everywhere. To some extent this reflects the evo-

lution of political idiom. The term has a positive normative resonance –

intimating ongoing interaction, mutually shared goals and collaboration

on the basis of equality. So it is constantly pressed into service. But the

move toward partnerships also appears to herald a deeper change in modes

of governance, as states and other actors respond to growing societal com-

plexity, to the difficulty of applying traditional approaches to handle emer-

gent problems and to the internationalization of economic and political life(Kooiman, 2000; Pierre and Peters, 2000).

194



A comprehensive democratic audit of partnerships would imply a

detailed assessment of the particular characteristics of the vast array of

institutional forms gathered under this label. Partnerships may be under-

stood to vary according to the area of environment and develop-ment decision-making concerned; the geographic and jurisdictional scale

of partnering activities; the sectors from which participants are drawn

(state/business/civil society); the purposes and functions of the initiative;

the selection of participants and operational procedures; as well as linkages

to other mechanisms of governance and processes of democratic decision-

making. For an individual partnership, the evaluation of democratic

impacts would depend also on the way all this was operationalized, the

political contexts in which the partnership was created and operated, and

its interactions with other actors and processes.Detailed discussion of diff erent types of partnership lies beyond the

scope of this chapter. And so the arguments presented here are necessarily

general, assessing the extent to which the partnership phenomenon ‘writ

large’ represents a challenge to democratic rule. Nevertheless, it is possible

to specify at the outset that the kinds of partnership with which we are

essentially concerned are those where actors from more than one societal

sector engage strategically to manage problems related to sustainable devel-

opment. Such bodies necessarily have a ‘public character’ (even if all the

participants are ‘private actors’, such as businesses or NGOs) – becausethey claim to undertake actions (rule-making; fostering technical and/or

social innovation; managing an issue area or development process; pro-

moting education and so on) that serves public ends. Thus, the discussion

does not primarily relate to partnerships that are basically commercial

arrangements (for example, publicly funded but privately managed infra-

structure projects), or that are essentially vehicles through which agencies

distribute funding to recipients (including many of the so-called ‘type II’

partnerships arranged in the run up to the WSSD in Johannesburg).

Instead, the concern is with ‘problem-solving partnerships’ that take up thecollective management of societal problems.

A decade ago, William Laff erty and I applied the term cooperative man-

agement regimes to capture the character of this type of partnership, which

involves organizations with their roots in diff erent domains of societal life

coming together around practical problems linked to the promotion of sus-

tainable development (Laff erty and Meadowcroft, 1996). But there are many

other ways to conceptualize such arrangements. Some researchers have

referred to the emergence of ‘joint environmental policy-making’ (Mol,

Lauber and Lieff erink, 2000; Mol, 2003).Othershave emphasizedthegrowth

of rule-making in which government has no part – business/business link-

ages, civil society/civil society unions and business/civil society partnerships

Democracy and accountability 195



(Pattberg, 2004; 2005). And the ideas of ‘network management’, ‘interactive

governance’, ‘collaborative environmental governance’, and ‘cooperative

environmental governance’ have also informeddiscussion (Glasbergen, 1998;

Glasbergen and Driessen, 2002; Koontz et al., 2004; Edelenbos, 2005).

9.2 THE DEMOCRATIC CRITIQUE OFPARTNERSHIPS

The core of the democratic critique of partnerships involves two inter-

related arguments. The first suggests these processes are not really demo-

cratic: the constitution and operation of partnerships falls short of the

norms of representation, interaction and accountability that democracyentails. The second suggests that by tolerating or actively encouraging the

emergence of such bodies, democratically elected governments are poten-

tially alienating powers that should be used to promote the public good.

With respect to the first line of argument, points are made concerning

representation, participation, power diff erentials (equity) and accountabil-

ity. To start with, most partnerships are hardly models of democratic rep-resentation. Participants typically reflect a narrow subset of all those who

might be aff ected by the issue under discussion. Those who could speak for

the disadvantaged (the poor, minorities and so on), or those whose viewsare inconvenient to the multinational corporations, government agencies

and establishment-oriented environmental groups sponsoring the process

are most likely to be excluded. Even if there is no deliberate intention to bar

these interests, underprivileged constituencies are less likely to generate

professionalized organizations that form attractive partners for such exer-

cises. And if there are many such processes (on diff erent topics, at diff erent

scales) the resources of groups that do exist will be stretched further.

Moreover, the wider the political/geographic scale over which partnerships

are established (moving from locality to region, to country and to the inter-national realm) the more tenuous any claim to ‘representivity’ that can be

made on behalf of participating bodies, because the groups are bound to

be increasingly remote from any direct contact with the constituencies they

are supposed to be representing. Above all, these mechanisms take up

issues of public policy without giving the concerned individuals and col-

lectivities the right to choose who is to speak in their name. They embody

representation ‘from above’, rather than applying the democratic principle

that people are entitled to select (and de-select) those who are to act on their

behalf.

Then there is participation. Although governments talk glibly about

encouraging participation in decision-making, they systematically conflate




participation by citizens and participation by stakeholders. But these are

quite diff erent. Participants in multi-stakeholder processes are not ordinary

citizens coming together to take part in the governance of their community.

What you have instead are leaders and paid officials of lobby groupsmeeting with government personnel in an attempt to stitch up a deal that

can then be ‘sold’ to the public. Thus to the extent that partnerships are

participatory at all, they privilege elite, over democratic, forms of partici-

pation. And as an ever great role is given to organized groups, the relative

influence of ordinary citizens – acting as citizens – is correspondingly

diminished.

Next there are the power di ff erentials, which mean that partnerships are

not the equitable ventures that some pretend. Although participants in a

cooperative venture are formally equal, they are not really equal. Businessparticipants are certain to wield greater influence. They already enjoy

the ear of government officials, who are eager to maintain a positive eco-

nomic climate, and are conscious of every nuance that might impact on

investment and jobs. Financial resources give the ‘for profit’ sector an

unfair advantage – for corporations have no difficulty attending discus-

sions, preparing material, bringing forward ‘experts’and so on. In contrast,

civil society organizations are poorly funded, and they lack the personnel

and assets required to participate on an equal footing. Similar diff erentials

exist among organizations based in diff erent regions – with NGOs fromdeveloped states being comparatively wealthy in comparison with those

from the South. Indeed, this is true also of governmental organizations,

where poorer countries may lack the resources to participate in partner-

ships on an equal footing. Thus real power inequities can vitiate the egali-

tarian pretensions of partnerships.

Finally, there are issues of accountability. To whom are such partnerships

accountable? Certainly not to voters, who have no say in their constitution.

Nor to local governments or national parliaments, where members may

struggle tofi

nd out what is actually happening. Moreover, the partici-pating groups are also unlikely to be internally democratic. Business corpor-

ations are not run on democratic lines. Executives and boards have more or

less unlimited control over their day-to-day operations. And NGOs – the

supposed standard bearers of civil society in such processes – actually

have rather dubious democratic credentials. Leaders are often un-elected.

Members may have little say over the orientation of the organization. And

while all sorts of groups claim to speak for one interest or another, there

are no formal mechanisms by which they can be called to account for their

actions. Without such mechanisms, those who take decisions are not

responsible to those who must bear the consequences, and the feedback

link that is so critical to democratic politics is missing.




The second line of argument focuses on the systemic implications of part-

nerships, and the claim is that by devolving authority to such bodies, demo-

cratic institutions are abandoning their responsibility to govern in

the public interest. When areas of societal decision-making are handed overto bodies made up of representatives of particular groups, there can be no

guarantee that the public interest and the common good will prevail. In fact,

they are almost certain not to prevail, because the interests at the table all

have particular axes to grind. The systematic turn toward partnerships thus

appears either as a move towards ‘private governance’ or a move towards

‘corporatist governance’– depending on the configuration of actors and the

role assumed by government. If government stands back from the process,

leaving things to private actors (businesses and civil society organizations in

various combinations), or if governments adopt a passive role (even if theyare formally ‘at the table’), then we are headed towards ‘private interest’

governance – where the diff erent spheres of social life are divided up and

ruled by implicated interests as they see fit. If government is a more active

partner then we are headed towards neo-corporatism – where the state and

major sectoral organizations work together to devise solutions that they

impose on society as a whole (Ottaway, 2001). Either way, democracy is the

casualty.

For democracy is not just about consensus. It is also about the major-

ity taking decisions, and pushing through reforms that are judged to bein the best interests of the community as a whole. In the context of

sustainable development this seems particularly pertinent, because organ-

ized interests that benefit from current (unsustainable) practices will

certainly resist change. And the cosy collaborative relationships estab-

lished in private interest or corporatist governance may simply encourage

complacency, mutual accommodation and incrementalism, rather than a

determined drive for change. Thus, by weakening democratic control,

partnerships may contribute more to political sclerosis than to innovation

for sustainability.

9.3 A DEMOCRATIC DEFENCE OF PARTNERSHIPS

There are various ways that one might respond to this sort of critique. One

option is to accept that the democratic credentials of partnerships are

weak, but to suggest that other advantages – particularly positive environ-

ment and development outcomes – outweigh this shortcoming. In govern-

ance, there are always trade-off s, and perhaps this trade-off is acceptable.

On the other hand, it may not be necessary to concede this democratic

deficiency so readily. To mount a democratic defence of cooperative




management approaches we will first respond to the criticisms of the

sceptics, and then move on to off er a more positive account.

Let us take the elements of the critique one by one, starting with the four

points focused on the partnerships themselves – representation, partici-pation, power diff erentials (equity) and accountability:

Representation Partnerships operate on the basis of functional represen-

tation. Individuals sit at the table because they represent an organized

stakeholder in a particular issue matrix. There is nothing illegitimate about

this. Election is not the only form of representation appropriate to a demo-

cratic polity. In diff erent circumstances a ‘representative’may be nominated

by a sponsoring agency (a scientist chosen for a government advisory

panel), appointed by the party to be represented (a lawyer selected by aclient), or picked by an independent adjudicator (a trustee designated by a

court). Representatives can also be self-selected, as when one speaks up on

behalf of a group to which one belongs, or for a cause one believes to be

just. In fact, there are many types of representation, but what is important

is that the mechanism employed corresponds to the function required.

In this case, the purpose is to draw conflicting interests into a collabor-

ative eff ort to resolve societal problems. Clearly, these interests are entitled to be heard, and to be represented in any process that will aff ect them. Each

interest constitutes a facet of a problem that needs to be understood andmanaged in a multi-faceted manner. But interests are constituted through

social practice, and they are articulated though societal organizations.

Thus, representatives of such organizations are best placed to contribute to

processes that require a pooling of knowledge, and engagement to develop

a shared understanding and to explore possible solutions. The organiz-

ations concerned exist because they serve some function in the wider society,

be it administering public programmes, meeting economic demand, articu-

lating a desire to protect the environment and so on. They are rooted in eco-

nomic and social life, in the practical ways in which society actuallyoperates. The answer to the question – ‘Who does an NGO represent?’ is:

those who share its concerns and support its work. The fact that the group

does exist, engages in societal action and survives the cut and thrust of

public life with a reputation for authenticity, proves such a constituency is

there to be represented. The answer to the question ‘Who do corporations

and business interests represent?’ is: all those whose economic future is con-

nected to the enterprise or industry. Of course, this is not to suggest

that supporters of environmental groups have identical interests in other

respects, any more than do all those involved with a business (management,

workers, consumers, suppliers and so on). But it is to suggest that in each

case there is an organized interest, with a legitimate claim to be represented,




and one that has the potential to contribute positively to collective man-

agement initiatives.

Participation Those involved in partnership processes are generallyleaders, officials or experts from organized groups. They are not ordinary

citizens, but members of diverse ‘elites’ with specialist professional knowl-

edge. It is precisely this that equips them to participate in interactive

problem-solving bodies. Of course, there are also mechanisms that can

encourage direct citizen participation in decision-making – particularly at

the local level. But with the exception of the referendum (where everyone

can vote), representation is also a difficult issue for citizen-based partici-

patory forums. For example, the randomly selected members of a ‘citizen

jury’ can in one sense be taken to represent all citizens (because they are justlike them), but in another sense they represent no one but themselves. And

such bodies face a challenge in terms of the integration of specialist knowl-

edge, long-term continuity and iterative learning that are so important in

relation to sustainable development. In any case, independent of the poten-

tial for greater individual citizen involvement in governance for sustainable

development, partnerships off er the possibility of a net participatory gain.

Groups that were previously excluded from the policy process (particularly

civil society organizations) can become more closely involved with defining

and solving problems.

Power di ff erentials Participants in cooperative ventures have varied

capacities to mobilize power resources. But this reflects the social reality

that power comes in various kinds and is distributed unevenly – a fact that

has implications for all governance practices, including the operation of

elections. And yet, within the partnership framework each party can be

treated with equality: each acknowledges the others as legitimate inter-

locutors; each has an equal right to be heard, to listen and to deliberate, and

to work with others to devise a common way forward. Thus, partnershipscan contribute to equalizing rather than exacerbating power inequalities.

Since the forces representing environmental interests are typically less well-

resourced than economic interests, partnership should prove favourable to

their cause, and certainly not less favourable than traditional processes of

lobby politics.

Accountability Partnerships are not directly accountable to voters in the

same way as are elected politicians and governments. On the other hand,

that does not mean that partnerships are unaccountable. On the contrary,

there are at least four distinct forms of accountability that operate in well-

designed partnerships for sustainable development.






elected institutions and promote private governance or neo-corporatist

manipulation? With respect to the first part of this claim, partnerships are

unlikely to remove a function from elected parliaments and municipal

assemblies because these bodies do not have the capacity to deal directlywith the detailed management of a vast array of complex, knowledge-

dense problems of the sort under discussion here. Modern government is

already too complex, and the competing claims on politicians’ time are too

great. The real alternative to devolving substantial authority to multi-

stakeholder processes is either to ignore many problems for the time being,

or else to rely on administrative initiatives accompanied by traditional

lobby mechanisms. Of these choices, partnerships are the more, rather than

the less, democratic option.

As for the private governance charge, it simply does not stick. In part-nerships involving participants from more than one societal sphere, none

of the actors can act entirely as private actors. The partnership context

obliges them to act publicly, as responsible interlocutors, framing their

arguments in terms of the public interest. Moreover, when government

agencies are partners in the venture they have a particular responsibility to

look to the general interest. And whether or not they are direct partici-

pants, government can always keep such processes under review. In fact, in

relation to the many self-governance mechanisms that are long-standing

features of developed countries (for example, self-regulation by theprofessions), this is exactly what occurs. The charge of environmental

corporatism also has very limited traction. In contrast to traditional neo-

corporatist arrangements, the processes we are discussing involve a greater

range of interests (not just state, labour and business). Negotiations

are not consolidated in the hands of a few peak organizations (political

leaders, trade unions and employers federation), but fragmented into

many distinct problem contexts. The process is not exclusionary, but

potentially inclusive.

One of the general problems with the position staked out by the scepticsis the failure to appreciate that democratic politics is not constituted simply

by the electoral process, no matter how important that may be. The oper-

ation of a complex matrix of institutional practices gives ‘government by the

people’ a real meaning. Freedoms of speech and association, the media, the

rule of law and the independence of the judiciary, all these contribute to a

system of rule that is reasonably democratic. Within this context, the cre-

ation of cooperative management bodies does not necessarily undermine

elected officials, but can open a new terrain of practical problem-solving,

of representation of groups, and a field for elected political representatives

to exercise supervision.




9.4 THE DELIBERATIVE POTENTIAL OFPARTNERSHIPS

Having provided an initial response to some anxieties about partnerships,it is now time to consider whether it is possible to make a more positive

affirmation of their democratic potential. Central to this case is the notion

that collaborative management ventures constitute a significant site for the

development of deliberative democratic interactions.

As its name suggests deliberative democracy locates acts of collective

deliberation at the core of the democratic process. It is typically contrasted

with ‘aggregative’ approaches to democracy that emphasize the act of

casting a ballot as the critical step in summing community preferences. For

deliberative democrats it is the reasoned discussion and exchange – whichshould precede any voting process – that allows participants to deepen their

understanding of a collective problem, to move beyond their initial prefer-

ences and to construct a shared vision of the public interest.

Central to this understanding of democratic deliberation are the ideas

of reasoned debate, public justification and political equality (Bohman,

1996). Collective choices are to be made through reasoned discussion,

rather than by blind acceptance of the views of established authorities, by

deals concluded among vested interests, or by recourse to intimidation.

As they deliberate, participants advance arguments and listen to counter-arguments; they employ critical reason to weigh alternatives and make judg-

ments. Deliberative democracy implies the public justi fication of proposals

and outcomes. To advocate publicly a particular course of action as appro-

priate for the collectivity implies establishing a link to some notion of the

public interest or the collective good. It is not enough to say ‘this alternative

will benefit me’, for the logic of the deliberative context is oriented towards

determining what is right and good for the community. Finally, if delibera-

tion is tobedemocratic, it requires substantive political equality: allconcerned

interests should have access to the process, and each participant should enjoyan equal opportunity to present perspectives, hear contributions and take

part in debates and decisions. Needless to say, every individual cannot be

involved personally in each deliberative context; representative mechanisms

are essential for the working of modern democracy. But the overall structure

of decision-making processes must be fair for all. In particular, inequalitiesof

wealth and status should not corrupt deliberative interaction.

In the environmental sphere there has been considerable interest in the

deliberative ideal: indeed, among green political theorists it has now

become almost an article of faith (Gunderson, 1995; Barry, 1999; Smith,

2003). Deliberation is viewed as promising for a number of reasons. The

emphasis on representation of all aff ected interests may help groups that




have traditionally been excluded from influence such as those speaking on

behalf of the victims of environmental degradation, future generations and

the non-human natural world. The focus on reasoned debate gives en-

vironmental advocates hope that their sound arguments (rather than theinfluence of powerful economic actors) will more often hold sway (Barry,

1999). Deliberation can encourage ‘reflexivity’– the collective interrogation

of existing practices and the examination of alternatives (Eckersley, 2004).

And it becomes possible to adjust preferences that have been shaped by

dominant ideological perspectives and economic relations. Moreover, the

integration of lay and scientific perspectives, engagement with complex

ethical issues and discussions of diff erent weightings of societal risk, may

all be facilitated by deliberative approaches (Meadowcroft, 2004). And all

this is especially true when one moves beyond traditional pollution controland nature conservation to consider the transformation of existing patterns

of production and consumption in the context of sustainable development.

But if more deliberation is good for the environment, and/or good for

constructing a more eff ective and acceptable approach to managing envi-

ronmental problems, how is it to be secured? To answer this, it is worth

pointing to three slightly diff erent forms of deliberative interaction opera-

tive on the ‘politico-constitutional’, the ‘societal’, and the ‘meso’ levels

(Meadowcroft, 2004).

The politico-constitutional level includes core institutions of the state (leg-islature, executive and courts) as well as constitution-making processes.

Measures to promote environmental deliberation here include enshrining

environmental rights in the constitution: for example Robyn Eckersley’s sug-

gestion that a constitutional obligation to apply the precautionary principle

in environmental decision-making would ensure more thorough deliberation

about environmental risks (Eckersley, 2004). But they can also include more

general reforms such as the introduction of elements of proportional repre-

sentation into ‘first-past-the-post’electoral systems, which could be expected

to facilitate the entry of Green parties into legislatures and so promote moreinclusive deliberation in national political institutions.

The societal level relates to public debate in the widest sense – to the

enhancement of democratic deliberation in the media, within associations

of all types, and among the citizenry at large. The idea is that higher

standards of public debate would improve the context in which electoral

contests take place as well as influencing the way in which officials carry out

their duties. Green thinkers have emphasized that civil society, as an

autonomous and dynamic deliberative domain, can check the instrumen-

tal and bureaucratic rationality characteristic of the administrative state,

and promote more thorough going protection of environmental values

(Torgerson, 1999; Dryzek, 2000).




The meso level refers to deliberative interactions at the interface between

state and society, where the personnel and structures of the state meet indi-

viduals and groups rooted in civil and commercial life. It is an intermediate

zone – somewhere between the high politics of the politico-constitutionalrealm and the open interactions of societal interchange. An extension of

deliberative mechanisms at this level requires the development of an array

of venues and processes concerned with specific environmental and natural

resource issues, which draw interested actors from the public and private

spheres into closer deliberative democratic interaction. And here, of course,

we return to ‘partnerships’ for sustainable development.

Viewed from the context of deliberative democracy such partnerships

can provide an excellent opportunity for extending deliberative democratic

practices. As we have seen, they allow the representation of aff ected inter-ests. They provide a forum where participants can engage with an issue on

a basis of relative equality, considering arguments on their merits, and

interacting to derive common understandings. Features of such processes

that are particularly promising from the perspective of deliberative democ-

racy include:

● The di ff erentiated contexts in which they operate. Partnerships come

together around particular issues, and participation can target those

implicated in the problem matrix.● Their practical focus. Partnerships are intended to engage with real

issues, and this grounds the deliberative interactions in the experience

of participants, and focuses attention on meaningful outcomes.

● Their potential to move beyond discussion to active management. By

collectively executing decisions and implementing solutions (rather

than just recommending options) participants must take fuller

responsibility for the agreements constructed through deliberation.

● The possibility for long-term learning . If cycles of assessment and

review follow decision and implementation, the body can drawlessons from experience and employ adaptive management.

● The potential to improve deliberation at other levels of the political system, including representative bodies and broader societal discus-

sion. This can be through increasing the level of understanding of

specific problems, building links among important groups, bridging

key discourses (science, law, the popular press) and so on.

Far from seeing cooperative management bodies as a threat to democ-

racy, they can be understood as part of its deepening to reflect increased

societal complexity and diff erentiation. Today many concerns exist about

the declining vitality of democratic institutions in the developed world, as






(McGrew, 2001). Fairer rules for international exchange and greater open-

ness to representatives of international civil society is key here.

The second orientation, closely associated with the writings of thinkers

such as David Held, anticipates a reconstruction of the existing inter-national order to integrate national jurisdictions within a broader frame-

work of international law (Held, 1998; 2000). It would represent a new

global settlement with self-governing collectivities at diff erent scales order-

ing their aff airs within an overarching legal structure. And the extension of

democracy into transnational spaces would help reinvigorate democracy

within nations, regions and cities.

Finally, there is the discursive democratic option championed particu-

larly by John Dryzek, which emphasizes the discursive underpinnings of

international governance (Dryzek, 2000; 2006). Rather than focusing pri-marily on institutional innovation, discursive democracy emphasizes the

potential for alternative projects to subvert dominant discourses, and thus

to alter the intellectual frame within which transnational governance

occurs. The perspective has a close affinity with deliberative democracy, but

the ‘discursive’ label is applied to emphasize that the focus is not the design

of ideal deliberative forums, but rather the emergence of discursive strata-

gems through which civil society can transform the understandings embed-

ded in global governance practices. It is about changing the categories

through which actors make sense of the world, and by so doing, trans-forming the way they act in the world.

Presumably, partnerships could be accommodated by each of these

competing conceptions of transnational democracy. And any advance

towards ‘democratizing’ international life would improve the possibilities

for more authentically deliberative partnerships. International partner-

ships fit well with liberal internationalism, reflecting a more active inter-

national civil society, encouraging greater openness and participation in the

international sphere, and complementing formal state-to-state interactions.

Collaborative management approaches could alsofi

nd a niche in thecomplex web of overlapping communities and jurisdictions envisaged by

cosmopolitan democracy. Yet, barring a catastrophe that swept away exist-

ing systems of international governance, the cosmopolitan vision could

only be approached in a far distant future. Even Held’s more modest pro-

posals for immediate reform stretch the bounds of the possible to breaking

point (Held, 2004). Since the questions about partnerships are immediate

and practical, little help is to be found here. With respect to discursive

democracy, international partnerships might be understood to provide

a forum where emergent discourse coalitions could articulate their bids

for ascendancy. Or they could be seen as deliberative institutional mecha-

nisms that could become more prevalent as the (neo-liberal/state-centred)




discourses currently underpinning the global order lost sway. And yet,

Dryzek’s deep suspicion of the state, and his fear that civil society will be

co-opted by a close association with government, would probably make

him uneasy with the intimate cross-sectoral collaboration that partnershipsentail. His faith has always been placed in discourses in the public sphere,

where civil society can continuously interrogate established authority. But

perhaps a vigorous development of broader processes of transnational dis-

cursive democracy could at least exert democratizing pressure on the terms

in which partnerships are established and operate.

When considering this problem there is another element that should not

be forgotten, and that is the potential of the state to promote democratic

processes as it acts in both domestic and international spheres. First, to the

extent that government organizations (agencies, ministries, state-fundedinitiatives and so on) participate directly in international partnerships, they

can promote norms of representation, transparency and accountability

consistent with deliberative democracy. Second, to the extent that govern-

ments participate indirectly in partnerships (through international bodies

in which they are direct participants), there is another opportunity to

uphold democratic norms. Third, the domestic oversight function that

governments exercise – assessing whether particular governance arrange-

ments promote the general good – applies to international partnerships

active on the national stage as well as to domestic partnerships.Governments can influence the national legal and political contexts within

which international partnerships must operate, and they could even choose

to attempt to influence the substantive orientation of specific partnerships.

Fourth, this supervisory role can be expanded to the international sphere.

As external agents, governments can monitor such partnerships, indepen-

dently decide whether they promote the collective good or are intervening

in areas of national interest. So even though the international order itself

does not function on representative democratic lines, its operations can be

shaped by states that do. Developing a theme that has been touched uponby Beck, and indeed reflects a broader tradition in international relations,

Robyn Eckersley has applied the term ‘transnational states’ to capture this

image of states that act beyond their borders to uphold democratic and

egalitarian norms (Eckersley, 2004).

9.6 IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE OFPARTNERSHIPS

I have argued that far from presenting a threat to democratic modes of rule

‘partnerships for sustainable development’have the potential to increase the




democratic deliberative content of existing institutional arrangements. My

point is not that partnerships necessarily promote democratic values.

Rather it is that they represent an opportunity to enhance democratic inter-

actions. There is little doubt that the partnership form can serve to erodedemocratic control. For example, in the United Kingdom there has been

discussion whether regional development bodies – constituted by the

national government as partnerships – have really functioned to erode the

influence of (democratically elected) local governments over the devel-

opment process. Here tensions between democratic constituencies (at

the national and at the local level) play out in the partnership form.

International partnerships that carefully excluded important aff ected inter-

ests might serve as a cover for purely self-interested action by powerful

players. With respect to ‘private’ rule-making bodies (where business andcivil society representatives establish standards), there may be difficulties

ensuring genuine deliberative interactions in the face of the vast diff er-

entials of power among potential participants. And one may wonder

whether some partnerships simply serve as ‘back channels’ to impose the

values of Northern states or consumers onto peoples in the South. And yet,

the democratic potential of partnerships remains.

A few additional observations will help place this conclusion in context.

In the first place, this discussion has dealt with cross-sectoral partnerships:

those that pull together organizations from more than one of the three tra-ditionally defined ‘sectors’ of modern life – state, economy and society. But

what about partnerships that involve organization from just one societal

sphere, say business groups, or NGOs, or agencies from various levels of

government? Clearly, such initiatives can play an important role in govern-

ance for sustainable development. And they too may be organized so as

to promote deliberation among participants and to develop collective

understandings and novel solutions. Now while there is no reason to believe

that a proliferation of such formations poses a threat to democratic govern-

ance, their potential for positively advancing deliberative democracy isunclear. For the activation of deliberative norms within a given body does

not necessarily imply an extension of deliberative democracy more gener-

ally. Although single-sector partnerships may be eff ective at advancing the

participants’ objectives, and these may coincide with the goals of actors

from other societal spheres, or indeed with the designs of policy-makers,

they do not necessarily promote the broader deliberation and reflexivity, as

well as the collective assumption of responsibility that (well-designed)

cross-sectoral initiatives should entail. If a case is to be made for the delib-

erative democratic contribution of single-sector partnerships, it would have

to turn either upon the specific content of the particular practice (which

encouraged wider deliberation in society more generally), or upon the




educative eff ects of the deliberative engagement ‘spilling over’ into the

other activities of the implicated actors. Perhaps in some circumstances

‘self-governance’ initiatives lead to enhanced self-understanding and

responsibility, and a fuller integration with broader processes of publicdeliberation. And yet, considering the already close contacts that exist

‘intra-sector’, and the distinctive ‘logics’ that inform these activities, it is not

clear that such spillover will predominate.

Even when dealing with partnerships that involve participants from

more than one societal sector, the potential contribution to enhancing

deliberative democracy should be understood as highly variable. Many

partnerships are essentially concerned with ‘implementation’ in the narrow

sense – with the delivery of specifically defined services or the distribution

of grant money to deserving recipients. There may in fact be little room forcreative deliberation and collective problem-solving in such contexts. And

the bodies may actually play much more of a coordination role and/or serve

a symbolic function. In such cases it is implausible to argue that there is any

real contribution to the broader development of deliberative democracy. At

the beginning of this chapter, reference was made to ‘strategic partnerships’

and to engagement with issues ‘of strategic significance for sustainable

development’ in an eff ort to transmit the idea of partnerships that are ori-

ented towards substantive problem-solving and the management of critical

issues. Here the broader opportunities for authentic deliberation, as well asthe intrinsic importance of the issues under discussion, aff ord greater

opportunities to raise the deliberative content of societal interactions. Of

course, much depends on the way processes are actually undertaken – the

representation of aff ected interests, the quality of the deliberative mecha-

nisms and the activation of accountability channels. And issues such as the

extent to which the partnerships pass over into active management and

implementation, the possibility for iterative processes stretching over time

involving review, readjustment and learning, also influence the potential of

an individual process to enhance democracy more generally.This suggests that the democratic credentials of partnerships cannot

simply be taken for granted. Instead they must be constructed and recon-

structed by the ways partnerships operate, and by the ways established rep-

resentative democratic institutions interact with partnerships. In each case,

important elements have been identified by those concerned about the

democratic deficiencies of partnerships.

From the side of the partnerships themselves, issues that require attention

include the representation of social interests, the quality of deliberative

interactions and the accountability linkages. There is a great deal of excel-

lent scholarship that examines these issues in relation to the eff ectiveness of

partnerships, and for the most part, eff ectiveness and democracy pull in the




same direction – because partnerships that exclude key interests, depend on

bargaining and power games rather than deliberation, and eschew account-

ability, are unlikely to work (for example: Gray, 1989; Renn, Webler and

Wiedemann, 1995). Of course, at the margin there may be trade-off s. But inaddition to issues that relate to the constitution and operation of partner-

ships there is also what might be described as their public and political ‘out-

reach’ – the extent to which they present their activities to those outside the

specific problem sphere, open their work to broader scrutiny, and contribute

to wider processes. Such opening allows partnerships to interact more fully

with the public sphere, to be exposed to give-and-take in the broader cur-

rents of public debate and democratic decision.

From the side of elected institutions it is a question of engaging with

partnerships – taking them seriously as governance processes, treatingthem fairly (because they represent legitimate expressions of societal per-

spectives), but also scrutinizing their activities and consciously struc-

turing their field of operations. Elected governments can frame the

circumstances in which partnerships operate, facilitate the dissemination

of information about partnerships, encourage participation by disadvan-

taged groups and encourage a pluralist culture of public monitoring and

assessment. State of the environment reporting, systems of environment

and sustainable development indicators and the monitoring of societal

trends, all provide critical background information for governments andother societal actors to form judgments about the relative success of par-

ticular governance arrangements. Public funding should be available

for an array of bodies involved in policy assessment and review: en-

vironmental assessment organizations, public audit bodies, independent

research centres and academic analysts all have an important role to play

in judging whether particular governance initiatives are working in the

public interest. By encouraging this activity, democratic governments can

further public and political reflection about the performance of partner-

ships. Thus elected governments have a supervisory role: although theymay leave particular spheres of activity to partnerships of various kinds,

they also have a responsibility to their electors to make sure that partner-

ships continue to serve public ends. And, as we have seen, this is a respon-

sibility they must seek to discharge in the international realm as well as

within their own territorial jurisdiction, although the ways that this can

be done will certainly vary.

In short, with respect to partnerships, representative democratic insti-

tutions must assume a role of ‘meta-governance’, rather than just govern-

ance as such. They need to consider how specific initiatives relate to overall

policy goals, reconcile conflicting claims and objectives and ensure that

diff erent governance modes are operating for the public interest. And if






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10. Bringing the environmental stateback in: partnerships in perspective

Arthur P.J. Mol

In the mid-1980s a number of American scholars brought together various

articles in an edited volume, with the title Bringing the State Back In(Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol, 1985). The volume aimed to provide

an alternative to the long-lasting domination of society-centred analysis in

various (neo-Marxist, pluralist, structural-functionalist) perspectives.

Notions of state autonomy, states as actors and state-centred analysis,

among others, brought states back into the centre of analyses and explan-

ations of social change. But the volume also gained its reputation by

linking these analytical alternatives to prescriptive courses of action, es-

pecially in times when deregulation, privatization and marketization were

strongly celebrated by the neo-conservative governments of Reagan(United States) and Thatcher (United Kingdom). The contributing

sociologists and political scientists aimed to combine theoretical perspec-

tives that showed that states do matter with concern about a too one-

dimensional programme of reducing the position and role of the state in

what we would now label governance. While the volume far from embraced

the state as a glorified institution, it condemned the fact that the state was

beginning to lose much of its relevance in social theory and empirical

research. For both conceptual and normative reasons, Evans and col-

leagues argued, the state should be brought back to the centre of social

analysis, as (1) it was still a relevant category for understanding social

developments and dynamics and (2) a focus on the state would contribute

to balancing too one-dimensional prescriptive programmes, both of neo-

liberal (economic) development or glorifying state power. Incidentally, it

was probably not by accident that in none of the chapters environmental

protection was emphasized, as, during the 1980s, the idea of strong state

involvement and intervention for sustainability was hardly debated,

neither from a political nor from a theoretical point of view. In those days

the ‘environmental state’, that is, that part of the state system involved

in and focused on environmental protection, was hardly under pressure

(cf. Mol and Buttel, 2002).

214



The title of this chapter suggests a similar point of view, be it in a

diff erent era and in confrontation with a diff erent scholarly debate. At least

during the last decade we have witnessed in the environmental social sci-

ences a major transformation on how we look at states and governancewhen societies deal with environmental challenges in global modernity.

One – but by far not the only one – of the more recent trends in the litera-

ture on innovations in environmental governance and reform is the notion

of partnerships. Without too much exaggeration it can be stated that the

idea or notion of partnership has successfully made it into the centre of

debates, discourses, practices and institutional arrangements in environ-

mental governance in at least a number of developed states. And in the

international arena, the notion of partnerships has become ‘salonfähig ’

(socially acceptable), following the 1992 UNCED conference and, evenmore strongly, after the Johannesburg Summit in 2002. In their most simple

form, partnerships have been defined as ‘an arrangement existing between

two or more organisations (or individuals or institutions) in working

towards a commonly defined goal’ (Darlow and Newby, 1997, p. 4).

Partnership logic can be fundamentally distinguished from substitution

logic. In substitution logic, private actors and arrangements can substitute

for public sectors and arrangements if the latter fail to live up to their

promises, expectations, or ‘natural’ roles and functions. In partnership

logic, there is an inclination to partner in order to solve emergent societalissues and deal with problems of governance (Linder and Rosenau, 2000),

which thus leaves room for states to play their role in ‘partnerships for

sustainability’.

In this chapter I will explore the shifting analyses and understanding

of the position of the environmental state in environmental governance by

analysing the notion and literature on environmental partnerships. With

partnerships – and thus a more society-centred analysis of environmental

governance – becoming dominant, is there a need to call once again for a

strengthening of the state in social science analyses, more or less alongsimilar lines as Evans and colleagues did in the 1980s? Or should we celebrate

the reduced importance of the state in environmental governance, now

that we have entered the age of globalization? The chapter will begin by out-

lining the historical roots of the idea of partnerships related to envir-

onmental governance, against the background of a changing social order.

Subsequently, in Section 10.2, I will distinguish two broad categories or types

of partnerships, limiting myself in the rest of the chapter to only one of

them. In Section 10.3 the debates around environmental partnerships will be

reviewed. Finally, Section 10.4 will focus on the state in environmental part-

nerships, listing four critical issues that argue – indeed – for the need to bring

the environmental state back into environmental partnership literature.

Bringing the environmental state back in 215



10.1 THEORETICAL ROOTS OF ENVIRONMENTALPARTNERSHIPS

While the notion of partnership is of relatively recent origin in the en-vironmental social sciences literature (see Murphy and Bendell, 1997, for a

very timely use), the ideas that lie behind it are not. Although some might

want us to believe that the notion of partnership in environmental govern-

ance is a typical product of the twenty-first century, the origins go back to

at least the mid-1980s. If, for the moment, we loosely define environmental

partnerships as the ideas, practices and (institutional) arrangements that

provide non-state actors and non-conventional politics with substantially

more room in environmental governance, we can trace the historical roots

of the environmental partnership idea back to the literature on state failurein the early 1980s. The fundamental origin of environmental partnerships

lies in the notion that the nation-state falls short in the provisioning of col-

lective goods, in this case environmental quality.

Some of the key publications in this regard come from Germany. Martin

Jänicke’s (1986) Staatsversagen analysed the fundamental inability of the

nation-state to protect the environment in the 1980s, and called for an

innovation or modernization of environmental politics, later to be labelled

political modernization (e.g., van Tatenhove, Arts and Leroy, 2000; Mol,

2002): a reorientation towards a more preventive, proactive and flexiblestrategy using new instruments and closer cooperation with non-state

actors. With a similar analysis of the environmental state’s fundamental

inabilities, Joseph Huber (1982; 1985) came to a slightly diff erent solution

with his strong plea for involving the market into environmental reforms.

Finally, around the same time, Ulrich Beck (1986) formulated his risk

society hypothesis and identified subpolitical arrangements as an alter-

native for the conventional environmental politics of the nation-state.

Inspired by these and several other authors and ideas, from the mid-

1980s onwards, environmental social science scholars started to developideas, investigate practices and formulate theories on governing environ-

mental problems, in which the environmental state was given a less domin-

ant and monopolistic position. This was, of course, also helped by the

emergence of a small number of innovative strategies within a few en-

vironmental pioneer states (most notably in the European Union (EU), but

also some states within the United States) including voluntary agreements,

environmental management systems, self-regulation and labelling and

certification schemes. We still see many of these innovations back in some

of the current literature on environmental partnerships. One can safely say

that the academic work in Northwestern European countries on state

failure, ecological and political modernization, and the risk society from




the late 1980s, and the studies in the United States in the 1990s on re-

inventing government, resembles much of the themes that can currently be

found in the literature and studies on partnerships. Poncelet (2001) and

Blowers (1998), for instance, provide evidence of this by drawing directlines between the ideas and discourse of ecological modernization and the

emergence and functioning of partnerships and cooperative governance.

Around the same time (the second half of the 1980s) ideas of public–

private partnerships in the provisioning of environmental services (water,

waste, energy, etc.) started to develop, especially in the United States and

to a lesser extent, and later, in the United Kingdom and the European con-

tinent. While here also the fundamental idea is to bring non-state actors

together with state actors around tasks traditionally fulfilled by the public

sector (and hardly ever around tasks traditionally fulfilled by the privatesector), the orientation and literature is slightly diff erent. The majority of

the literature comes from the management and organization sciences and

the orientation is less focused on state failures and governance, but rather

on efficiency, the bringing in of new capital and the introduction of market

logics. This literature and debate had spread wide particularly through the

involvement of multilateral institutions and banks, and also became

prominent after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the transitional processes

followed by that event.

A third historical root of partnership ideas can be traced back to theemerging literature in international and global environmental policy-

making, where conventional realist and regimes theories were challenged

by the notion – and later school of thought – of (global) environmental

governance. In the absence of a global state authority, and with the growing

emergence of global environmental challenges in the 1990s, the inter-

national and global arena proved particularly fertile for ideas and practices

of cooperative environmental governance between various state and non-

state partners (e.g., Streck, 2002). This was also strongly pushed by a

number of international conferences where the idea of partnership waswidely circulated, not in least at the 1992 UNCED conference in Rio de

Janeiro and the 2002 summit in Johannesburg (or the Rio10). During this

last conference in particular, a rapid growth in the number of international

and global partnerships for sustainable development was recorded (UN

Commission on Sustainable Development, 2006).

This literature on international environmental governance cross-fertilized

in the 1990s with the more general literature on new governance arrange-

ments, network governance and a number of other notions, which are all less

restricted to just the environmental domain and the international arena. In

general, as Davies (2002) notes, the partnership literature resembles the

positive rhetoric of inclusiveness, transparency, redistribution of power and




equity that prevails in ideas of sustainable governance. In a similar way,

Glasbergen (1996) lauds partnerships for institutionalizing consensus-

building practices and participatory dialogue into environmental decision-

making and governance processes.Some of these traditions or historical roots more or less came together

and were strengthened in those studies that aimed to reflect on the conse-

quences of globalization and growing complexity for the role and position

of the nation-state in governance, not least in environmental governance

(or governance for sustainability). The literature on globalization and

global complexity radicalized the idea of state failure as global flows and

networks intruded all kinds of processes into the state’s territory, while the

nation-state had basically no control over them. The conventional idea of

the state had to make way for new notions. Bauman (1987) described thisas the transformation from a gardening to a gamekeeper state.

One of the early key publications that analysed what globalization meant

for, among others, environmental governance, is Limits to Competition,

written by a group of independent experts led by Petrella (Group of

Lisbon, 1995). Their call for social contracts, also in the environment field,

resembles much of what would now be called partnerships. More recently,

Linder (1999, p. 38), for instance, argued how the global economy, new

communication technologies, the need for flexibility, and consumerism

forced governments and business alike towards partnerships, as a vehicle toovercome these challenges jointly. These global developments come

together with an intermingling of public and private spheres, making part-

nerships less contested and even logical. And in the Millennium Report,

Kofi Annan (2000), the UN’s Secretary General, gave a most adequate

summary of the widely perceived challenges in this global arena:

If we are to get the best out of globalization and avoid the worst, we must learnto govern better, and how to govern better together. That does not mean worldgovernment or the eclipse of nation states. On the contrary, states need to bestrengthened. And they can draw strength from each other, by acting togetherwith common institutions based on shared values. These institutions must reflectthe realities of the time, including the distribution of power. And they must serveas an arena for states to co-operate with non-state actors, including global com-panies. In many cases they need to be complemented by less formal policy net-works, which can respond more quickly to the changing global agenda.

So, in conclusion, while the roots of new environmental governance ideas

go back to the mid-1980s, it is only from the second half of the 1990s

onwards that ideas of political modernization, subpolitics, network

governance, reinventing governance and globalization started to influence

fundamentally the environmental research agendas on governance. This




provided fertile ground for the emergence and becoming mainstream of the

notion of environmental partnerships in the social science literature on the

environment.

10.2 ENVIRONMENTAL PARTNERSHIPS:CLASSIFICATIONS

To say that the literature on partnerships is quite diverse is an understate-

ment. Increasingly, it seems that little cannot be captured under the heading

of partnerships, certainly in the field of environmental governance. Before

any assessment can be made we need to classify and disentangle the various

connotations of partnership, both in the academic literature as well as inpolitical practice and discourse. Most of the classifications that have been

made up until now focus strongly on the kind of actors that enter into part-

nerships. For the purpose of my analysis I will distinguish two categories

(see Table 10.1), and continue my further analysis on the latter category in

particular, by looking at actor constellations.

A first category of partnership literature is strongly embedded in the

public–private cooperation between government and business, with a

strong focus on efficient management of activities, contractual obligations

and relations, and transfer of responsibilities. Such partnerships areperceived as an alternative to relying only on the state and authoritative

coordination mechanisms, or – to a lesser extent – just relying on private

business and the market. As noted above, this category dates back from the

1980s when the neo-conservative governments in the United Kingdom and

the United States started to promote public–private partnerships (PPP) as

an alternative to inefficient state dominance in a number of areas. In this

category of PPP there is a strong focus on urban infrastructure develop-

ment and management, and public services of water, waste and energy

(next to a number of otherfi

elds: health, education, post delivery, trans-port, etc.). These partnerships, although still diverse, have a clear instru-

mental focus and a wide literature reflects on the various organizational

and management dimensions: eff ectiveness, efficiency, organizational

modes, division of responsibilities, coordination structures and so on.

After its emergence in OECD countries the idea of PPP was swiftly taken

over by development agencies and international financial institutions such

as the World Bank and the IMF, conditioning loans and assistance pro-

grammes with reduction of government expenditures and shrinkage of

state responsibility, using the arguments of efficiency and eff ectiveness of

service provision (e.g., Miraftab, 2004). In these partnerships the focus

was – and still is – clearly on the partnering of state and market actors,








arrangements rather than just a diff erent management model; (2) they

acknowledge the growing role, force and power of civil society norms and

organizations, and are thus less controversial for environmental advocates;

(3) they are directly connected to the wider social science literature on thechanging conditions of our late-modern times. I will focus my further analy-

sis of partnerships on these sub-categories of partnership governance in

particular.

While these ideas of partnerships are not restricted to the environment

domain, a substantial part of the partnership literature refers to the realm

of environment and sustainability. The ideas of partnership governance

have strongly emerged in the environmental field, based according to

Poncelet (2001) on two specific, rather recent, socio-historical back-

grounds: a specific cultural model of non-confrontation and a discourse of ecological modernization. A cultural model guides people’s expectations

and provides a frame of interpretation on how diff erent interests should

relate and behave. The frame of non-confrontation and common responsi-

bilities has been propagated from the early days of the environmental crisis

onwards (with notions such as spaceship Earth), but was severely criticized

and opposed by environmentalists in the 1970s and 1980s, to become only

more acceptable from the late 1980s onward (e.g., with Our CommonFuture, WCED, 1987). The discourse of ecological modernization – as it

emerged in Europe in the late 1980s but spread wider in the 1990s (Mol andSonnenfeld, 2000) – provides the shared ideological and substantial back-

ground for partners to define common and joint solutions. However,

we should add a third background to the rapid emergence and strong

prevalence of partnerships in the environment and sustainability field:

the strong relation between globalization/complexity and environmental

governance. As environmental challenges become not only more and

more global in nature, but also increasingly framed against the background

of complex, global dynamics, conventional notions of state-led governance

become particularly problematic. Earth system governance (Biermann,2005) and governing environmental flows (Spaargaren, Mol and Buttel,

2006) are two among the many notions that point to the fact that in order

to address the new environmental challenges we need new forms of govern-

ance beyond, above, below and outside the state, and partnerships are one

of the answers to such calls. In that sense, environmental partnerships

cannot be separated from ideas and developments of globalization and

global complexities. Hence it should not surprise us to see much of the

recent partnership literature and examples being focused on (global)

environmental challenges, while the public–private partnership literature

of the late 1980s was strongly related to (sub)national management of

infrastructure.




10.3 ENVIRONMENTAL PARTNERSHIPSIN DEBATE

Throughout the last two decades when the idea of partnership wasdeveloped and put into practice in – among others – the field of environ-

mental protection, there has been a continuous debate on its merits and

deficiencies. Many critiques are not unique for environmental partnerships

but resemble wider uneasiness with new modes of environmental govern-

ance, and thus should sound quite familiar to environmental social sci-

ences scholars. One of them is the ambivalent environmental results of

partnerships. For instance, after studying partnerships between developed

country governments, transnational corporations and environmental

NGOs, Marina Ottaway is not too convinced of the contributions of suchcross-sectoral partnerships in improving local environmental conditions

and reforming local developing country governments: ‘The so-called part-

nership between NGOs, developed countries, and transnational corpor-

ations is beginning to look like a game in which each actor tries to pass the

hot potato of reforming reluctant governments to somebody else’

(Ottaway, 2001, p. 53). In a study on Leicester City partnerships, Roberts

(2000, p. 13) also draws ambivalent conclusions: ‘there is a realisation that

partnerships have limitations as well as benefits . . . partnership is not the

yellow brick road to a sustainable city that it is sometimes made out to be’.And also in several of the chapters in this volume, the environmental

ambivalences of partnership governance are noted. However, we can

find these kind of ambivalences on eff ectiveness and efficiencies with any

environmental arrangement, whether it is conventional state-centred or

new non-state governance. In analysing the debate on partnerships for sus-

tainability in this section, I will focus not so much on the environmental

records of partnerships, but rather on other – according to some, more

‘fundamental’ – lines of criticism. I group these critiques together under

four denominators.First, there is a substantial amount of conceptual criticism, all referring

to the particular vague notion of partnership, the a-theoretical underpin-

nings and the diversity of meanings that are brought under one denomin-

ator. A variety of authors claim that the sheer imprecise, vague and loose

definitions of partnership make it almost impossible to judge and evaluate

in general terms the functioning, advantages and disadvantages, strengths

and weaknesses of partnerships. Miraftab (2004, p. 92), for instance, dis-

cusses the ‘terminological sloppiness’ of the partnership literature and

practices through the multiple interpretations of the private sector in part-

nerships; the strongly diverging conditions under which partnerships can,

do or are advocated to operate; the variations in the kind of governments




involved, the ways they are involved and the functions these governmental

authorities are believed to fulfil; and the diversity and impreciseness of

objectives partnerships should fulfil. Van Seters (2005) list 10 concepts,

introduced by as many diff erent authors, which all seem to refer to more orless the same kind of partnership arrangements: civil partnership, cross-

sectoral collaborative alliances, cross-sector organizational collaboration,

cross-sectoral partnership, local partnership, multisectoral network, multi-

stakeholder initiative, new social partnership, strategic partnership and

social partnership organization.

Others equally note the large variety of meanings, arrangements and

contextual conditions of partnerships, which hardly permits one to draw

any lasting conclusions on whether partnerships do live up to their

promises (and what promises they have exactly). For some scholars, thisdefinitional ambiguity also serves the purposes of those in power, and they

connect this criticism with one of the points mentioned below. The origin

of this definitional lack of clarity and diversity, as well as a logical conse-

quence of it, seems to be the dominant prevalence of typical studies on

partnerships: empirical and management-oriented case studies that try to

capture the (list of) conditions and forms under which particular partner-

ships are eff ective and successful. In their overview of the partnership

literature, Selsky and Parker (2005) conclude that much of the recent

literature on social partnerships take a rather instrumental view and prag-matic orientation, and focus on the achievement of short-term objectives,

especially through a limited number of case studies. Limited attention has

been paid to both understanding long-term impacts and consequences and

a fuller analysis and comprehension of the broader social background and

development of partnerships: ‘after many productive years of relying on

case studies, the field is ripe for theory building’ (Selsky and Parker, 2005,

p. 866). In doing so, they add, ‘more political and critical perspectives on

CSSPs [cross-sectoral social partnerships] would reward research attention.

Most organizational literature is favourable towards these entities and [still]discusses them in functional, normative and managerial terms’.

A second group of critiques on current partnerships can be labelled

forward criticism, where partnerships do not live up to the new roles and

modes of flexible governance that are increasingly believed necessary under

conditions of networked complexities. It directly opposes backward criti-

cism ideas (see below). The common denominator is that, in practice, part-

nerships do not live up to their theoretical promises of non-hierarchical

multi-actor governance, because in implementation and design, actors and

arrangements still hang too strongly on conventional ideas of state govern-

ance, frustrating a fundamental shift to ‘real’ environmental partnerships.

Teisman and Klijn (2002), while celebrating the idea of partnerships as a




new form of governance better adapted to and fitting into the new network

society and the emerging global complexity, note that governments are

often not prepared to adjust their mode of ‘self-referential organization

decisions’ to more ‘joint inter-organizational policy-making’. Today, part-nerships seem to be primarily related to the domain of verbally expressed

intentions and theoretical advantages and benefits of cooperation, accord-

ing to Teisman and Klijn (ibid.).

The partnership idea has widely penetrated the language of politicians

on all levels, and partnerships do emerge as arrangements for debates and

discussion, but hardly appear in the realm of concrete decision-making.

While governments express the need for partnership, in practice partner-

ships turn into schemes of contracting out to market parties, where clear

rules, goals and targets are set. Governments and the representative democ-racy are still seen as the firm basis for governing the environment, and hesi-

tations exist with respect to more complex governance arrangements,

where the roles of public and private actors get blurred. Davies (2002)

describes how local sustainable community partnerships in the United

Kingdom are frequently overruled by dictates from strong national

governmental agencies. And Stewart and Gray (2006) evaluate interna-

tional partnership projects with a strong focus on Africa, to conclude that

much of the so-called new partnership approaches strongly resemble the

old government-dominated models, with a strong top-down way of policy-making. Governments did manage to maintain their privileged position as

partners, while to some extent other stakeholders were given a voice but cer-

tainly not as equal partners. This also seems to be the conclusion of

Bäckstrand’s (2006) analysis of the dominancy of states, multilateral insti-

tutions and governmental authority in global partnerships, with hardly any

relocation of authority to the private sector. In all, while these critics

support the idea of partnerships as an adequate answer to the governance

challenges of globalization, they criticize the lack of actual practical imple-

mentation of partnership arrangements, resulting in inadequate andhalfway governance innovations.

The third set of critiques can be grouped together as backward criticism,

where partnerships are interpreted as postmodern innovations that are

inadequate to deal with the power relations behind contemporary environ-

mental challenges. Typical doubts on and arguments against environ-

mental partnerships in this line resemble the need to move ‘back’ to

conventional models of governance, where the state had a central position

and was seen as the only force able to tame the treadmill of capitalist

exploitation and thus also to prevent pollution. Such analyses often end

in a plea for reinstalling past modes of state governance and calls for

strong environmental states that do more than just facilitate and mediate




conflicting parties. A typical, though balanced, criticism of partnerships

within this line is given by Hancock (1998), where he doubts whether part-

nerships can work within a setting where capitalist enterprises are only

focused on short-term profit-making in order to survive. In evaluating anumber of partnerships on the environment in the EU and the United

States, Poncelet (2001) draws similar conclusions. Through the prevalence

of and focus on non-confrontational strategies and solutions, the funda-

mental contradictions and confrontations related to the capitalist economy

are outside the potentials of partnerships. But at the same time, partner-

ships, when becoming increasingly dominant, de-legitimize more con-

frontational strategies, strong interventionist states and the use of related

resources. This especially empowers the ruling political and economic

elites, while environmental NGOs who have invested their capital, expertiseand resources in more confrontational strategies are disfavoured. Healthy

conflicts and vigorous debates between alternative approaches, interests

and ideas are played down in such partnership paradigms, where an ideol-

ogy of common interests prevents any more radical solutions for protect-

ing the environment.

This backward criticism to some extent is related to or spills over in a

fourth category of political economy and democracy criticism, emphasizing

the unequal power balances and the distributional consequences of part-

nerships. Davies (2002) analyses partnerships for sustainability especiallywith respect to their promise of redistributing power, their increase in par-

ticipation and stronger legitimacy. Most notably, she does so for partner-

ships that have a stronger involvement of local communities, with a special

emphasis on the so-called sustainable community partnerships in Britain,

which operated as pilot projects during the second half of the 1990s. While

she found that there was a redistribution of power, it was not to the advan-

tage of the local people. This was partly caused by the fact that partner-

ships do not operate in a governance vacuum, but have to function within

existing institutional structures.Andy Blowers (1998) analyses cooperative governance, ecological mod-

ernization and partnerships all along the same axis. While acknowledging

the value of these consensual models of environmental governance for

some environmental agendas, he strongly stresses the limitations of these

models by criticizing their reformist (instead of radical) agendas, their

economic-technological prevalence and preoccupation, their incorporation

of environmental NGOs instead of real participation, and their neglect of

power and social inequalities.

This comes very close to the criticism of Oppenheim and MacGregor

(2004), who see partnerships as being too often the combination of ‘public

money and resources to produce private profit and disproportionally small








as at best a marginal phenomenon to be relegated to the periphery of en-

vironmental governance? If partnerships have a lasting impact in terms of

environmental governance, could the transforming state be captured by

Conca’s (2005) hybridization of authority; or should we take global issuenetworks (Rischard, 2002) as a core concept in which states are given a

place; or perhaps David Held’s (2004) idea of global covenants, which

resembles the social contracts of the Petrella report (Group of Lisbon,

1995)? It is beyond the scope of this chapter to conclude the theoretical and

conceptual debates on the position of the state in partnerships. But the point

is that the partnership literature is in urgent need of further theoretical

underpinnings and it remains to be seen what theory or conceptualization

of the state comes out of this, up till now, strongly empirical and mana-

gerial partnership literature. Bringing the environmental state back in refershere to the need to make theoretical and conceptual space for states in any

theory of partnerships, also under conditions of global complexity.

The second worrying dimension is a strong celebration of and emphasis

by many scholars in the recent governance and partnership literature on a

minimization of the nation-state and a prevalence of and preference for

private–private partnerships. In the literature on environmental partner-

ships in particular, all kind of arrangements and partnerships beyond,

outside and without a strong environmental state are celebrated as inno-

vative, eff ective, legitimate, trustworthy and so on. The basic idea seems tobe that civil society takes over a number of qualifications and roles that

were ‘traditionally’ related to the state. In such partnerships civil society

balances the major economic powers and ensures legitimate arrangements,

forces accountability among the transnational companies, builds trust

among those dependent on the partnerships, balances unequal powers and

looks for equity. In contrast to conventional states, civil society and NGOs

are not bureaucratic,are moreflexible, are less ruled by a (political) elite, are

more grassroots democratic and are not preoccupied with national inter-

ests but connect local and global interests. To be sure, such private forms of cooperation and governance have prevailed in the early writings of Murphy

and Bendell (1997), in Beck’s subpolitics (1994), in the literature on private

environmental governance, in the project on global civil society (Anheier,

Glasius and Kaldor, 2001; 2005) and also in ecological and political mod-

ernization studies. In the early and mid-1990s such frameworks were

launched, experimented upon and reported by academics against the back-

ground of a social order that was still predominantly (perceived to be) organ-

ized as a nation-state system. These new branches of literature in the 1990s

were helpful in showing that there is also a world outside the state when dis-

cussing, designing and implementing environmental governance, and in

that sense they were much needed. However, the environmental partnership




literature – among other literature – sometimes seem to take this latter posi-

tion as the point of reference, as the preferential arrangement for dealing

with transnational and subnational sustainability issues in a flexible, inno-

vative, non-bureaucratic, democratic, transparent and legitimized way.And that is worrying. As for instance Gerrefi, Garcia-Johnson and Sasser

(2001) conclude, private partnerships should go together with a strong state

that actively enforces environmental goals within and beyond their sover-

eign territory. These private partnerships should not weaken or replace

existing state programmes. Seidman (2005) also warns against the limita-

tions of ‘stateless’ governance and the limitations of civil society in taking

on watchdog and control functions traditionally fulfilled by the state.

Bringing the environmental state back in means here that environmental

protection without the state is only in very specific problem settings andconditions sustainable in the long term. On average, there often remains a

need, role and position for active environmental states in new (partnership-

like) governance arrangements.

The third dimension that refers to shortcomings of the state in environ-

mental partnerships relates to those partnerships where the state is

included, but put on a similar and equal footing with a multitude of other

actors. States then become one among a wide network of actors, all

analysed in more or less similar ways in terms of power, interests, respons-

ibilities, accountabilities and resources. To be sure, I don’t want to arguethat states have any pre-ordained higher morality, normative preferable

place, or formal ahistorical position in environmental protection arrange-

ments. But I do think that in contemporary sustainability partnerships,

states and state authorities require a conceptualization that is fundamen-

tally rather than marginally diff erent (that is, not better) than those of other

(private) actors in partnerships. Bringing the state back in then means

making conceptual room for the specificities of states in partnership

arrangements, where issues of legitimacy, accountability, rule-altering

behaviour, democracy and balancing interests take their own turn anddynamics. Regarding what kind of environmental issues, levels and

arrangements can some of these state ‘functions’, tasks and responsibilities

be (partly) taken over by other actors, and where do we witness the unique

qualities of states and state institutions? The contribution by Meadowcroft

in this volume (Chapter 9) is a very useful start to such an analysis with

respect to democracy, where he argues for a meta-governance role of rep-

resentative institutions in partnerships. All this is not to argue in favour of

(a return to) classical statist arrangements in environmental governance,

like some of the ‘backward critics’ seem to do. Under specific conditions,

legitimacy, accountability and democracy, for instance, can also be orga-

nized and safeguarded to a major extent through a global civil society, as




some of the case studies in this volume illustrate. But in other cases this

is not desirable, possible or the (non-monetary) costs are too high.

Environmental states and their democratic institutions will not always be

able to draw back into mediation, facilitation, network management andinformation exchange within partnerships for sustainability.

The fourth problematic dimension of the state in the environmental part-

nership literature is of a more practical/political nature. As social scientists

we have always been conscious of the double hermeneutics, of the fact that

with our studies and writings we influence our research object, for better or

for worse. Increasingly I feel that, while the partnership literature concep-

tualizes real existing tendencies in environmental governance, nation-state

organizations internalize the partnership ideas by (1) legitimizing non-

interventionist environmental policies; (2) shifting the burden for failingenvironmental governance towards non-state parties and supranational

institutions; (3) showing a preoccupation on mediation and network con-

struction instead of designing and implementing substantial policies and

(4) reducing environmental experts and expertise in the environmental

state, while maximizing network (or partnership) managers and manage-

ment. At least for the West European countries I’m familiar with, I cannot

be very enthusiastic about that. Environmental partnerships become an

excuse for weakening environmental states, non-interventionists policies,

endless mediation and discussion. And specific sectors in society as well asspecific political ideologies cherish and celebrate such developments.

Growing complexity is then often combined with liberalization, to become

central arguments for the impossibility of interventionist, preventive and

precautionary environmental policy: a self-fulfilling prophecy for some

parts of the partnership literature and advocates. But at the same time we

do not see much hesitation by certain states to act preventatively and in a

precautionary way when issues of terrorism or security are at stake. And

partnerships in these areas come along with strong states (with all the

teething trouble that comes with that). Bringing the environmental stateback in, fourthly and finally, refers to a political project where states, state

authorities and state officials can also be agents that dare to intervene and

make a diff erence, also when uncertainties, globalization and complexities

make simple planning and goal achievement out of the question.

10.5 CONCLUSION

The call for bringing the environmental state back into the analysis of

social change resembles some of the ideas and research agenda of Evans

and colleagues (1985), as we have indicated above. But of course, there are




diff erences. A marginalization of the state in social analyses follows now

from (the perception of) a changing social order, where globalization and

complexities dominate. In the 1980s it was rather the coming together of

diff erent theoretical perspectives that threatened to marginalize the analy-sis of the state as autonomous actor in social processes. In the 1980s, the

political connotation was strongly related to the neo-liberal ideologies

and political practices of privatization, deregulation and marketization.

Although we witness similar debates of privatization (e.g., on environmen-

tal services) and deregulation (voluntary agreements, self-regulation), the

political background of partnerships seems to be ideologically less clear.

This makes current political debates on the environmental state confusing

at least. Environmental NGOs join multinationals in arguments for and

practices of partnerships in which states are marginally present. Originallycontrasting ideologies thus seem to join forces in state-marginalized forms

of governance.

Environmental partnerships, or partnerships for sustainability, are a

manifestation of the world’s search for new modes of governance following

the new conditions of a globalized modernity. No doubt this should

be assessed positively. The analytical and normative calls for bringing

the environmental state back should be interpreted against such a –

positive/constructive – background: partnerships may indeed contribute to

our understanding of, search for and design of new governance arrange-ments. But against that background, the environmental state needs a better

conceptualization. I have argued that we should be careful that our relatively

recent analytical innovations in studying environmental governance (so, in

our analysis, those on partnerships) are not getting ‘out of control’. There

is a constant threat of crossing a (thin) line where the analysis and under-

standing of new, innovative, experimental environmental governance

arrangements, in which the role of the state is diff erent from earlier arrange-

ments, is turned into a neglect of the state and its democratic institutions,

and normative standards for the prevalence of society-dominated forms of environmental governance. Or to put it slightly diff erently: the recent litera-

ture on partnerships is in danger of crossing a – in the first instance, thin –

line, between conceptualizing new forms and arrangements of environmen-

tal governance that resemble and fit the new globalized world order, and

putting the ‘end of the nation-state’ (Ohmae, 1995), the stateless society

(Young, 1994), or the privatization of (environmental) governance (Clapp,

2005; Finger, 2005) on the analytical and political agenda of environmental

protection. With the analysis of Peter Evans and colleagues (1985) we

should oppose such line-crossing not only on academic but also on

normative grounds, because it concerns more than just our academic ana-

lytical models and explanatory power. Through the double hermeneutics




(Giddens, 1984) and self-fulfilling prophecies, the marginalization of the

environmental state in academic studies reflects upon actual state action and

intervention, when environmental states and authorities are no longer

willing to take a (pro)active position and seem to be prepared to live withthe idea of a subsumed position vis à vis all kinds of social and economic

forces in determining and implementing environmental agendas.

One of the recent interesting perspectives, where the need for state govern-

ance is combined with a thorough analysis of the changing conditions

of the state in the global age, is to be found with Ulrich Beck (2005). While

his earlier work on subpolitics resembles the idea of partnerships and the

need for (environmental) governance beyond the state, more recently his

analysis on globalization and cosmopolitanization brings the state force-

fully back into the analysis, be it radically diff erent from the environmentalstate of the 1980s and early 1990s. According to him we have to get rid of

the idea of nation-states, of the nation-state outlook in politics and society

and of methodological nationalism in the social sciences, but not of the

state as such. The cosmopolitan state in a transnational state system and

with ‘a common human awareness of the global’ form for Beck the core for

provisioning and protecting public goods such as the environment in the

global age. Of course, also for Beck, this should take place in wider net-

works and partnerships with non-state actors. But in the end only the cos-

mopolitan state is able to combat eff ectively and legitimately the globalneo-liberal tendencies of privatization and liberalization that are so often

endangering the environment. This puts a new research line onto the

agenda on a cosmopolitan environmental state.

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PART 4

The future of partnerships





11. Multi-stakeholder partnerships forsustainable development: does thepromise hold?

Frank Biermann, Man-san Chan, Aysem Mertand Philipp Pattberg

Multi-stakeholder partnerships for sustainable development are often

hailed as a vital new element of the emerging system of global sustainabil-

ity governance. In policy and academic debates alike, partnerships are pro-

moted as the solution to deadlocked intergovernmental negotiations, to

ineff ective treaties and overly bureaucratic international organizations, to

power-based state policies, corrupt elites and many other real or perceived

current problems of the sustainability transition. Multi-stakeholder part-

nerships are now ubiquitous. They have been promoted in particular at the2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, where

partnerships became known as ‘Type 2 outcomes’ of the summit, along

with the traditional outcomes of the intergovernmental diplomatic process.

As of December 2006, 321 multi-stakeholder initiatives have been regis-

tered with the United Nations (UN, 2006). In addition, many similar agree-

ments are in place but not formally registered.

And yet, the role and relevance of these partnerships remains contested

(Glasbergen, Chapter 1 this volume). Some observers view the new

emphasis on multi-stakeholder partnerships as problematic (Ottaway,

2001; Corporate Europe Observatory, 2002; IISD, 2002; SDIN, 2002),

since voluntary public–private governance arrangements might privilege

more powerful actors, in particular ‘the North’ and ‘big business’, and

consolidate the privatization of governance and dominant neo-liberal

modes of globalization. Also, some argue that partnerships lack account-

ability and (democratic) legitimacy. Yet others see multi-stakeholder part-

nerships as an innovative form of governance that addresses deficits of

inter-state politics by bringing together key actors of civil society,

governments and business (e.g., Reinicke, 1998; Benner, Streck and Witte,

2003; Streck, 2004). In this perspective, multi-stakeholder partnerships orsimilar governance networks for sustainable development are important

239



new mechanisms to help resolve a variety of current governance deficits.

Such governance deficits have been discussed from diff erent conceptual

perspectives (e.g., Andonova and Levy, 2003; Haas, 2004; Martens, 2007).

While some scholars regard governance deficits as a generic phenomenonin international relations (Haas, 2004), others focus on a particular

governance deficit, for example the democratic deficit and problems of

legitimacy (Bäckstrand, 2006).

These conflicting expectations regarding the role and relevance of multi-

stakeholder partnerships remain open for debate. In this chapter, we

therefore provide a large-n assessment of whether the entire system of part-

nerships tends to live up to the positive expectations of their proponents,

or whether the evidence supports the arguments of the critics. We focus our

analysis on three governance deficits that are repeatedly mentioned in theliterature on multi-stakeholder partnerships, and that partnerships are

meant to address.

First, partnerships are expected to address a regulatory de ficit in current

sustainability governance. In other words, they are seen as providing

avenues for cooperation and joint problem-solving in areas where inter-

governmental regulation is largely non-existent. Second, partnerships are

believed to fill an implementation de ficit in sustainability governance, that

is, they could help implement intergovernmental regulations that do exist,

but that are only poorly implemented, if at all. Third, partnerships areoften expected to assist in solving a participation de ficit in global govern-

ance. In this view, intergovernmental negotiations are seen as dominated

by powerful governments and international organizations, while partner-

ships might ensure higher participation of less privileged actors, including

voices from youth, the poor, women, indigenous people and civil society at

large. Increased participation from such groups is seen as needed to

improve the implementation of international agreements and to strengthen

the overall legitimacy, accountability and democratic quality of current

governance systems.While these claims of multi-stakeholder partnerships as solutions to per-

ceived regulation, implementation and participation deficits in sustainabil-

ity governance are frequently made, there is surprisingly little systematic

research in their support. Evidence for the actual role and relevance of part-

nerships concerning the three governance deficits is scarce and inconclusive.

This lacuna impairs a better understanding of multi-stakeholder partner-

ships in global governance. Are partnerships a sign of a new model of world

politics in which intergovernmental negotiations are complemented and

sometimes even replaced by networked governance of non-state actors? Or

is the contribution of partnerships rather limited? To what extent, if at all,

are partnerships superior to traditional ways of international cooperation,

240 The future of partnerships



such as the negotiation of legally binding agreements among governments

and their subsequent national implementation?

The current literature on public–private governance in general, and on

multi-stakeholder partnerships in particular, is still not sufficiently evolvedboth theoretically and empirically to answer these questions, even though

important pioneering work has been done (Witte, Streck and Brenner,

2002; Andonova and Levy, 2003; Falkner, 2003; Betsill and Bulkeley, 2004;

Hale and Mauzerall, 2004; Dingwerth, 2005; Bäckstrand, 2006). Yet the

literature continues to be hampered by fragmented research agendas,

inconsistent conceptualizations across diff erent studies and the absence

of large-n studies. Most analyses diff er regarding the policy level they

address, ranging from studies that focus on local partnerships (Bassett,

1996; De Rynck and Voets, 2006) to the analysis of nationwide arrange-ments (Williams et al., 1991; Selin, 1999), European partnerships (Marks,

1993; Bomberg, 1994; Heinelt and Smith, 1996; Rhodes, Bache and

George, 1996; Dehousse, 1997), or transnational partnerships (Börzel,

1997). Empirical studies also focus on diff erent partnership functions, that

is, whether partnerships serve as mechanisms of rule- and standard-setting

(Pattberg, 2005a; 2005b), of rule implementation (Börzel and Risse,

2005) or for information provision and dissemination (Glasbergen and

Groenenberg, 2001; Tully, 2004). It is open to debate to what extent one can

generalize empirical findings on one partnership type to other types.Studies also diff er regarding the policy area in which partnerships operate –

ranging from studies on sustainable development and environment to a

variety of other issues including security (Considine, 2002; Krahmann,

2003), economy (Kenis and Schneider, 1987; Considine and Lewis, 2003),

tourism (Selin, 1999) or health (Williams et al., 1991; Altenstetter, 1994).

The predominant case study approach often results in a bias towards the

most visible and most successful public–private partnerships, which tends

to paint a universe that is more partnership-dominated than reality may

warrant. Overall, current research on partnerships falls short of placingthese governance arrangements in a wider context.

In order to improve understanding of the role and relevance of partner-

ships concerning the three governance deficits identified above, this chapter

off ers a first large-n empirical assessment of the entire system of multi-

stakeholder partnerships five years after they were institutionalized at the

World Summit on Sustainable Development. We draw on three data sources:

first, a meta-analysis of existing empirical studies of the performance of

partnerships for sustainable development; second, the United Nations

Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) database on partnerships

(a basic inventory of registered partnerships based on self-reporting); and

finally, data from the first version of the Global Sustainability Partnership

Multi-stakeholder partnerships 241



Database that is currently developed by our project team. The Global

Sustainability Partnership Database covers all partnerships that have been

formally registered with the United Nations, and will later also include non-

registered partnerships.The remainder of our chapter is organized around the three governance

deficits that we have outlined above and that partnerships are believed to

resolve: the regulation deficit, the implementation deficit and the partici-

pation deficit.

11.1 PARTNERSHIPS AND THE REGULATIONDEFICIT

One core claim in support of multi-stakeholder partnerships for sustain-

able development is that they function where governments fail. When

governments cannot agree on eff ective international agreements, or when

these agreements are too general to elicit any meaningful action, non-state

actors step in with the creation of multi-stakeholder partnerships. One can

reformulate this claim in two hypotheses. First, if partnerships fill a regu-

latory deficit, they will be more prominent in areas where public regulation

is largely non-existent. That is, there would be a negative correlation

between the frequency of partnerships in a given issue area and public reg-ulation of that area. Alternatively, if this was not the case, then partner-

ships would at least be spread rather equally over a wide range of problems.

The evidence is inconclusive, but hardly supportive of either hypothesis

(cf. Figure 11.1). Partnerships are indeed unequally spread over issue areas,

with some areas, such as water (75 partnerships), energy (55) and natural

resource management (52), receiving most attention (based on data on their

self-declared primary theme when registering with the United Nations,

excluding ‘cross-cutting issues’). From these areas with highest partnership

density, at least energy and natural resource management are densely regu-lated at the national level, and by a large measure also internationally, for

example through the climate regime and the biodiversity protection regime.

Other areas of equal importance for global environmental change – mining

(6), desertification (11), drought (12) or toxic chemicals (4) – are relatively

neglected by partnership initiatives (see UN, 2006).

A systematic comparison of the distribution of partnerships with that of

multilateral environmental agreements per issue area, through an online

treaty locator (CIESIN, 2007), suggests that issues that are less regulated or

unregulated (like mining) also attract very few partnerships. Relatively

more partnerships exist in areas that are heavily regulated, such as marine

resources, oceans and seas. This hypothesis has also been analyzed by




Liliana Andonova (2006, p. 48) based on older datasets from 2003. Both

Andonova’s and our investigations seem to contradict the regulation deficithypothesis. It seems that a fair degree of institutionalization and a relatively

high density of intergovernmental agreements facilitate partnership entre-

preneurship, whereas areas with obvious governance gaps have been less

popular for partnerships.

A similar trend emerges from our country studies, the first of which had

focused on all partnerships that claim to work in Chile (Tondreau, 2005).

Issues addressed by partnerships in Chile were heavily concentrated on

more managerial problems, such as sustainable management of forests,

improving mapping and citizen information, whereas almost no partner-ships existed on issues of major importance but with little national and

international regulation, such as mining or aquaculture.

Thus, while some areas with major international conventions – such as

energy and climate change – are heavily populated with partnerships,

areas with no strong international agreements, such as forestry, are less

covered by partnerships. Hale and Mauzerall (2004) explain this by the

private and voluntary nature of partnerships that prevents them from

sharing the macro-perspective of the United Nations and international

partnership advocates, so that ‘some key issues have not received the

attention they deserve’ (Hale and Mauzerall, 2004). This could result in

partnerships picking the ‘low hanging fruit’ in highly regulated areas,


Source: Global Sustainability Partnership Database V.1 (2007).

Figure 11.1 Issue areas of WSSD partnerships

4

5

1111

12

14

17

17

17

25

27

28

33

3438

52

55

75

Chemicals

Mountains

DesertificationTransport

Drought

Air pollution/Atmosphere

Forests

Marine resources

Waste management

Land

Climate change

SanitationOceans and seas

BiodiversityAgriculture

Natural resource management

Energy for sustainable development

Water



since they do not necessarily view problems in terms of urgency, but in

terms of manageability.

Another important factor that might facilitate partnership agreements –

and that also contradicts the regulation deficit hypothesis – is funding.Partnerships tend to emerge in areas that receive abundant funding from

governments, especially from the European Union and the United States;

areas such as climate change, air pollution, energy and water. The United

States have pledged in the Johannesburg process to invest US$970 million

over three years in water and sanitation projects, and the European Union

has off ered to launch a US$700 million partnership on energy develop-

ment. Both issue areas are now also most densely populated by partner-

ships. The pattern of partnerships emerging in areas with such financial

priorities points to a conclusion that the emergence of partnerships israther supply-driven than responsive to governmental incentives and

perceived regulation deficits in global governance.

In sum, multi-stakeholder partnerships for sustainable development do

not live up to expectations that they fill regulatory deficits in global govern-

ance. While our current analysis and previous studies do not focus on the

performance of individual partnerships in a given issue area, we can con-

clude that partnerships have been created rather unevenly across issues.

This uneven spread across areas, however, does not negatively correlate

with the regulatory density in an area. In fact, there is some evidence tosuggest that partnerships emerge in areas where there is already a fair

degree of regulatory institutionalization.

This is not necessarily a problem – if partnerships serve to contribute to

the implementation of existing rules and regulations, it might be more

eff ective for them to flourish in areas with substantial public regulation.

However, the underlying question then is whether partnerships in fact con-

tribute to implementation, as we analyze in the following section. In any

case, at least the claim that partnerships fill regulatory gaps – where

governments fail to agree on taking action – is hardly supported by theevidence.

11.2 PARTNERSHIPS AND THE IMPLEMENTATIONDEFICIT

The second claim in support of partnerships for sustainable development

is that they help improve the implementation of intergovernmental

treaties, agreements and programs. In the official texts from the World

Summit on Sustainable Development, strengthened implementation is

generally seen as the most important rationale for partnerships. In






our view more convincing – reading is that there is a more general problem

and that the vast majority of all partnerships simply lacks the financial

means to reach the goals they set for themselves.

New and Additional Resources?

Second, we have analyzed whether partnerships create new sources of

funding in addition to what governments and UN agencies were already

going to provide. If partnerships generated a substantial amount of new

resources, this would be a positive indicator of their eff ectiveness in imple-

menting the sustainable development goals. At the end of the World

Summit on Sustainable Development, all partnerships initiated around the

summit had less than US$250 million in resources (Hale and Mauzerall,2004, p. 235). In the larger context, this sum is a trifle and merely slightly

more than the official development assistance of a small country such as

Luxembourg. Admittedly, until 2004 – in less than two years – funding

increased four-fold to US$1.02 billion. However, the main reason for this

substantial increase was the reclassification of large intergovernmental

programs as multi-stakeholder partnerships, while the programs continue

to rely on governmental funding and on existing programs within the

United Nations and World Bank programs (Hale and Mauzerall, 2004,

p. 235). This is supported by the rather modest increase from 2004 toDecember 2006 by merely an additional US$230 million, from 1.02 billion

to 1.28 billion.

In any case, this sum is still small compared with US$78 billion in overall

official development assistance of the OECD countries (OECD, 2004).

Even in the multi-sectoral partnerships, funding remains largely public:

business actors account for only 1 percent of the new funding, almost the

same ratio as non-governmental organizations, which has led Hale and

Mauzerall (2004, pp. 235–6) to the conclusion that ‘partnerships have

failed to bring a substantial amount of new, multi-sectoral resources to sus-tainable development activities’. Our more recent analysis indicates that

not much has changed.

It is also difficult to estimate the percentage of funds that is genuinely new

and that has not been allocated for sustainable development before the World

Summit on Sustainable Development (Bäckstrand, 2006). Partnerships were

often presented to developing country representatives as a more reliable

source of funding, as they were not dependent on the uncertain process of

negotiations (personal communication with members of government dele-

gations to the World Summit on Sustainable Development and to the fourth

Preparatory Committee meeting, January 2007). This partially explains why

developing countries agreed to the partnerships regime at the World Summit




on Sustainable Development, but also supports suspicions that substantial

parts of the partnership funds are in fact reclassified public development

assistance.

Focus on Direct Impact?

Third, if multi-stakeholder partnerships contribute to closing an imple-

mentation deficit, one could expect that they concentrate on direct environ-

mental impacts. However, in a recent OECD survey (2006), which looks

mainly at partnerships registered with the United Nations that have an

environmental focus, only 28 percent of the responding partnerships con-

sidered themselves as providing direct environmental benefits. The OECD

researchers interpreted this as an overestimate and suggested that at a closerlook, it was more likely that ‘of the 32 partnerships only three or four had

direct environmental impact, with the rest facilitating impact further down

the line’ (OECD, 2006, p. 24). Another critical finding of the survey is that

most partnerships identify as main beneficiaries of multi-stakeholder co-

operation ‘the partners themselves’ (79 percent) or ‘the partners as well as

others’ (ibid., pp. 24–5). A similar pattern is found among the 321 partner-

ships registered with the United Nations. For example, 165 partnerships

report rather vague objectives as their primary goals, such as ‘strengthening

the means of implementation’, ‘building institutional frameworks’, and‘supplying information for decision-making’. A recent survey by the

International Food Policy Research Institute on 124 public–private part-

nerships in agricultural innovation in nine South American countries con-

cludes that most of the partnerships reviewed ‘are not based on genuine

demand; do not produce the expected synergistic eff ects from complemen-

tary use of resources, co-innovation, and joint learning; and do not respond

to common interests’ (Hartwich, Gonzalez and Vieira, 2005, p. 30).

Likewise, our 2005 study of partnerships implemented in Chile found

that only half of the partnerships list as objectives the ‘actual increase incoverage of services and life quality’ and ‘reduction of environmental

impacts’. Instead, most objectives seem to have only a rather indirect

impact on actual problems, for example through ‘improving mapping that

helps to take better public decisions’, ‘access to credits that allow people to

improve their quality of life’ or ‘giving consultancy services for better and

more sustainable results from agriculture’ (Tondreau, 2005).

Another proxy for the question of whether partnerships address the

implementation deficit is the number of partnerships that monitor their

progress in implementing the Millennium Development Goals. In the 250

partnerships that Hale and Mauzerall (2004) studied, merely 69 percent had

a reporting system and less than 50 percent had a monitoring mechanism in




place. Because this study was conducted shortly after the initiation of part-

nerships, monitoring mechanisms might have been created later. However,

there is indicative evidence that the lack of monitoring persists. For

example, a more recent OECD survey (2006) states that many partnershipsthat focused on environmental protection had no monitoring mechanism in

place. While 81 percent of the sampled cases planned an evaluation of the

eff ectiveness of the partnership, only 56 percent declared that they would

evaluate ‘their contribution to the Millennium Development Goals’.

This seems comparable to other multi-stakeholder processes. For

example, a 2004 McKinsey report on ‘intermediate impacts’ of the United

Nations Global Compact does not find any substantial improvements

towards the Compact’s principles five years after its initiation. The results

of the survey indicate that the foremost reason to sign the Global Compactfor non-governmental organizations was ‘to network with other organiz-

ations’ (64 percent). Companies most often claimed that they aimed at

addressing humanitarian concerns (55 percent globally) or at becoming

familiar with corporate social responsibility (62 percent in non-OECD

countries). However, only 58 percent of the companies took ‘any (at least

one) action’ in support of global compact goals. While 67 percent of com-

panies indicated that their companies ‘made changes’ to implement the

Compact’s principles, only 9 percent claimed that the Global Compact had

a crucial impact on any of these policy changes (McKinsey, 2004).Of course, improving means of implementation or building institutional

frameworks are important elements of the larger quest for the transition

towards a more sustainable development. Yet, given these data, the sus-

picion arises that a sizable part of current partnership activity is not imple-

mentation per se, but rather the construction of a bureaucratic procedural

universe in parallel to the existing intergovernmental processes. These activi-

ties may lay the foundation for eff ective implementation in the future – but

this is far from certain.

Focus on Least Developed Regions?

Fourth, if partnerships were contributing to filling the implementation

deficit, one would expect them to focus in particular on these countries and

regions where implementation is most urgently needed. One can analyze

this through looking at the designated countries of implementation of

partnerships registered with the United Nations (see Figure 11.2). Most

previous partnership studies have focused on countries as (lead) partners

and neglected the category of country of implementation. This category

indicates exclusively the broadness of implementation regardless of which

countries the partners come from. Interestingly, we found that it is not the




least developed countries but the OECD countries that are the most fre-

quent countries of implementation, followed by Asian countries andAfrica. If partnerships exist to further the implementation of the

Millennium Development Goals, such as bringing food and education to

the poorest, it is striking that there is no bias in the partnership universe in

favor of least developed countries as countries of implementation.

In sum, the general perception of partnerships as a response to the imple-

mentation gap seems overly optimistic. A number of indicators – the

balance of issue areas and geographical areas, the lack of focus on direct

environmental impact, the potential to reach goals and to attract additional

funding – all point to the conclusion that the current practice of partner-ships does not show strong evidence that they contribute significantly

towards filling an implementation gap in global governance.

11.3 PARTNERSHIPS AND THE PARTICIPATIONDEFICIT

Multi-stakeholder partnerships for sustainable development are often seen

as a means to ensure larger participation of all stakeholders. Already

Principle 10 of the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development

stipulated that ‘environmental issues are best handled with participation of


Source: Global Sustainability Partnership Database V.I (2007).

Figure 11.2 Countries of implementation

Partnerships implementing in...

198

151

150

126

92

123

170

171

195

229

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

OECD

Non-OECD Asia

Africa

EU

South America



all concerned citizens, at the relevant level’, and at the Rio Summit the

notion of major groups was introduced to acknowledge the necessity of

broad-based participation in decision-making to achieve sustainable devel-

opment. Thus, the Agenda 21 of 1992 urged governments to retreat ‘fromnarrow sectoral approaches’ and move towards ‘full cross-sectoral coord-

ination and cooperation’ (UN, 1992, p. 8.12).

There are various arguments that support broader participation. Some

argue that ensuring participatory processes is a public good in itself

(Stiglitz, 2002, pp. 168–71), while others add that participation also

increases the eff ectiveness of projects and of decisions in general, ensures

political sustainability, assists in a more acceptable development transfor-

mation and creates more transparent corporate governance (cf. Isham,

Narayan and Pritchett, 1995; Isham, Kaufmann and Pritchett, 1997).Proponents of multi-stakeholder partnerships as means to increase par-

ticipation off er three core arguments. First, because national governments

and public agencies have limited resources, information and skills, they

need to collaborate with other sectors to ensure eff ective governance

(Reinicke and Deng, 2000; Ruggie, 2002; Streck, 2004). Second, partner-

ships that bring together a variety of sectors in environmental decision-

making will decrease the gap between societies and global institutions that

emerges from the impossibility of a global democracy. Finally, partnerships

are believed to reduce the costs of compliance to international agreementsthrough creating consensus among the major actors (Jobin, forthcoming).

Increased participation through partnerships is often related to their

assumed bridge-functions between state and non-state actors (Martens,

2007, p. 33). Yet the assumed positive eff ect of partnerships also relates to

their role in bridging the diff erences of understanding between the global

‘North’ and ‘South’ on environment and development issues.

Does this promise hold, and is the theory met by reality? We have ana-

lyzed three hypotheses. We assumed that if partnerships are eff ective in

strengthening participation, they will have: (1) an at least balanced distri-bution of lead partners from the global North and South and of actors

from developing countries in general; (2) an at least balanced distribution

of lead partners from state and non-state actors; and (3) a sufficient par-

ticipation of traditionally marginalized partners.

Balance between North and South

First, regarding overall representation and distribution of leadership roles

between North and South, this is hardly balanced among state actors in

partnerships for sustainable development. In more than a quarter of all

partnerships registered with the United Nations, industrialized countries




are the only state partners involved. In 60 percent of the registered part-

nerships, at least one OECD state is a partner. Developing countries are

underrepresented; 56 percent of all partnerships have no state partner from

the developing world. When we consider countries not as a partner but asthe setting for implementation, we observe a similar pattern: 70.4 percent

of partnerships led by industrialized countries have at least one OECD

country as their country of implementation. In comparison, only 17.4

percent of the partnerships that are led by developing countries have a

developed country as country of implementation.

The leadership of partnerships lies predominantly with industrialized

countries (see Figure 11.3). By the end of 2006, governments that were

leading partnerships registered with the United Nations were almost exclus-

ively from the North. The only developing countries among the group of the ten most-often leading governments were the host countries of the last

preparatory conference to the World Summit on Sustainable Development

(Indonesia) and of the Summit itself (South Africa).

The general trend that Northern actors play a major role in the initiation,

funding and operation of private–public governance is supported by sec-

toral studies as well. For example, Buse (2004) concludes for global health

partnerships that the most active governmental partners are the United

States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Canada, with the conse-

quence that Southern governments and non-governmental organizations


Source: Global Sustainability Partnership Database.

Figure 11.3 Lead partner governments

2

2

4

5

8

8

9

13

13

15

Sweden

Germany

South Africa

Canada

Indonesia

France

Australia

Japan

USA

Italy



are systematically under-represented in the governing bodies of the part-

nerships. Even when Southern actors are represented, leadership and ini-

tiation might mean that decision-making power remains with more

powerful actors. Bartsch (2006) cites global health partnerships as cases inwhich no real decision-making power is granted to governments and civil

society actors from the South even despite their representation.

Empirical studies of environmental partnerships have reached similar

conclusions. Andonova (2006, pp. 44–5) suggests that, ‘the more countries

are involved in foreign aid transactions, the more their governments and

development agencies are likely to have interest and political skill to

participate in public–private institutions’. On the other hand, according to

Andonova, environmental stress, level of involvement in international

institutions and domestic political environment have no bearing on thestate partners involved (with the exception of countries with the largest

populations that are more likely to build partnerships, and of the two host

countries of the World Summit on Sustainable Development and the Bali

preparatory meeting, South Africa and Indonesia).

Participation of Non-governmental Actors

Second, it has been argued that multi-sectoral partnerships would create

new opportunities for non-state actors and thus alleviate the participationdeficit in global governance. Again, this is hardly supported by data on

current partnership practice. Across all issue areas, state actors and inter-

governmental organizations dominate the partner population of partner-

ships for sustainable development. Only 16 percent of partnerships have no

government as a partner. Public actors are also more likely to take the lead:

national and local governments lead 29 percent of all partnerships, and

the United Nations and other intergovernmental organizations another

30 percent. Taken together, public actors run almost 60 percent of all part-

nerships that have emerged from the Johannesburg process. Business actorsare in charge of only 3 percent of all partnerships registered with the

United Nations, which is noteworthy given that business actors were highly

supportive of the partnership idea during the Johannesburg Summit. Non-

governmental organizations lead an additional 8.2 percent of all registered

partnerships, with research and science organizations and networks (12

percent) and collective actors such as partnership fora or stakeholder coun-

cils, as well as cases of missing data accounting for the rest (18.6 percent).

Back in 2003, Andonova and Levy (2003, p. 23) had concluded that part-

nerships are mainly ‘supply-driven (by what powerful actors have to off er)’.

The current sets of data analyzed for this study show that not much has

changed since then (see Figure 11.4). The only major change over the last






of his research on health partnerships: ‘[i]f you don’t have some money on

the table, some time, and expertise, you are not a partner’.

Comparable imbalances are also found in the Global Compact that the

United Nations concluded with a number of actors to improve the en-vironmental, social or human rights performance of companies by bring-

ing them together with UN agencies, civil society and labor unions. The

impressive portfolio of the initiative, which attracted some 1430 small and

medium-sized enterprises and 1615 larger corporations, including 108 of

the businesses ranked in FT Global 500, is in stark contrast to low involve-

ment of non-governmental organizations – merely 7 percent of all partici-

pants are NGOs – and lack of consistency in the commitments of business

partners: 40 percent of the companies listed on the Compact’s database are

either inactive or non-communicating participants (most of them beingsmall and medium-sized enterprises). Similar to partnerships for sustain-

able development, small businesses and civil society have a limited partici-

pation in the Global Compact.

In sum, there is empirical support for the claim that partnerships repro-

duce or even intensify existing relationships in the international system

(Martens, 2007). This is not restricted to partnerships for sustainable devel-

opment. Similar patterns are visible in other governance arrangements (e.g.,

partnerships established through the Global Compact) and other issue

areas (e.g., health partnerships). So far, partnerships for sustainable devel-

opment remain dominated by states and international organizations, and

are predominantly led and populated by Northern actors. Participation of


Source: UN (2006).

Figure 11.5 Number of partners from di ff erent sectors and major groups

545

14

15

27

31

41

263

593

758

1163

1283

1978

Other

Farmers

Workers & trade unions

Indigenous peoples

Women

Youth & children

Local authorities

Scientific & technological community

Business & industry

UN & other IGOs

NGOs

Government



‘major groups’ is limited to stakeholders that have certain competitive

advantages or useful resources, and traditional patterns of political ex-

clusion of weaker groups tend to be reproduced at the transnational level

of partnerships as well.

11.4 CONCLUSION

Two contradictions seem to prevent partnerships from eff ectively filling the

governance deficits observable at the global level. First, there seems to be a

contradiction between the tasks of addressing the implementation gap and

addressing the participation gap at the same time and to the same degree.

Although partnerships are expected to implement sustainable developmentpolicies eff ectively and at the same time to ensure a certain level of partici-

pation, this appears difficult within the context of the World Summit on

Sustainable Development and its follow-up process. If partnerships are

created to fill the implementation gap, this will require like-minded state

and non-state actors to form a partnership and implement some or all

Millennium Development Goals. Yet if they aim at ensuring broadest poss-

ible participation, the chances of eff ective implementation could be ham-

pered by partners with opposing interests. This contradiction from within

the partnership system is reflected in the debate on the ‘partnershipbrokers’, wherein some argued that ‘if the partners cannot work out a way

to work together and develop mutual trust on their own, then perhaps the

partnership should not be formed in the first place’(Warner, 2003). It might

be, in this case, more realistic and useful for partnerships to focus on imple-

mentation, and limit the ambitions with regard to participation.

The second contradiction relates to the regulatory gap, which partner-

ships fail to fill. Despite the rhetoric about the partnerships being only an

additional eff ort and not a substitute for multilateralism, no intergovern-

mental environmental agreement has been signed at the JohannesburgSummit. The only significant outcome of this major summit was voluntary

partnerships between diff erent sectors, with limited resources and no

binding authority. A competitive – as opposed to complementary – element

is especially visible in the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development

and Climate, which has the strong support of two governments that reject

the regulatory regime of the Kyoto Protocol and that seek voluntary part-

nerships as a replacement of multilateral environmental agreements. (For a

detailed analysis of complementarity see McGee and Taplin, 2006.)

Surely, the question is not whether one single partnership addresses the

three governance deficits of regulation, implementation and participation.

The question is about the overall role and relevance of the entire system of




the almost 400 partnerships that have emerged in recent years to advance

sustainable development in the areas of water, energy, health, agricul-

ture and biodiversity and to contribute to the implementation of the

Millennium Development Goals. Does this entire partnership universe helpresolve the three governance deficits? Given the large number and variety of

partnerships, an answer to this question is difficult. Our large-n analysis –

drawing on existing studies, on UN data and on our own Global

Sustainability Partnerships Database – comes to a rather somber con-

clusion. While some partnerships might have some positive eff ect on

addressing the regulation, implementation and participation deficits, this

does not seem to be the case for the entire system of partnerships.

Partnerships are most frequent in those areas that are already heavily insti-

tutionalized and regulated. They are predominantly not concerned withimplementation, but rather with further institution-building, and for many

of them it is doubtful whether they have sufficient resources to make any

meaningful contribution towards implementation in the first place. Finally,

the majority of partnerships strengthen the participation of those actors

that already participate: governments, major international organizations

and those civil society actors that have had a say in global governance

already before the partnership phenomenon emerged. The balance of evi-

dence suggests that those that have been marginalized before have also been

marginalized in the partnership process.If the entire system of partnership does not help much in filling the

governance gaps analyzed here, what then is their main rationale? Other

reasons for partnerships to emerge have been mentioned. Dedeurwaerdere

(2005, p. 4) for instance had suggested that ‘self-regulatory institutions

remain subject to takeover by opportunistic individuals and to potentially

perverse dynamics’. Some of these subsidiary purposes in partnership

building may be self-interest, as both public and private actors can be

expected to form a partnership ‘not necessarily to foster their [partner-

ship’s] main rationale, but for a subsidiary purpose’ (Broadwater and Kaul,2005, p. 3). Considering the amount of time and funding invested in each

partnership, it seems not surprising that partners themselves tend to be the

primary beneficiaries of their partnerships.

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12. Multi-stakeholder global networks:emerging systems for the globalcommon good

Steve Waddell and Sanjeev Khagram

Until recently nation-states and their intergovernmental organizations have

been seen as the key agents to manage the global commons and provision

of global public goods. However, the limits of the nation-state system as

conventionally understood have been increasingly apparent during the

decades of asymmetric and contested globalization dynamics (during and

since the end of the Cold War). Substantial disparities in wealth and seem-

ingly intractable poverty of large regions, global pandemics like AIDS and

bird flu, more extensive and pernicious forms of transnational crime, pol-

lution of the seas and the growing pace of climate change are only a few

examples of challenges that indicate new approaches to global action,

policy and governance are needed.

One common response is to support strengthening of intergovernmental

organizations, from the United Nations to the International Criminal

Court. Another is to call for developing a global state and system of global

representative government. A return to the grassroots is passionately pro-

moted by many. Yet others say that fortifying global market mechanisms is

the answer (Khagram, 2006). This chapter focuses on the development of

global multi-stakeholder networks – understood here as global action net-

works (GANs). GANs are global governance arrangements defined by fivecharacteristics. They are (1) global; (2) focused upon public good issues;

(3) interorganizational networks; (4) bridging agents among diverse organ-

izations; and (5) systemic change agents.

Before the Cold War began, three particularly interesting and enduring

‘proto-GANs’were established. The year 1863 marked the founding of what

eventually became legally an NGO but was an interorganizational network

created with intimate government involvement, known today as the

International Committee of the Red Cross and the International Federation

of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. In 1919, the government-labor-employer-constituted International Labour Organization was established.

261



In 1948, the World Conservation Union (IUCN) brought together govern-

ments, scientific communities and environmental NGOs.

The Cold War halted development of such multi-stakeholder strategies

for the management of the global commons and the provision of globalpublic goods. Global politics became equated with allegiance to nation-

states individually and in international coalitions to such an extent that

problem-solving across these boundaries by diverse stakeholders became

highly problematic. But at its end, conditions were substantially diff er-

ent and richer for creation of GANs. Transcontinental transportation

and telecommunications had grown tremendously. Business and civil

society organizations had proliferated around the world and were increas-

ingly globally networked. Transparent and participatory multi-stakeholder

processes had become much more widespread, eff ective and legitimate at alllevels of governance.

The subsequent post-Cold War round of global multi-stakeholder

network creation is associated with the ‘international regimes’ of Ruggie

and Young (Ruggie, 1975; Young, 1999), the ‘governance without govern-

ment’ phenomenon noted in the 1990s (Rosenau, 1992), and the ‘govern-

ment as networks’ phenomenon (Goldsmith and Eggers, 2004) noted more

recently. From an intergovernmental organization perspective, Reinicke and

his associates refers to these multi-stakeholder networks as ‘global public

policy networks’ (Reinicke, 1999–2000; Reinicke and Deng, 2000; Witte,Reinicke and Benner, 2000). From a global problem perspective, Rischard

(2002) labels them ‘global issue networks’. With a focus on these networks

as societal learning and change systems, Waddell describes them as ‘global

action networks’ (GANs) (Waddell, 2003a, 2003b; Waddell, 2004).

The chapter asks: ‘What is the potential role of GANs in the protection of

the global commons and the production of global public goods?’ ‘Are GANs

one of the important emerging mechanisms competing today for dominance

in global governance?’ Governance is conceived broadly as a set of legiti-

mate and authoritative relationships and processes that defi

ne public goalsand stimulate collective action to achieve them. Today national governments

and intergovernmental organizations are usually associated – and often

equated – with having the leadership role in governance in today’s world.

However, at the global level, governance is obviously more complex, given

the lack of an entity with a monopoly of legitimate force over citizens – an

attribute usually associated with the definition of a nation state.

Indeed, global governance is to date a very messy arrangement of

feuding powers that can be likened to the various governance arrangements

that were at play in feudal Europe. As many scholars have noted in their

comprehensive analysis of that period (among the most recent see Sassen,

2006), there were many arrangements for decision-making – including the




Church, independent cities ruled by merchant-citizens, kingdoms, empires,

guilds and so on. There was nothing obvious about the trajectory that pro-

duced a Europe with a governance arrangement dominated by territorially-

based nation states with citizen voters.In fact, the emergence of the nation state in Europe was highly correlated

with its ability to address issues of the commons and provision of public

goods within particular territorial boundaries. As is so evidently clear today,

the spread of the nation-state form to many parts of the world has not

necessarily even been associated with the eff ective provision of public goods

and protection of commons within those territorial units (many countries

in Sub-Saharan Africa are obvious but by no means the only cases in this

regard). Given the apparent inability of nation-states to accomplish these

functions at the global level, their declining or at very least significantlytransforming roles given contemporary globalization trends and patterns

seems inevitable. This chapter correspondingly examines in more detail the

potential of GANs in particular to complement and perhaps eventually

supplement nation-states and intergovernmental organizations in managing

the global commons and providing global public goods.

12.1 THE EMERGING FIELD OF GLOBAL

ACTION NETWORKS

The current universe of GANs approximates four dozen in number. They

include Transparency International, which has an anti-corruption agenda,

the Forest Stewardship Council, which promotes sustainable approaches to

forestry (and, in particular, certification systems), the Global Water

Partnership, which is an agent of integrated water resource management,

the Youth Employment Summit, which is focused on generating work for

un- and under-employed young people, and the Microcredit Summit

Campaign, which is promoting microcredit as a strategy to address extremepoverty, among others.

The research for this chapter includes documentary investigation, web

reviews, interviews and participant observation over the span of nearly ten

years. Early 2006 data was gathered on 19 GANs through a structured-

focused comparative methodology to construct an initial landscape of this

emergentfield. The networks included in the sample are all currently active,

have been in operation for at least four years, and the three pre-Cold War

cases were excluded since they were formed in such a diff erent context. This

sample was generated after an initial exploration of 30 networks in total

with the primary selection criteria being diversity of issue area focused on

by the GAN.

Multi-stakeholder global networks 263



The following GANs have been analyzed for this study:

● Building Partnerships for Development in Water and Sanitation (BPD)

To study, to explore and promote tri-sector partnerships as anapproach that would more eff ectively meet the water and sanitation

needs of poor communities.

● Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) To promote and improve the imple-

mentation of corporate codes of practice that cover supply chain

working conditions.

● Fair Labor Association (FLA) To combine the eff orts of industry,

non-governmental organizations, colleges and universities to

promote adherence to international labor standards and improve

working conditions worldwide.● Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) To promote environmentally

appropriate, socially beneficial and economically viable management

of the world’s forests.

● Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) To improve the nu-

tritional status of one billion people, of which 700 million are at risk

of vitamin and mineral deficiencies, over theperiod2002–07, primarily

through fortification of commonly available and consumed foods.

● Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) To save chil-

dren’s lives and protect people’s health through the widespread use of vaccines

● Global Compact To promote responsible corporate citizenship

so that business can be part of the solution to the challenges of

globalization.

● Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (Global Fund)

To finance a dramatic turnaround in the fight against AIDS, tuber-

culosis and malaria.

● Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) To promote international har-

monization in the reporting of relevant and credible corporate en-vironment, social and economic performance information to

enhance responsible decision-making, through a multi-stakeholder

process of open dialogue and collaboration in the design and imple-

mentation of widely applicable sustainability reporting guidelines.

● Global Water Partnership To support countries in the sustainable

management of their water resources.

● International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD)

By empowering stakeholders in trade policy through information,

networking, dialogue, well-targeted research and capacity-building,

to influence the international trade system such that it advances the

goal of sustainable development.




● Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) To safeguard the world’s

seafood supply by promoting the best environmental choice.

● Microcredit Summit Campaign To reach 100 million of the world’s

poorest families, especially the women of those families, with creditfor self-employment and other financial and business services by the

year 2005.

● Partnership for Principle 10 (PP10) To translate access to infor-

mation, participation in decision-making and access to justice as key

principles of environmental governance into action by promoting

transparent, inclusive and accountable decision-making at the

national level.

● Social Accountability International (SAI) To promote human rights

for workers around the world as a standards organization, ethicalsupply chain resource and programs developer.

● The Access Initiative (TAI) To ensure that people have a voice in the

decisions that aff ect their environment and their communities. TAI

partners promote transparent, participatory and accountable

governance as an essential foundation for sustainable development,

access to information, participation in decision-making and access to

justice as key principles of environmental governance.

● Transparency International (TI) To create a world in which govern-

ment, politics, business, civil society and the daily lives of people arefree of corruption. Corruption is the abuse of entrusted power for

private gain.

● World Water Council (WWC) To promote awareness, build political

commitment and trigger action on critical water issues at all levels,

including the highest decision-making level, to facilitate the efficient

conservation, protection, development, planning, management and

use of water in all its dimensions on an environmentally sustainable

basis for the benefit of all life on earth.

●

Youth Employment Summit Campaign (YES) To build the capacityof young people to create sustainable livelihoods and to establish an

entrepreneurial culture where young people will work towards self-

employment.

12.2 FIVE DEFINITIONAL CHARACTERISTICSOF GANs

Two caveats are necessary with respect to the field landscape developed

based on this 19-GAN sample. First, the cases of GANs fit the definition

‘more rather than less’. Part of the goal of the analysis was to assess this




very question of definition, so a significant range is noted. As well, as in any

quickly changing field, descriptions and details themselves are rapidly

changing. For example, official and formal budgets for organizations can

shift 50 percent from year to year. This is not simply a product of financingsuccesses, but of changing strategies (such as shifting from a centralized to

decentralized network) and cycles of activities that are not annual (such as

holding a global assembly).

With these caveats, the following quite informative patterns about the

field were derived from an analysis of the 19 GANs in the sample.

1. Global

Although the GANs aspire to be global, most are as of yet active in fewerthan 50 countries. However, all GANs have active participants on all con-

tinents (with the possible exception of Australia), which eliminates some

international partnerships focused upon specific regions such as Africa, as

is the case with the Global Partnership to Eliminate River Blindness. Most

are active in the most populous countries in the world. Four factors

influence how planetary the GANs are. These are:

1. Funders as donors. Several of the networks, such as the Global Fund to

Fight AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis (the Global Fund), are productsof a donor agency framework of Northern countries trying to achieve

some outcome in Southern countries. Therefore, although they may be

‘global’ there is important asymmetry within the global nature between

‘donor’ and ‘recipient’. Of the 19, all are active in Southern countries

but only 11 conduct programmatic activity in Northern countries.

2. Their stage of development. Obviously, a global network does not

spring up overnight. Even when sponsored by an existing global

network, substantial eff ort and time is required to give life to a new in-

itiative that spans the world. Thus, it is expected that at least asignificant sub-set of GANs will increase their activities into more

countries as time passes and they become more eff ective and legitimate.

3. The robustness of stakeholder organizations. As ‘multi-stakeholder’ net-

works, the GANs depend upon legal and cultural frameworks that

permit and encourage diverse stakeholders to form independent organ-

izations. In China and Arab countries, there are still significant road-

blocks to robust civil society and business organizations. In some

countries, the question is more the capacity of local stakeholder groups.

4. The GAN membership strategy. Some of the networks are closed to new

members, set significant hurdles to membership or are very specialized.

For example, although anyone can join the Ethical Trading Initiative,




companies must agree to monitoring and ethical performance stand-

ards that many would find overly onerous. Building Partners for

Development in Water and Sanitation is quite specialized and would

not be of interest for countries committed only to public sector plan-ning, development and delivery of water and sanitation services.

2. Focused on Issues for the Public Good Issue

None of the GANs (across the sample or the larger population) is a for-

profit organization. Their multi-stakeholder character means that they must

be able to integrate diverse goals, and their formal organization is almost

always as an NGO or non-profit organization (or a program of one) or,

occasionally, an intergovernmental organization as is the case of the GlobalCompact. The issues GANs focus on in some ways reflect divisions not

uncommon with governments, their agencies and ministries. However, the

issues are often relatively specialized – rather than a Ministry of Health,

they are constructed around specific health challenges and diseases; rather

than a ministry of public works, the Global Water Partnership and World

Water Council have much narrower, distinctive and complementary roles.

On the other hand, some of the GANs focus upon cross-cutting issues that

traditional governmental structures have great difficulty addressing – such

as the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development and theGlobal Reporting Initiative, which are concerned with triple bottom line

(economic, social and environmental) reporting.

3. Inter-organizational Networks

Operating at a global level, the role of individuals as participants and

members in the networks is very marginal as opposed to the role of organ-

izations. Transparency International began as a network of individual

members and it still has a modest (and diminishing) role, but it quicklyshifted to a network where a specific organization is usually accredited as a

national chapter. In some cases, the distinction between individuals and

organizations is finessed – the Global Reporting Initiative, for example,

specifies that individuals do not represent an organization’s interests

because of concern that this will undermine the needs of ‘the whole’ – but

in fact, ‘Organizational Stakeholders’ is a key membership category.

Usually the GANs are born of organizations coming together. These can

be independent individual organizations or associations of organizations –

the GAN then being a network of networks like the World Water Council.

But very often the GANs’ work involves anointing, strengthening or even

creating its constituent organizations or networks. For example, The Access




Initiative organizes groups of NGOs (usually three) in a specific country to

form a local TAI-(country name) network.

For students of organizational studies, all organizations are networks

and therefore the terms require further description. Table 12.1 proposes dis-

tinctions between three diff erent types of relevant organizations to describe

more clearly the diff erence that GANs represent. They tend to have

network characteristics, although some may more closely resemble part-

nerships. The distinctions between whether a specific entity is a partnershipor network is further muddied by development issues – most start as part-

nerships but grow to networks.

4. Diversity Embracing Boundary Spanners

GANs span several types of boundaries. GANs are all bridging North–

South divides – sometimes this divide reflects the traditional donor/recipi-

ent one, but increasingly there is a sense of true globalness with more peer-

like relationships. Another classic divide spanned is rich–poor. Theyinclude all levels – individual, group, organizational, organizational sector

(business-government-civil society), country and region. Wealthy corpor-

ations with substantial resources work side by side with NGOs in many of

the GANs. One study demonstrated the importance of bridging the divides

between policy-makers (usually governments and international NGOs),

techno-experts (scientists, business people, engineers), funders (foun-

dations and donor agencies) and communities (local activists and commu-

nity members) (Snyder, 2005). Of course, being global, GANs also aim to

span cultural, racial, ethnic and linguistic diff erences and the diverse values

embedded in these. Many GANs’ success also hinges upon being success-

ful global-regional-national-local boundary spanners.


Table 12.1 Organizations versus partnerships versus networks

Organization Partnership Network

Number of legally One Small to Very large

distinct dominant modest

organizations

Organizing structure Hierarchical Spoke and Multi-hub

wheel

Operating logic Administrating/Managing Coordination Coherence

Operating focus Organization Task System

Participation Closed Highly Loosely

controlled controlled



In many ways GANs are the first truly global assemblies. Unlike some

traditional global boundary spanners that depend upon creating strong

collective identities – such as religious organizations – at least as important

for GANs is the ability to preserve the distinct identities of members. If people coming from the diverse perspectives cannot successfully articulate

and represent them and mobilize the resources of their stakeholder group,

their value to the GAN will be lost.

5. Systemic Change Agents

This is perhaps the most complicated of the attributes and is difficult to

explain or to assess. A system is a set of independent but interrelated

elements comprising a whole with regard to an activity, goal or function.A complex system contains sub-systems, processes and elements (often

referred to as agents). These are like a systems DNA, in that a system

contains the necessary elements for its reproduction and potential trans-

formation – a global system, therefore, contains sub-systems that are com-

plete within themselves, but cannot on their own create a global system.

GANs are bringing together at the global level the diverse agents necess-

ary to make improvements with respect to a specific global commons or

global public goods. The systems around these global commons or global

public goods can be described as underorganized (Brown, 1980), and GANsaim to improve the organizing of them. GANs identify priority actions and

norms to give the systems direction. They set boundary definitions for these

systems to decide who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ – and the boundaries can shift

as the GAN develops. For example, the Partnership for Principle 10 (PP10)

was originally narrowly conceived as a multi-stakeholder complement to

support a particular methodology developed by The Access Initiative (TAI

– a global civil society coalition) for ensuring that people have a voice in the

decisions that aff ect their environment and their communities. However,

PP10 concluded that its real value would be to give life to a much broaderumbrella network for stakeholders using various methodologies to realize

the objective.

The very founding of a GAN indicates that at least some stakeholders

concluded through deliberation (the Global Water Partnership) and/or

through negotiation over conflict (the World Commission on Dams) that

change on a global scale was needed in an approach to an issue. However,

it is also important to distinguish between types of change in terms of

depth. Societal learning and change theory suggests that if key sub-systems

of all of society are being brought together, the potential for change is

much deeper (Waddell, 2005b). The key sub-systems are the social sub-

system represented by community-based organizations (NGOs, religious,




labor), the economic sub-system led by business and the political sub-

system represented by governments and their agencies including inter-

governmental organizations when considering global society. Of course, to

achieve global change is particularly challenging because of the need tobring together the diff erent geographic and organizational levels as well.

Change has been classified as being of three types (Bartunek and Moch,

1987; Nielsen, 1996; Pruitt and Waddell, 2005). ‘First order change’ is

doing more of the same – often understood as scaling up. The very forma-

tion of a GAN indicates that change of at least the second order is being

promoted, since it represents doing something very diff erently. ‘Second

order change’ involves redefining the rules of the game. For example, the

Global Fund is basically a mechanism for funders to pool their resources

and take a more systemic and global perspective to improve coordinationand eff ectiveness (first order would be when one or more funders simply

expands budgets). But financial resource mobilization as the key driver has

not changed and the approach can basically be described as one of reform

under the direction of stakeholders who by and large maintain their tra-

ditional power relationships.

‘Third order change’ involves basic power realignments, re-visioning of

how organizations and people relate to one another, and developing

fundamental change in relationships and organizational boundaries and

roles. The Forest Stewardship Council, for example, represents a thirdorder innovation because it is based in the premise that business, environ-

mentalists and social activists must find a very diff erent way of operating

(by working collaboratively). These distinctions are further elaborated in

Table 12.2. In Table 12.3, indicators of third order change are described at

the individual level.

Other Characteristics

GANs’ missions and goals are complex. They have two levels of outcomes.One is a collectively defined goal that all participating organizations can

buy into. It derives from the fundamental rationale for founding a GAN –

the need to bring together distinctive competencies and resources on a

global scale. This goal may be called a system-organizing goal. The

International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development aims to bring

together diverse stakeholders in creative and strategic ways to make a trade

system that reflects a sustainability imperative. This overarching goal is

seemingly broad, but it must encompass the particular objective that leads

organizations to participate. The corporation Unilever participates in the

Marine Stewardship Council not only to develop sustainable fisheries, but

ones that will also be pro fitable for it. Success in a GAN is determined by





Table 12.2 Types of change in problem-solving initiatives

Criteria First Order Change Second Order Change Third Order Change

Desired ‘More (or less) of Reform Transformation

outcome the same’

Purpose To improve the To change the To address

performance of system to address problems and seize

the established shortcomings and opportunities from

system respond to the a whole-system

needs of stakeholders perspective

Participation Replicates the Brings relevant Creates a

established stakeholders into microcosm of thedecision-making the problem-solving problem system,

group and power conversation in ways with all participants

relationships that enable them to coming in on an

influence the equal footing as

decision-making issue owners and

process decision-makers

Process Confirms existing Opens existing rules Opens issues to

rules. Preserves the to revision. Suspends creation of entirely

established power established power new ways of

structure and relationships; thinking about therelationships promotes authentic issues. Promotes

among actors in interactions; creates transformation of

the system a space for genuine relationships toward

reform of the system whole-system

awareness and

identity; promotes

examination of the

deep structures

that sustain the

system; creates aspace for

fundamental system

change

Indicators More of the same Changes in the way Fundamental shift

tasks are performed, in relationships

while maintaining and the way

the same power stakeholders

relationships interact

Source: From Pruitt and Waddell (2005).



collective commitment to both the overarching goal, and to the support

stakeholders provide each other to reach at least some of their individual

objectives (the second type of goals). This emphasizes the importance of

clearly articulating these two diff erent sets of goals and ensuring reciprocal

and collective commitment to them, while recognizing that both individual-level as well as collective goals can shift (and probably should if the GAN

is achieving third order change) over time.

Size of GANs

The size of the networks is difficult to describe, given their diverse ways of

organizing resources and given that all of them depend upon leveraging

resources from their participants. In terms of direct resources, they are very

modest in size. For the 17 GANs providing staff

size, the average was 25;annual operating budgets start at US$0.63 million and average US$9.9

million per year. However, removing the Global Fund that is huge and

clearly an outlier, the means for the sample are 18 staff and budgets of

US$4.2 million annually.

Impacts of GANs

In terms of achievements or impact, very diverse outcomes and indi-

cators are cited. The Forest Stewardship Council cites US$10 billion in

products traded with its label and 74 million hectares certified. The Access

Initiative points to assessments on the public availability of environmental


Table 12.3 Indicators of third order change for individuals

From To

Seeing others as separate and diff erent, Seeing others as fellow human beings;

defined by their roles, their positions ‘we’re in this together’; and all have

on the issues, or their place in a something important to contribute

hierarchy

Seeing oneself as separate from the Seeing oneself as part of the system

problem situation, looking for others that sustains the situation, accepting

to change in order to resolve it responsibility for changing oneself

Disconnected relationships within Creative relationships energized by

stuck problem systems mutually owned ideas for addressingproblems

Source: Developed by Bettye Pruitt.



information being undertaken for nearly 40 countries. The Global Water

Partnership points to an external review that stated that GWP provides

good value for the donors’ money in promoting sustainable water man-

agement; the Global Reporting Initiative refers to 800 corporations thatare using its framework and 20000 individuals who have joined. The

Microcredit Summit Campaign says that by 2006 it will reach its goal

originally set for 2005 ‘to reach 100 million of the world’s poorest fami-

lies, especially women, with credit for self-employment and otherfinancial

and business services’. For all GANs, putting and keeping their issue high

on the global agenda is crucial. Most still do not identify or measure the

system organizing and cohering eff ects of their network growth or pro-

grammatic activities.

Variety in Governance Structure

There is a great innovation and variety in GANs’ governance structures.

Although some of this variation is undoubtedly the product of personal

idiosyncrasies of key individual leaders and diff erences in the issues they

focus on, the range of governance structures also reflects experimentation.

Given the dictum that structure should follow strategy, it also reflects

experiments with diff erent strategies and theories of change. This latter

point is particularly evident with respect to participation and membership – both associated with obligations and formal decision-making rights like

voting in elections for board members.

In all GANs, membership is primarily associated with organizations and

often with a geographically-based unit (e.g., a national chapter). But about

eight of the 19 GANs see mass membership as a particularly important

strategy. For example, the Youth Employment and Microcredit Summit

Campaigns see increasing participation as a measure of success. These

types of networks openly promote participation and have hundreds of par-

ticipating organizations. Anotherfi

ve of the GANs surveyed have quitesignificant requirements for membership. Any company joining the Ethical

Trading Initiative (ETI) must agree to apply the ETI code of conduct to its

global supply chains; to become a member of PP10 requires making

specific and significant commitments to support its goals.

For a third category of six GANs in the sample, membership is confined

and even closed to a small group. NGOs maintain decision-making control

of Social Accountability International and the International Centre for

Trade and Sustainable Development, The Marine Stewardship Council has

a self-perpetuating board and donors maintain control of financing GANs.

In some hybrid cases, local/regional structures have a mass member strat-

egy where the global structure is closed, as with the Global Compact and




Youth Employment Summit. In both these examples, the formal account-

ability between the two is tenuous.

This all leads to the question of control and issues of stakeholder repre-

sentation. Members are often grouped into categories on the basis of (1) geography and/or (2) stakeholder group. Nine of those surveyed for-

mally aim for representation by the latter method. The Microcredit Summit

Campaign has 15 ‘Councils’, the Marine Stewardship Council has eight

‘issue groups’ in two categories, and the World Water Council has five ‘col-

leges’. Of the 19 GANs in the sample, five were primarily controlled by

NGOs, seven by intergovernmental organizations and another six jointly

by NGOs and business stakeholders. Only one was being driven either

jointly by governments and intergovernmental organizations or by stake-

holders across the public, private and civil society sectors.

12.3 THE WORK OF GANs

As mentioned, realizing global system change is a common activity of

GANs. Perhaps the most basic task of GANs is to put and keep an issue

on the global stage. Transparency International made corruption an issue

when it was difficult to talk about in part because of complicit govern-

ment and involvement of an intergovernmental organization. The YouthEmployment Summit Campaign has made its issue a global one for

governments, businesses and other stakeholders. GANs act as global stew-

ards to promote attention and action for their issues.

One way to understand the work of GANs arises from comparing them

with the dominant traditional global governance mechanism – inter-

governmental organizations. In Oran Young’s terms, intergovernmental

organizations represent collective action strategies because they are the

product of government representatives writing rules and then trying to

apply them. Intergovernmental organizations come from a constitutionallaw model (Young, 1999). GANs, in contrast, represent a social action

strategy because they are the product of stakeholders in an issue experi-

menting to try to develop responses to key issues and then drawing out gen-

eralizable knowledge and action. In a sense, GANs are working through a

common law model.

In other words, rather than taking action based on a theoretical

description of the way things should work, as intergovernmental organ-

izations tend to do, GANs are much more practical and focus on devel-

opment of applied knowledge that is socially embedded with the issue

stakeholders. Since the stakeholders collectively develop the solutions,

they know their role and responsibilities and have agreed upon them.




This is very diff erent from knowledge being developed by experts who

write it up in reports that often do not reflect the system stakeholders’

perspectives. This is why the issue of enforcement is so often pointed to

as necessary (but usually impossible) in traditional intergovernmentalorganization processes. For GANs, it is much less important because the

way they do their work builds stakeholder understanding about, and com-

mitment to, the solutions.

The Marine Stewardship Council focuses on specific fisheries and

connects stakeholders so they can create collective commitment to a

process for managing fisheries. This requires ongoing experimentation.

MSC is now leading multi-stakeholder experiments with issues about

fishing practices’ impact on bird life. This multi-stakeholder strategy is

true even for those GANs (e.g., the International Centre for Trade andSustainable Development) that focus on rules of an intergovernmental

organization (WTO). ICTSD tries to influence trade policy through multi-

stakeholder dialogues, and to build sufficient shared understanding drawn

from those experiments, so that a ‘tipping point’ is reached and the formal

rules are changed.

Therefore, although GANs address a great range of issues, they share

commitment to multi-stakeholder learning and change processes. These

processes can prove highly complementary with the work of governments

and intergovernmental organizations. The Commission on SustainableDevelopment recognized this with its promotion of Type 2 partnerships –

envisioning that these cross-sectoral initiatives, of which a sub-set are

GANs, would provide critical support for implementing international con-

ventions, as TAI/PP10 does. However, to realize this potential requires

much more flexible engagement of stakeholders in defining and revising

conventions.

Similarly, GANs can develop critical innovations to a stage at which

governments can integrate them into their own policies, or individual stake-

holders from a specifi

c sector can take the responsibility for implementingor diff using them. There are numerous examples of standards developed by

the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, the FSC, the Greenhouse

Gas Protocol, the World Commission on Dams and others being adopted

by stakeholders in part or in whole. The Global Reporting Initiative was

faced with government absence – not resistance, but there was ‘no one

home’ in terms of the broad-based transparency of corporations. GRI

moved to fill the vacuum, and over time, expects the government to codify

its work. The promotion of GRI guidelines as an exemplary way for cor-

porations to fulfill their triple bottom line reporting requirements if they

are listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange is an early example of this

possibility.




12.4 CATEGORIZING GAN ACTIVITIES

There are diff erent ways to categorize the various activities GANs are

engaged in. One study of an overlapping set of global cross-sectoral net-works grouped them into three categories linked to diff erent stages in the

public policy cycle: negotiating networks that develop global norms and

standards, coordinating networks that facilitate joint action strategies and

implementing networks that ensure application of agreements of inter-

governmental organization (Witte, Benner and Streck, 2005). This work

requires development of two types of activities. One is developing the tra-

ditional expert and physical science knowledge associated with the issue.

But the other, which is less appreciated, concerns development of the nec-

essary social relationships to address the issue. GANs develop the physicalscience knowledge by developing social relationships to ensure that the

technical knowledge is socially embedded and that there is capacity and

the necessary commitment to act.

Another paper looking at multi-stakeholder partnerships from the

perspective of governance and accountability classified them into diff erent

categories focusing on: the direct delivery of public services and infrastruc-

ture; eff ectively increasing large public resource transfers, particularly trans-

border; and the co-design, promotion and stewardship of new rules for

market and non-market actors. That study also noted that these distinctionsincreasingly are converging and creating hybrids (Zadek, 2005).

We will follow a diff erent classification. As agents for global problem-

solving, GANs’activities can be diff erentiated as being one of five diff erent

types: (1) system organizing; (2) learning/knowledge generation; (3) shared

visioning; (4) reporting and measuring and (5) financing.

The most often reported activity is global system organizing . This

means creating activities such as meetings, information networks and

shared tasks that bring diverse organizations into increasing contact and

joint action. This builds the ability of organizations participating in aGAN to work together, as they become more familiar with one another

and develop their own relationships. This produces growing coordination

and synergies. This in turn leads to new norms, procedures and rules of

varying formality.

Of the 19 GANs surveyed, 17 do this type of systems organizing work. The

two exceptions – BPD for Water and Sanitation and the Ethical Trading

Initiative – focus on learning activities among a modest number of core

stakeholders. Learning means research (usually action research), sharing

knowledge and information, and capacity-building. It also means taking a

systems approach to test rules against policy objectives, going back to review

rules against outcomes and then rewriting them as appropriate. Overall,




including BPD and ETI, 11 GANs identified learning and knowledge

generation as a key activity area.

Twelve GANs identified shared visioning as a major focus. This activity

is closely associated with system organizing, but it is a more categoricallydirected activity and involves collective planning, dialogue and consensus-

building initiatives, as described earlier for GANs’ change agent role.

For ten of the GANs, measuring and reporting is a core activity. For the

Marine and Forest Stewardship Councils, this means a formal system of

certification. For Social Accountability International and Fair Labor

Association, monitoring is important. For TAI/PP10, assessing a country’s

performance is a key tool for developing change.

Four of the GANs have an important financing function. For the

Global Fund, GAVI and GAIN, this is their raison d’être; for theGlobal Water Partnership, financing runs parallel in importance with

other activities.All GANs clearly engage in more than one of these activity areas, and

most also are involved in other forms of work. One particularly important

area that became clear during the research is that of building capacity of

participating organizations to address the mission of the GAN eff ectively.

Mature GANs possess technical physical science knowledge and (often

experience-based) knowledge about change strategies. At a local level,

people see their local organizations are taking action, and do not think of the action as being driven by a foreign one. For the Fair Labor Association

in Cambodia, this meant building the capacity of employers, government

and NGOs to do labor inspections. As an organization comprising employ-

ers and NGOs who are striving to improve standards, the Fair Labor

Association has substantially greater credibility than either one of the

sectors could have on its own. The Fair Labor Association catalyzes the

process and then steps away.

12.5 REALIZING THE POTENTIAL

Given their relatively young and experimental nature, GANs have indi-

vidually not reached their full potential. And as a group, they have hardly

started to interact, so their collective impact in managing the global

commons or providing global public goods has not yet been felt. However,

a few of the GANs appear to be moving into a more advanced develop-

mental stage. Their experiences, conversations with executive officers and

data from other projects suggest some outlines for GANs’ potential ten to

15 years from now. The following description is based on the assumption

that GANs do continue to develop and grow.




Fifteen years from now, a much stronger sense of global citizenship will

likely be shared worldwide, as a complement to our particular ethnic,

national, gender, class, sectoral and professional identities. When people

look back at the rise of global citizenship, GANs will likely have played animportant role. They are stimulating actions that reflect the linkages

between global, regional, national and local concerns, and thereby becom-

ing critical globalizing and integrating agents of diverse viewpoints and

resources. We will shift from an international organizing framework to a

much more global, multi-stakeholder one.

One image of the future of a GAN is as a global membrane that will

attract organizations around the world that are working on a particular

issue. Reluctant participants will be caught up andfind themselves working

within systems structured by GANs. A forest company, for example, maynot participate directly in the Forest Stewardship Council, but it will find

itself working with a market and regulatory framework that are heavily

influenced by the FSC. Within this model, with regard to particular issues,

GANs will be robust global systems of governance; based on accountabil-

ity, knowledge development and coordinated action, off ering open and

easy access to others. They will be sensing and guiding mechanisms for

identifying emergent opportunities and challenges regarding their issues,

and for developing responses.

GANs-as-global-membranes will support resource transfers, productionof public goods and services, co-creation of rules to address global

inequities, wealth development, human security and sustainability. Creating

alignment within their issue system is a key task – they will be negotiators

arbitrators and change agents skilled at smoothing the connections between

diverse interests of their particular issue system. They have the ability to do

this without requiring homogenization because they are agents that support

diversity within globalization with an emphasis on subsidiarity. GANs will

be known for providing a trust and reputation network that facilitates the

flow of knowledge and resources with low transaction costs.Fifteen years from now we will undoubtedly have many more GANs in

specialized issue areas, both because globalization will generate great chal-

lenges, increase the demand for globally coherent and large-scale action, as

well as because the legitimacy and eff ectiveness of GANs and GAN-like

activities will have grown tremendously. The era in which nation-states were

seen as solely responsible for issues of peace and security, for example, will

likely be bypassed by strategies to bring together stakeholders to collabor-

atively address tensions, as can be seen with the recent founding of the

Global Partnership for Prevention of Armed Conflict. Disaster relief

systems that are arising in response to increasing climate variation will be

increasingly integrated into systems with dense ties between all actors such




as through the GAN ProVention, in contrast with the traditional response

systems of government and their contractual relationships with NGOs. In

the field of international finance, new collaborative mechanisms will build

on historic activities such as the Equator Principles.GANs will be weaving new global issue systems of accountability. As

diverse actors work collaboratively in a GAN, they will increase their inter-

dependence and understanding of the global whole. Traditional hierarch-

ical organizations operating locally and globally will find participation in

GANs a highly compelling strategy for realizing their individual objectives.

However, although they will find great rewards from participating from the

inside, they will also find participation requires increased sharing of infor-

mation, transparency and accommodation of diverse goals.

Today’s GANs are still struggling to be global. The challenge has manydimensions – geographic, cultural, ‘glocal’, linguistic and contextual

dimensions of the problems they are addressing. When they are successful,

they may reflect the realization of Friedman’s hypothesis that the world is

flat with fluid connections between the various nodes (Friedman, 2005).

The connections will be particularly robust in four diff erent ways. One is

interpersonal – people will find the networks rich sources of personal re-

lationships in which traditional connections will be less driven by hierarchy

(which will continue to exist within organizations) than by shared interests.

A second level of connections will be local to local – people working on anissue in a community or organization on one part of the planet will easily

connect with people elsewhere in the network. There will be similarly robust

connections across regional and global scales. All will be facilitated by a

network logic that will ease flows of information, resource exchanges and

action between the levels of governance. As a group, GANs will have devel-

oped many inter-GAN contacts that build on ones of today (e.g., between

the GRI and Global Compact). The Youth Employment Summit and

IUCN will find shared interests in developing youth employment initiatives

with an environmental sustainability orientation. The Marine StewardshipCouncil and the Microcredit Summit Campaign will find shared interests

in developing sustainable livelihoods for small fishers. The one-on-one

exchanges will be facilitated by the fact that the GANs have a common

organizing logic and value set. These will help many GANs work together

more ambitiously at the regional and global levels. What at one time were

numerous unassociated networks will increasingly become collective global

governance forums in which the global social contract will be in ongoing

development and implementation. It will function not as a set of distinct

directives from the top down, but as afluid system addressing problems and

opportunities. Gradually, the myriad of certification processes and volun-

tary regulations will become a collaboratively developed system with a few




clear principles and easily accessed interpretations that reflect environmen-

tal, social and economic concerns. With increased alignment among stake-

holders within an issue system, GANs will be dealing with the challenge of

alignment between issue systems and distribution of resources.As a group, 15 years from now, GANs could well be the critical mech-

anisms for addressing global governance gaps of participation, ethics, com-

munications and implementation. Today, the Forest Stewardship Council

is the closest we have to the World Ministry of Forests; the Global Water

Partnership and World Water Councils have a similar role with water.

Collectively, the large-scale health GANs may be seen functioning with the

World Health Organization and governments as key stakeholders rather

than controllers. Stakeholders in an issue system will know how to partici-

pate directly in the appropriate GAN.

12.6 FOUR CHALLENGES FOR REALIZINGPOTENTIAL

Of course, some of today’s GANs will fail to address early developmental

stage challenges and close their doors. Others may be wrapped up when

they consider their mission accomplished. Those that want to realize their

potential will face four particular challenges: (1) measuring their impact onglobal systems; (2) becoming more and more legitimate to all stakeholders,

particularly governments and intergovernmental organizations; (3) devel-

oping more generally accepted global action norms and (4) building more

robust cross-issue inter-GAN linkages.

Today GANs are basically prototyping, planning and building infra-

structure for change. However, they increasingly realize they do not have

the tools to measure their global systemic impact – and it is likely that they

are just now achieving the stage in which this impact can be significant.

GANs are a very elaborate strategy that demands patience and resources,and they still lack even a good system for measuring their impact, describ-

ing their value and guiding their priorities and direction. They must be able

to develop such a global system as well as their competencies in the other

arenas such as learning and resource mobilization, in order to have sub-

stantial impact on their issue and demonstrate positive trends.

At this stage, the challenge is to reach potential and not simply be an

interesting experiment. This means overcoming ostensible competitors – the

most successful and GAN-like way of doing this is to incorporate them. The

GAN must include leaders in various stakeholder arenas, both globally and

locally. By this stage, they must have a sufficient mass of participation that

they have overcome the possibility of being marginalized or ignored.




Governments have an important role in GANs’ scaling-up success.

GANs should be able to point to success where their innovations in regu-

lations or service delivery are integrated into the functioning of local,

provincial, national and international governmental organizations. Whengovernments and a GAN work together well, the impact can be substan-

tial. For example, the Microcredit Summit Campaign credits legislation

that the US government passed as making a critical contribution to shift-

ing its global funding focus to the poorest with a disciplined measurement

framework. However, today more common are stories in which govern-

ments perceive GANs as competitors. Undoubtedly, in some cases, some

government functions can be better managed by GAN affiliates, but within

a GAN, governments retain their clear authority rooted in the ability to

pass and enforce laws.A more subtle problem occurs when governmental organizations take

advantage of GANs without providing them with any resources. For

example, there are several examples of GANs developing certification and

assessment programs that governments tout as their own while refusing

to support the GANs in any way. The reverse problem occurs when a

government becomes involved with a GAN and wants to control it. The

value of a GAN is lost if it simply becomes another intergovernmental

organization.

The governmental challenge has particular cultural and national aspects.GANs are notably most successful in countries in which principles and

capacities for transparency, participation and accountability are most

developed and multi-stakeholder processes valued. This means that some

operations in some arenas (e.g., Russia) are problematic, and other oper-

ations are even more so in countries (e.g., China and Arab nations) where

NGOs are very weak and government seeks to control society much more

broadly. GANs must find ways around these problems if they are to have a

global impact.

Of course, substantial legitimacy comes with having impact. However,because GANs use participatory processes, legitimacy also requires cre-

ating systems of accountability and eff ective governance mechanisms. As a

GAN expands, the number of participants it faces substantially increases

coordinating challenges. To retain agility and avoid simply adding to earlier

structures based on assumptions of fewer participants, GANs at this stage

should review their governance structure and even their issue definition.

The issue definition may involve renewal of mission, strategy or goals.

For example, the Microcredit Summit Campaign recently concluded that it

would reach its original goals in 2006. It retained its poverty mission and

microcredit strategy, but identified two new ten-year goals to provide

renewed focus. The Forest Stewardship Council is currently contemplating




a shift in its governance structure because it wants to engage a broader

number of stakeholders than those originally envisioned – a shift needed to

become the global system in forest sustainability.

Accountability and governance at this stage become even more import-ant because new mechanisms for generating trust must be developed.

The relatively close relationships people enjoyed and that were the basis

for trust in a GAN before it became a truly global system will be increas-

ingly difficult to maintain. Transparency International is experiencing this

now as it pays more attention to accreditation processes for its system of

national chapters.

Strengthening the legitimacy of GANs, the second challenge, requires

ensuring that people see themselves as active participants in GANs, rather

than simply consumers of its activities. Further development of stake-holder engagement mechanisms is required so GANs’ value chain truly

reaches to the local level. More formal stakeholder caucuses supported by

new communications technology would build further support processes

for GANs. The trend toward self-organizing national units for GANs sug-

gests stakeholder groups need to take leadership for organizing these.

Most GANs have some form of stakeholder group definition, and these

distinctions will likely grow in number and activity. If the activity of

stakeholder groups diminishes, it is likely a signal that the GAN is losing

touch with its grassroots or not performing activities that are valued andrelevant for the stakeholders. In voluntary associations such as GANs,

stakeholders do not usually rebel, they just fade away – and with them,

legitimacy.

Increased participation must occur, while avoiding cooptation by any

particular group and achieving balance between being a movement and

being an organization. For example, GRI must avoid being overtaken by

accounting organizations, the Marine Stewardship Council must not be

seen as a handmaiden for the fishing industry and the Global Compact

must not be seen as an agent of business.Third, GANs’ core operating logic is grounded in some distinctive norms

that contrast sharply with the dominant ones in most organizations, norms

that must be further developed. In contrast to the traditional government-

in-charge governance model, GANs stress multi-stakeholder collabor-

ation. Business and civil society are peers, and each has its distinctive

competency and responsibility. Of course, government is responsible for

laws and formally establishing legal frameworks, but business is respons-

ible for economic products and civil society is responsible for community

values and justice. This sort of mutual respect for functions leads to appreci-

ation of interdependence as a key value, in juxtaposition to the tradition of

independence. This is the logic behind the statement that:




The Global Fund (on HIV/AIDS) recognizes that only through a country-driven, coordinated, and multi-sector approach involving all relevant partnerswill additional resources have a significant impact on the reduction of infections,

illness, and death from the three diseases. Thus, a variety of actors, each withunique skills, background and experience, must be involved in the developmentof proposals and decisions on the allocation and utilization of Global Fundfinancial resources. (Global Fund to Fight AIDS, 2005)

However, one suspects that the systemic change challenge this represents –

the contrast with traditional ways of operating – might be insufficiently

appreciated.

The implications of this shift are described in Table 12.4. It emphasizes

the importance of GANs continuing to move in this stage toward a much

more decentralized network. Today, in general, GANs still operate with acentralized global secretariat model, which is not surprising given that the

common mental model they have followed is secretariats of intergovern-

mental organizations. However, that sort of model will not work for the

diversity and mutual accountability that GANs embody. In decentralized

networks, decisions at the global versus local levels are not part of a hier-

archy, but simply diff erent places in a network. Responsibility for common

tasks is distributed to promote ownership throughout the system. There is

high degree of autonomy, with a shift from the coordinating model behind

the secretariat structure to a coherence creation model in the polycentricstructure.


Table 12.4 The emerging global action norms

What is Dying What is Developing

Atomistic (reductionist) as the (Whole) systems thinking

approach

Linear and mechanical mental Circular and biological mental modelsmodels

International structures Glocal

Negotiations as deep change Collaboration for systemic change

Hierarchy as dominant Hierarchy embedded in networks

Power as brute force Power as knowledge/education/information

Accountability as a product of Accountability as the product of

legislation interdependent relationships grounded in

transparent and participatory practices

Source: Waddell (2005b).



The goal is to have interventions that move an issue in a particular direc-

tion through strategically selected activities that cohere the system around

it. A GAN identifies key challenges and opportunities to move an issue

forward, facilitates an initially modest group of stakeholders to addressthem and connects the learning to the rest of the system in strategic and

sustainable ways.

However, this increased participation must be undertaken while main-

taining a very modest scale of organization in any one location. The mental

model of large centralized intergovernmental organizations must be

avoided in favor of dispersed networks, or the GANs will lose their critical

agility and resilience.

The fourth and final challenge of building and strengthening inter-GAN

linkages can be understood as developing GANs’ collective global govern-ance potential. It arises from a common quality of GANs’ public purpose

vision for a world that is socially equitable and just, and environmentally

healthy. It also arises from the other shared qualities – the global norms

discussed previously – that make interaction easy among GANs.

In fact, GANs have already begun interacting and reinforcing one

another’s activities. For example, Transparency International has suc-

ceeded in realizing integration of corruption into the Global Compact’s

principles, and the Global Reporting Initiative has an official collaboration

with the Compact. In an experimental meeting in March 2006 that broughttogether eight GANs to consider collaboration in Guatemala, within two

days, each established opportunities with an average of three others,

they identified a sub-region of the country in which to develop more com-

prehensive and long-term collaboration, and they identified common

capacity-building interests (Waddell and Ritchie-Dunham, 2006).

Inter-GAN relationships appear to hold enormous potential for the

separate GANs to link robustly with one another to foster sustainable third

order ‘deep’ change. Transparency is important in forestry, microcredit can

be an important tool in developing sustainable forestry approaches andyouth is a critical constituency for building a sustainable future for forestry.

These are the types of virtuous cycles that can be created through inter-

GAN activities.

GANs are developing into increasingly complex webs of organizations

that extend both horizontal and vertical relationships (Reinicke and Deng,

2000). Collectively, they represent a collection of public issue networks that

could develop into a much more eff ective global governance framework

than anything envisioned by the traditional intergovernmental model.

Addressing these four challenges will make GANs a much more

central force in global governance. They will be placed in a historic context

as a successor to the national-level social contract negotiation between




labor-government-business that had a particularly potent life in the

decades following World War II. However, given the absence of a global

government, the participants will act much more like peers rather than in

the traditional government-as-governance model. The GANs will be globalsub-systems, and their interlinkages will constitute the global system. This

type of direction can be seen behind PP10s and the Forest Stewardship’s

interest in embracing a much broader constituent group than was initially

envisioned.

12.7 CONCLUSION

Whether GANs will successfully develop their potential as leading struc-tures in a new global governance architecture is still an open question. They

may become epiphenomenal to a reinvigorated set of intergovernmental

institutions, such as the United Nations and those of Bretton Woods.

GANs may prove incapable of engaging a sufficient number of stakehold-

ers in a sufficient number of issue areas for them to become a critical global

organizing logic. GANs may simply become another set of global bureauc-

racies and talk shops. Individually, they may never develop the type of

impact-measuring systems that provide the needed types of feedback. They

may simply become accountable to elites, rather than to citizens globally.Already we see danger signs that some GANs are chasing out the ‘move-

ment’ and ‘deep change’ parts of their missions and activities because it is

easier to flow with the status quo, maintaining sustained antagonism

involves pain and their change competency is insufficient.

However, the norms that are giving birth to GANs are also part of a

much broader set of global trends. The collaborative governance model

they represent is one that is increasingly active at the subnational level as

well, mainly because they are more eff ective than many traditional state-

driven solutions (Zadek, 2005). Perhaps the strongest driver of GANs’development is that they hold the promise of being critical for sustainable

development and human security. GANs may not become the dominant

global player, but neither are they likely to be insignificant.

Realizing GANs’ potential represents a substantial challenge. However,

underestimating the capacity for dramatic change in global governance

would be a mistake. The transformation from empires to a nation-state

global system only occurred with the end of the British Empire after

World War II and the more recent break up of the Soviet one. At the

beginning of the twentieth century, four-fifths of the world’s population

lived under monarchs or empires; as late as 1950, 70 percent of the world

lived under non-democratic rule. Today nation-states are considered






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Waddell, S.J. (2003b), ‘Global action networks: building global public policysystems of accountability’, AccountAbility Quarterly, 20, 19–26.

Waddell, S. (2004), ‘The Global Compact as a new organizational form’, inS. Waddock, M. MacIntosh and G. Kell (eds), Learning to Talk: CorporateCitizenship and the Development of the UN Global Compact, Sheffield, UK:Greenleaf Publishing.

Waddell, S. (2005), Societal Learning and Change: How Governments, Business and Civil Society are Creating Solutions to Complex Multi-stakeholder Problems,

Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf Publishing.Waddell, S. and J. Ritchie-Dunham (2006), An Experiment in Inter-GAN Collaboration: A Report on the GAN-Net/CARE Guatemala Meeting March 9–10, 2006 , Boston, MA: GAN-Net.

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13. Conclusion: partnerships forsustainability – reflections on afuture research agenda

Frank Biermann, Arthur P.J. Mol andPieter Glasbergen

This volume gives evidence of the emergence of partnerships for sustain-

able development as an innovative and potentially influential new type of

governance. There is now a rich practice of partnerships to deal with prob-

lems of transitions towards sustainability, ranging from the local to the

global level. This is mirrored in a growing body of literature that analyzes

and assesses these new societal arrangements.

The various contributions to this volume give numerous insights to

better understand the characteristics and implications of the new part-nership paradigm, as introduced by Glasbergen in the first chapter. Yet

inevitably, they also raise new questions. In this concluding chapter, we

reflect upon the studies and the evidence collected in this volume, draw con-

clusions with respect to the existing practice and study of partnerships, and

lay out a number of research challenges that form core elements of an inter-

disciplinary research program for further study of this phenomenon. We

elaborate in particular on further research questions regarding the emer-

gence and popularity of partnerships, their individual and overall perform-

ance, the interaction among partnerships and between partnerships and

governmental policies, the needs and opportunities for methodological

progress and finally, the politics in partnerships.

13.1 UNDERSTANDING THE EMERGENCE OFPARTNERSHIPS

First of all, despite all research eff orts – in this volume but also beyond

that – we do not yet fully understand the remarkable emergence of the phe-

nomenon of multi-sectoral, multi-stakeholder partnerships in the first

place. If any overall conclusion emerges from the contributions to this

288





done by scholars from the sustainability community, and most academic

debates on what partnerships are and how they function, as well as most of

the case studies assessing partnerships, draw heavily on partnerships for

sustainability. Only few partnership studies exist outside this field. Thismight have introduced a systematic bias in assessments and raises the ques-

tion of whether one can expect similarly growing numbers of partnerships

in other areas, such as social, labor or health policies. And to what extent

can partnerships on these issues learn from – or conversely, inspire –

partnerships for sustainability? Can we expect similarities with respect to

issues of eff ectiveness, accountability and legitimacy, working modes and

arrangements, to name but a few variables? Or are the characteristics of

sustainability partnerships too specific to draw lessons for other areas? A

rich area of comparative research between issue areas lies ahead.In understanding the problem of the emergence of partnerships, it is also

important to further systematize the rich universe of partnerships. Factors

that are likely to account for the emergence of one type of partnerships

might not have much traction in explaining the emergence of other types

of partnerships. The emergence of partnerships at the local and national

level will need to be explained by factors other than the emergence of global

multi-sectoral initiatives. Partnerships that include only private actors

might follow diff erent rationales than partnerships that have been initiated

by governments or by intergovernmental organizations. The emergence of partnerships that focus only on a limited issue will have diff erent dynamics

and outlooks than the emergence of a partnership that covers a wide range

of problems. In sum, in order to better understand the emergence and

development of individual partnerships, and of the entire partnership phe-

nomenon as such, further eff orts in the conceptualization of diff erent types

of partnerships – for example, according to function, scale, scope or state

involvement – seem crucial.

13.2 UNDERSTANDING THE EFFECTIVENESS OFPARTNERSHIPS

Perhaps even more pressing than gaining a better understanding of where

partnerships come from, is the need to advance knowledge on the conse-

quences of individual partnerships and of the entire system of partner-

ships. How do we value these new forms of governance, also in relation to

conventional governmental regulation? A variety of models and criteria to

assess and evaluate partnerships for sustainability has been developed. In

this volume, Gray, Austin and Jennifer Brinkerhoff focus on partnership

evaluations and on designing models or frameworks that assist in doing so.




These and other studies are closely related to more conventional policy

evaluation studies. Other contributions to the present volume apply, explic-

itly or implicitly, such evaluation frameworks or sets of criteria to appraise

partnerships, for example Gunningham in exploring Australian partner-ships and Visseren-Hamakers and colleagues in assessing partnership on

transboundary commodity chains.

A major line in these partnership evaluations relates to their eff ectiveness

regarding environmental or sustainability goals. How eff ective are partner-

ships in reaching their goals, or contributing to more general goals of sus-

tainability? The main emphasis in such investigations is on the factors that

determine the success of partnerships, such as leadership, type and number

of participants, clarity of objectives and a variety of contextual factors. If

broader conclusions can be drawn from the current evaluation studies, itwould seem (1) that partnerships are not a panacea for all kinds of govern-

ance problems related to sustainability; (2) that little systematic knowledge

has been collected on the key factors that determine eff ectiveness of part-

nerships and (3) that it is questionable whether general conclusions on the

eff ectiveness of partnerships for sustainability can be drawn at all, given the

diversity of arrangements in this field.

In theory, we can assess the eff ectiveness of partnerships similar to the

eff ectiveness of public policies at the national level, or of intergovernmen-

tal agreements at the international level. In other words, one could look atthe output of partnerships, that is, what they actually do; at the outcome of

their activities, that is, changes in actor behavior that they eff ect and, finally,

at their impact, that is, changes in eventual target indicators, such as

improvements of environmental parameters. However, these standard tools

of policy analysis pose serious challenges if applied to multi-sectoral,

multi-stakeholder partnerships. First, partnerships are generally limited in

resources, scope and ambition, which makes measurements of their impact

on target indicators difficult, given the ‘background noise’ of other factors.

Second, the specifi

c character of partnerships complicates the attri-bution of changes in actor behavior to the influence of individual partner-

ships, the more so since many partnerships are meant to help implementing

intergovernmental regimes or national policies. This creates the problem of

over-determined research designs in which outcomes can be related at the

same time to an intergovernmental agreement and to specific partnerships.

Such questions could be resolved by in-depth qualitative case studies as a

basis for comparative research programs. These, however, are again nega-

tively aff ected by the rich diversity in the partnership universe, making

generalizations difficult. For example, while some partnerships are meant

to generate and disseminate information, others focus on capacity-building

or the implementation of a policy. In its current usage, the concept of

Conclusion: re fl ections on a future agenda 291



partnerships is vague and general, and has diff erent meanings in diff erent

contexts (Mol, this volume). Various concepts are in use that all refer, in

one way or the other, to the phenomenon of partnerships. Part of the future

research agenda, partially but by no means conclusively addressed by thecontributions in this volume, is thus the sorting out of concepts and the

development of better and more precise definitions and classifications in

light of their theoretical underpinnings. For example, are global action

networks (Waddell, this volume) or private governance arrangements

(Pattberg, this volume) variations of partnerships? If so, what is then not a

partnership? Lack of conceptual clarity as well as extreme variety of empiri-

cal phenomena make structured and focused comparisons between func-

tionally diff erent partnerships difficult, if not impossible.

One obvious yet crucial distinction is between partnerships at the localand national level, on the one hand, and those at the transnational, if not

global level. National partnerships, which are at the center, for example, in

the contributions of Gunningham and Derick Brinkerhoff (both this

volume), often partly replace or complement conventional state insti-

tutions in coping with sustainability issues. They generally function within

relatively clear institutional structures and established relations with state

agencies at national or local levels. For instance, Gray emphasizes the role

states play in catalyzing partnerships at the national level and in safe-

guarding wide representation and a fair process. Transnational partner-ships, in contrast, emerge often in an institutional void, deal with issues and

agendas that have hardly been picked up by conventional governance

systems, and lack a ‘sovereign’ body that can intervene. Thus, national and

transnational partnerships face diff erent sets of questions, criteria and

problems. While there might be good reasons to refer to both as ‘partner-

ships’, in assessments, evaluations and designs of partnerships it seems

important to distinguish between these two meta-types of partnerships.

Taking this discussion together, the diversity of the partnership phenome-

non requires further conceptual eff

orts in increasing our understanding onthe role and relevance of each individual partnership.

13.3 UNDERSTANDING THE RELEVANCE OFPARTNERSHIPS

This holds, too, for the relevance of the entire partnership phenomenon,

that is of the aggregate of partnerships as a new mechanism of local,

national and global governance. Are partnerships a mere add-on to

national and international governmental policies, in the spirit of ‘imple-

mentation partnerships’ that was seen by many as a key rationale behind




partnerships at the World Summit on Sustainable Development? Or do we

observe a fundamentally new and important phenomenon that is changing

the context in which national and international politics are being con-

ducted? What is the overall relevance of the partnership phenomenon?Will it remain here to stay, because its development is strongly related to

wider developments of globalization, growing complexities and shrinking

national sovereignty? Will it further develop into a main type of govern-

ance, be it in the form of global action networks (Waddell, this volume), or

any other form that resembles several of the specific characteristics of part-

nerships? Or will it – after two or three decades – prove to have just been a

footnote in history, not really deserving a place among the major govern-

ance structures that have been developed over time? While the concept of

partnerships may be fashionable and disappear after some time, mostauthors in this volume stress that the specific characteristics of partnership

forms of governance are less volatile. In two decades the concept of part-

nerships might sound outdated and have disappeared from the textbooks

and vocabulary of governmental authorities, yet many argue that the

governance modes that are included in the partnership literature could

prove to be more inert.

How can we assess these two diff erent scenarios and appraisals, of part-

nerships as a transformation or rather as a footnote of world history? If we

would take financial flows as an indicator of the relevance of partnerships,the current relevance would be marginal. At the 2002 World Summit on

Sustainable Development, US$250 million had been committed to all part-

nerships agreed around that time. This amount has increased since then,

but it is unclear to what extent these funds are new and additional or

rather a reclassification of existing streams of official development assis-

tance and other sources of public funding (Biermann et al., this volume).

In any case, the total funding available for the hundreds of sustainability

partnerships is likely to be small if compared with the financial volume of

publicfi

nancial mechanisms, from the World Bank to bilateral assistanceprograms.

But if we focus on the degree to which partnerships aff ect the course

of political aff airs, a diff erent assessment emerges. For instance, some

partnerships develop new mechanisms that venture into rule-making and

standard-setting in areas that are little or not regulated by governments.

The most prominent examples are probably the Forest Stewardship

Council and the Marine Stewardship Council, which arguably have evolved

into influential private governance arrangements in their respective issue

areas (Pattberg, this volume). Other partnership arrangements are power-

ful ideational innovators that define or redefine existing discourses on

how problems are framed and what solutions are available and acceptable.




The World Commission on Dams is a prominent example. And to give

another example: in various commodity chains, we see the blossoming of

certification and labeling schemes, each related to distinct networks or part-

nerships. If assessed against their ability to change the course of politicalaff airs, partnerships are relevant today, as they embrace new forms of

governance that are inserted into political practices.

These various forms of governance arrangements put questions of

meta-governance on the table. How are diff erent competing governance

arrangements concluded within the partnership mode, but also between

partnerships and conventional state-based forms of governance? What

formsof meta-governance are currently inplace, and are weinneedof more

refined systems of meta-governance? For instance, in the example of com-

modity chains, is the market or consumer demand a desirable andlegitimatemeta-governance arrangement that in theendwill distinguish themain part-

nerships or governance arrangements?

Taken together, conflicting bodies of evidence exist when it comes to

ascertaining the overall relevance of the new phenomenon of multi-sector

and multi-stakeholder partnerships. More research, both conceptually and

empirically, is needed.

13.4 UNDERSTANDING PARTNERSHIPINTERLINKAGES

Partnerships operate in a context that is populated and shaped by inter-

national and national agreements, policies and programs, as well as by other

partnerships. This raises the question of partnership interaction, much

similar to the question of regime interlinkages that has produced a number

of major comparative studies in international relations research in recent

years. At a more theoretical level, the problem of interplay, as analyzed in

the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change researchprogram, is also part and parcel of the partnership research agenda.

This relates, first, to the interaction between diff erent partnerships. Many

partnerships operate in the same issue area, such as protection of forests.

Others work on similar issues but in diff erent regions. To make it even more

complex, the same NGO or business may be active in diff erent partnerships

that are active on more or less the same sustainability issue. In some cases,

one could even speak of partnership competition between diff erent initi-

atives for funding sources, or for legitimacy and recognition of their specific

interpretation of sustainability, for example in the competition between

eco-labels. There is hardly any research yet that conceptualizes and empiri-

cally analyzes this new type of institutional interaction, asking questions




on what sustainability aspects partnerships focus on, what their strategies

are and what the impacts are of competing activities and arrangements on

transformations of governance structures in specific markets.

Equally important is to better understand the relationship between multi-sectoral partnerships and traditional forms of policy-making, notably

intergovernmental and national agreements, policies and programs. While

partnerships may be seen as an answer to failures or shortcomings of con-

ventional forms of governance in a complex globalized world, they still

function within a world polity in which states are key building blocks. Even

though the monopolistic position of public actors in national and inter-

national governance has deteriorated, states do remain essential, and several

authors have stressed that partnerships cannot fully replace states. And yet,

at the same time, states find a hard time coping with partnerships. Amonggovernments and state authorities, one can witness confusion, hesitation

and hostility with respect to the rapid emergence and functioning of part-

nerships. States have generally little idea of how to relate to partnerships,

especially when partnerships move beyond national borders.

Even though partnerships might benefit from the relative powerlessness

of governments in some areas, their success remains dependent on govern-

mental actors. First, the success of many partnerships is closely connected

to specific government policies and measures. For example, overcapacity in

fishery and illegal fishery can hardly be dealt with by private initiativesalone. The same holds for sustainable forestry, which depends on strict land

use planning and a strong policy against illegal logging. However, up to

now, governments often fail in developing these necessary back-up policies;

too often they are part of the problem that partnerships address. Second,

governments are crucial in their meta-governance role. Yet here also they

often remain absent. Because governments take a pragmatic approach to

partnerships – some governments even use partnerships to protect their

own economic interests – they have not been given a logical place in public

governance yet. The result is much duplication of eff

orts, disjointed actionsand incoherent partnership programs (Glasbergen, this volume).

In other words, the relation between partnerships and wider architec-

tures of intergovernmental institutions, including the question addressed

by Mol in this volume on how to bring the state back in, remains unclear

and an important subject of the partnership research agenda.

13.5 IMPROVING THE ANALYTICAL TOOLBOX

The diversity of the partnership phenomenon poses serious methodological

challenges for social science analysis. Yet on the other hand, we believe that




this methodological challenge could make also partnership research a

hotbed of methodological innovation and inspiration for the larger com-

munity of theorists and analysts in the social sciences.

First, the partnership phenomenon has attracted scholars from a largevariety of disciplines. Diff erent discourses have evolved in diff erent schol-

arly communities in recent years, as evidenced in this volume, and it is only

recently that these diff erent streams started to come together in the form of

a more coherent research community, if not research program. Academics

from public administration, business administration and management,

political science, sociology and economics all made contributions to this

emerging field of partnership studies. Looking at this volume, it appears

that organization theory best handles questions related to collaborative

arrangements (Part 1), public administration theory and policy theories arevaluable in addressing questions related to partnerships as governance

mechanisms (Part 2), and political science and sociology are key in dealing

with questions related to partnerships and the liberal-democratic govern-

ance structure (Part 3).

On the one hand, conceptual confusion, as noted above, is one – perhaps

unsurprising – consequence of this multidisciplinary, and thus terminologi-

cally multilingual, community of scholars and practitioners. Yet on the

other hand, we believe that this situation off ers a chance that cannot be

underestimated. Given the complex character of partnerships, this newphenomenon might well evolve into an empirical object of analysis that

brings together the various social science disciplines and helps them to

translate, and possibly integrate, their various approaches, methods and

languages. The partnership phenomenon could thus become a method-

ological or conceptual tool for more multidisciplinary research among the

social sciences, with a strong potential for some degree of disciplinary con-

vergence. While we should not exaggerate this potential – as other cross-

disciplinary concepts in the field of sustainability have shown, such as the

concept of ‘risk’ – it does open up the various disciplines to each other andhelps the development of common ground and of a common language.

A second problem that could be turned into methodological progress is

grounded in the sheer number of partnerships. Probably more than 400

transnational partnerships are active in the field of sustainability govern-

ance alone, and some basic data on many of them is available at websites

maintained by the United Nations. This number is significantly higher than

the standard numbers given for multilateral environmental agreements,

which have led to a series of database projects in recent years. In other

words, the partnership phenomenon is a promising example of a mech-

anism of transnational governance that is well suited for experimentation

and exploration of large-n comparative study programs. These large-n




study programs will be able to shed light on important factors that single

cases studies, or limited small-n comparative case study programs, cannot

sufficiently assess. For example, correlations between various types of

actors, partnership designs, partnership functions and partnershipperformance for all 400 existing UN partnerships can allow for the gener-

ation, and at some later stage, testing, of hypotheses regarding the role

and relevance of transnational partnerships for sustainable development

(cf. Biermann et al., this volume). Naturally, some caution is in order.

Large-n investigations are limited in their explanatory power and require

precise definitions of partnerships for their particular project. They also

face difficulties in coping with the diversity of contexts in which partner-

ships operate. Yet large-n study programs also help to put existing qualita-

tive research into context, and assist in generating hypotheses and insightsthat are not possible based on case study research alone. In any case,

because of the large number of empirical cases, the partnership phenome-

non opens up new avenues for the conceptual and methodological devel-

opment and analysis of databases of governance mechanisms that were

previously not available.

13.6 THE POLITICS IN PARTNERSHIPS

Finally, the partnership phenomenon aff ects core questions of politics and

political theory. The emergence of partnerships is often seen as a reaction

to deficits in accountability and legitimacy of traditional public policy, from

national governmental policies to intergovernmental agreements. Yet the

extent to which partnerships in fact close the ‘participation gap’ in global

governance is debatable. Some studies come to a rather cautious conclusion

(Biermann et al., this volume). In any case, partnerships raise serious ques-

tions of their own accountability and legitimacy. In conventional govern-

mental policies, legitimacy, accountability and democracy have beeninstitutionalized, even though a need remains for continuing investigations

in the shortcomings of state-based institutions in providing the required

levels of legitimacy, accountability and democracy. However, with respect to

partnerships, issues of legitimacy, accountability and democracy are much

less institutionalized in fixed procedures, rules and regulations. In this

volume, for example, Meadowcroft analyzes from a political science per-

spective the kind of research and evaluative questions that can be put

forward when partnership modes of governance take over from conven-

tional state governance. More empirically, the contributions of Austin and

Jennifer Brinkerhoff , among others, use legitimacy and accountability in

their frames for evaluating partnerships. Derick Brinkerhoff illustrates how




in developing country settings these questions are very much related to the

good governance agenda, which is so strongly emphasized now in inter-

national cooperation eff orts.

Partnerships are not merely mechanisms to advance the common good.They are also as much institutional arrangements that distribute values and

resources. In other words, they are both sources of power to the extent that

they are eff ective, and arenas for power-based conflicts on the distribution

of values and resources. These core questions of the analysis of politics have

thus far been marginalized in research on partnerships: who is to win and

who loses in constructing and implementing partnerships for sustainability?

How is power distributed in partnerships, and on what kind of resources is

it based? How are the benefits of partnerships distributed among various

groups in society, or various regions and places, both among the partnersand beyond? While Mol and Meadowcroft (this volume) address these

issues on a more theoretical level, Visseren-Hamakers and colleagues (this

volume) provide a more empirical illustration of the relevance of such

assessments in explaining partnership outcomes. The concept of partner-

ship might suggest equality in power and distribution of gains and losses,

yet the contributions to this book make clear that in that sense the concept

is highly ideological. As with all governance arrangements, power and pol-

itics are as much dimensions of partnerships as cooperation and consensus.

This calls for a wider research agenda on the politics of, and in, partnerships.

13.7 TO CONCLUDE

In sum, while this volume has brought together important new insights

about a new and fascinating phenomenon of national and global sustain-

ability governance, it also became evident that we are rather at the start

than at the end of the journey. While there is a more general understand-

ing on why partnerships have emerged so massively in sustainabilitygovernance, there is yet no coherent and convincing theory on why specific

partnerships emerge at a specific point in time. Nor is it fully understood

how eff ective individual partnerships are, and how variation in eff ectiveness

of individual partnerships can be measured and explained. At a more

general level, the debate on the overall relevance of the partnership phe-

nomenon is still not closed. Are partnerships a marginal phenomenon

around the turn of the millennium, triggered by political motives or result-

ing from political deadlock and embarrassment at the World Summit on

Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002? Or do we observe a

more general transformation of the way in which politics are conducted,

with a diminishing role for the state and intergovernmental regimes and




organizations and a more pronounced role for partnerships between public

and private actors; or just between private actors, as a new, ‘Type 2’, mode

of global and national governance?

An interesting research agenda is in front of us. Careful theoretical andempirical research will shed more light on these questions, which are impor-

tant from two perspectives: of solving the pressing environmental govern-

ance problems of our time, and of theory advancement in the social

sciences. With respect to the latter, the partnership phenomenon – ubiqui-

tous, divers and colorful as it is – has the potential to evolve into a breed-

ing ground for the exploration and development of new approaches,

methods and theories in the larger field of social analysis.






Index

abilities, of partnership actors 31, 33,110–11

accountabilityand corruption 106and democracy 197, 200–201, 206,

208

global action networks (GANs) 279,282

and governance 74–9, 99, 100, 239Madagascar case study 103–4, 108and partnerships 109–10, 297–8state role 230–31targets 78

action focal points 51, 52, 53actors 6–7, 31, 33, 109–11, 140, 175–6,

252–3Africa 130, 138–9, 180, 185–6, 225, 249

Agenda 21 3, 18, 250Agrawal, A. 93, 111agriculture 58–9, 115–16, 117–25, 243,

253–5see also vegetable growing

agro-food partnerships 12, 13see also coff ee sector

air pollution 243Amnesty International 43analysis of interconnected decision

areas (AIDA) 37

anchoveta case study 140, 146, 155–67Andonova, Liliana 243, 252Annan, Kofi 218Anti-corruption Council 109appreciation, as leadership task 34–5aquaculture

anchoveta case study 155–62developments in 144–6partnership analysis 162–7registered agreements 243shrimp case study 146–55

sustainability of 144–7Aquaculture Certification Council

(ACC) 149

Arab countries 266Arts, Bas 22, 140Asia 249Asian Development Bank 148Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean

Development and Climate 255

Association for the Management of Protected Areas (ANGAP) 107,110–11

Audubon Society 54–5Austin, James 21, 69, 290, 297Australia 115–16, 117–30, 251Australian Conservation Foundation

(ACF) 117–19, 121, 125, 126, 128Austria 185Aveda Corporation 180, 181awareness raising 10

Bäckstrand, K. 225backward criticism 225–6, 227Bangladesh 221Barrados, M. 76Bartsch, S. 252Bass, Stephen 174, 188BATNAs (better alternatives to a

negotiated agreement) 43Bauman, Z. 218Beck, Ulrich 208, 216, 221, 229, 233

behavioural forces 50, 52, 53Belgium 185Ben & Jerry’s 181Bendell, J. 140, 221, 229Benin 138–9Bhutan 138–9BIANCO (Anti-corruption

Independent Office) 106, 109Biermann, Frank 22biodiversity 243bipartite partnerships 133

Blowers, Andy 226Body Shop, The 181Bolivia 186

301



boundaries, crossing 268–9Brazil 30, 55–6Bringing the State Back In (Evans,

Rueschmeyer and Skocpol) 214,215Brinkerhoff , Derick 21, 86–7, 292,

297Brinkerhoff , Jennifer 21, 290, 297British Petroleum (BP) 30Building Partnerships for Development

in Water and Sanitation (BPD)264, 267, 276

bureaucracy 9Buse, K. 251, 253

businessand accountability 201and civil society 164–5, 173collaboration motivation action

(CMA) framework 50–51, 52democracy in 197and global action networks (GANs)

270, 282goals, achieved through partnership

175and governance 3, 6, 98, 107–8, 176

and governments 197, 219, 221, 232motivation 50, 52, 54, 56, 58–9, 60neighborhood environmental

improvement plans (NEIPS)123–5

and NGOs (non-governmentalorganizations) 117–19, 126, 173,175, 221

as non-state actors 175and partnerships 177–90, 246, 252,

253–5

and representation 199shrimp case study 149, 153business-opportunity-driven

motivation 50, 52, 54, 56, 58–9, 60bycatch 147, 158

Canada 251capabilities 64

see also capacity, of partnershipscapabilities-driven motivation 51, 53,

56–7

capacity, of partnerships 31, 33, 64,110–11, 245–6capitalism 226

CARE International 62–3Caribbean 138–9case studies

anchoveta 140, 155–67coff ee 54–5, 59, 66cotton 119–22, 125, 126, 127, 128,

131dams 82–4farming 58–9forestry 59–60, 184–90governance 73–4, 79Madagascar 101–12neighborhood environmental

improvement plans (NEIPS)

123–5, 126, 128objectives 7promotional campaigns 62–3rainforest 55–6, 60–61, 63salinity 117–19shrimp 140, 146–55transnational environmental

partnerships 176, 178–83, 188–9vegetable growing 122–3, 125, 126,

127, 128, 131, 134waste management 53–4

categories of partnerships 219–22centralization 102CERES (Coalition for

Environmentally ResponsibleEconomies) 176, 178–83, 188–9

certification schemes 216Chan, Man-san 22Chandra, K. 81change, types of 270, 271, 272Cheema, G.S. 76chemicals 243

children 253–5Chile 247Chimalapas Coalition 36China 221, 266citizen participation

as constraint 109and democracy 196–7, 200, 204and governance 99, 100Madagascar case study 106–8trends in 94–7see also civil society

citizenship 278civil societyand business 164–5, 173

302 Index



and global action networks (GANs)282

and governance 98, 175

international 206–7Madagascar case study 106–8marine biodiversity case studies

151–3, 158–60, 162–3and partnerships 177–90, 221–2role of 164–5and state 208, 229transactional model 142see also citizen participation;

NGOs (non-governmentalorganizations)

classification of partnerships219–22Climate Action Network (CAN) 30climate change 243COBA (Communautê de Base) 101,

103, 104coff ee sector 12, 54–5, 59, 174cognitive influence, of transnational

environmental partnerships 183,184, 186–7, 188–9, 190–91

collaboration 5–9, 32–4, 50–61, 70,

196, 250see also partnershipscollaboration motivation action

(CMA) framework 50–57collaborative governance model see

global action networks (GANs)co-management 97, 107command and control regulation 94–6,

134commitment 164Common Code for the Coff ee

Community (4C) 174communication 64community groups 97, 102, 123–5companies see businesscompetition 12–14, 79–84complexity 128compliance-driven motivation 42–3,

50, 52, 56, 60CONAIE (Confederation of

Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) 42

Conca, K. 229conceptual criticisms 223–4conflict 39–41, 79–84, 108, 226

consensus 250Conservation Breeding Specialist

Group (CBSG) 35, 37

Conservation International (CI) 54–5,59, 63, 66constraints, on actors 109–10consumer pressure 126, 163Consumers’ Association of Penang

(CAP) 151context, situational 163, 205control-oriented policies 94–6, 101,

134convening, as leadership task 35–7cooperation 16, 142, 162–3, 175,

195–6, 284cooperative environmental governance196

cooperative management regimes195

coordinating networks 276corporatist governance 198, 202corruption 99, 100, 105–6, 108, 109Corruption Perception Index 99cosmopolitan democracy 206, 207cosmopolitan state 233

Costa Rica 138–9costs 187–8cotton, case study 119–22, 125, 126,

127, 128, 131Cotton Australia 121coverage enlargement 11credibility 181crisis, as partnership impetus 127–8,

129criticisms, of partnerships 223–31cross-sector partnerships 220–22, 223,

268–9see also global action networks(GANs)

cross-sectoral social partnerships(CSSPs) 224

cultural model 222

dams, case study 82–4Davies, A.R. 217, 225, 226decentralization 102, 108, 109, 283deconcentration 102, 109

Dedeurwaerdere, T. 256deliberative democracy 203–6, 207–8,209–10

Index 303



democracyand accountability 103–4, 197,

200–201

criticisms of 196–8, 226–7deliberative 203–6, 207–8, 209–10and eff ectiveness 210–12and governance 99, 102, 202, 230–31increasing 80, 208–9, 210–12and participation 196–7, 200, 204,

206, 208and partnerships 206–8, 209–10,

297–8and power 197, 200, 206, 209and representation 196, 199–200

and state role 230–31Democracy and Freedom Audits 99Denmark 185desertification 242, 243developed countries 45, 138–40, 145,

165–6, 250–52see also Northern countries

developing countriescommand and control regulation 94–6fisheries 145leadership role 45, 250–52

and partnerships 246–7, 248–9promotion of sustainabledevelopment 96

relationship with developedcountries 138–40, 165–6

state role 227user participation 94, 96–7see also Southern countries

development projects, partnerships in138–40

devolution of authority 198, 201–2

DGEF (Malagasy Directorate of Water and Forests) 102, 104, 109,110, 111

direct environmental impact 247–8direction setting phase 33, 37–43disaster relief 278–9discourse

concept of 143deliberative democracy 203–6,

207–8, 209–10influence of transnational

environmental partnerships 183,184, 187, 188–9, 190–91in partnerships 163

discursive democracy 206, 207–8diversity 268–9Doane, Deborah 178

donor-recipient relationships 138–9,165–6drought 242, 243Dryzek, John 207, 208Dubiel-Gauchet hypothesis 80

Earth Island Institute 174earth system governance 222Eckersley, Robyn 204, 208ecological modernization 222economic factors 13–15, 161, 164,

187–8, 197, 244ecosystem approach 156, 163eff ectiveness 7, 71–4, 84, 210–11, 278,

289, 290–92Ehrenfeld, J. 180El Niño 155–6El Triunfo Biosphere Preserve 54Ellinger, A.D. 70Ellinger, A.E. 70energy 242, 243Environment, Water and Forests,

Ministry of (MinEnvEF),Madagascar 101, 103, 106, 110environment and natural resources

(ENR) policies 93, 94–100,101–12, 185–6

Environment Protection Agency 123environmental community, insights

into 186environmental impact 148, 247–8environmental impact analysis (EIA)

148

environmental management 73–4, 216environmental partnerships seepartnerships

Environmental Protection Agency(EPA) 73–4

equality 200, 203, 217–18Equator Principles 279Eseje Community (Peru) 60–61, 63Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) 264,

266–7, 273, 276Eurep Gap certification system 150,

155, 164European Union (EU) 130, 138–9, 152,216, 244, 249

304 Index



Evans, P.B. 214, 215, 231, 232external shocks 127–8, 129Extractive Industries Transparency

Initiative 275Exxon Valdez 180, 190

facilitation 40–41Fair Labor Association (FLA) 264, 277farming 58–9, 115–16, 117–25, 243,

253–5see also vegetable growing

Federal Advisory Committee Act 36finance

and accountability 76

and democracy 197global action networks (GANs) 277and partnerships 124–5, 131, 244,

245–7, 293‘first order change’ 270, 271fisheries 19, 144–7, 155–7, 158flows, as organizing principles 228focus, of partnerships 205Food and Agriculture Organization

(FAO) 148, 149, 157, 185Forest Alliance 12

Forest Sector Observatory (OSF) 102,104, 106, 109Forest Service (Madagascar) 101–10Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)

case study 184–90collaborative advantage 8future potential 278, 280, 281–2governance 293ideational environment 183innovations adopted by governments

275

linkages 285NGO-market partnerships 37, 140and regulation 182results 272role of 10, 176–7, 263, 264, 277and systemic change 270as a transnational environmental

partnership 173–4forestry

case studies 59–60, 101–8, 160,184–90

economic power 13legitimacy 12private sector associations 108

registered agreements 243sustainability 19

formal agreements, and trust 9

forward criticism 224–5framing 32–3, 181, 183, 184, 186–7France 185, 251Freedom House 99free-riders 120, 128, 132Friedman, T.L. 279Friends of the Earth 151, 154funding 51, 53, 56, 124–5, 244future research 65–6, 191, 224, 233,

288–99

Garcia-Johnson, R. 230GCF (Gestion Contractualisée desForêts) 101, 105, 107

GELOSE (Gestion Locale Sécurisée),Madagascar 101, 105

General Motors (GM) 181Georgia-Pacific 59–60Germany 185, 216, 251Gerrefi, G. 230Gibson, C.C. 111Glasbergen, Pieter 22, 30, 49, 74, 138,

218, 288Global Aquaculture Alliance (GAA)149

global action networks (GANs)activities 276–7challenges 280–85characteristics 265–74current networks 263–5definition 261future potential 277–80, 285–6historic development 261–2

as partnerships 292, 293work of 274–5Global Alliance for Improved

Nutrition (GAIN) 264, 277Global Alliance for Vaccines and

Immunization (GAVI) 264, 277global citizenship 278global civil society 229, 230–31Global Compact 264, 267, 273, 282,

284global convergence 250

global covenants 229global demand 161Global Environment Facility 10

Index 305



global environmental governance 217global environmental politics 176global environmental regimes 37

Global Exchange 55, 66Global Fund to Fight AIDS,Tuberculosis and Malaria (GlobalFund) 264, 266, 270, 277, 283

global government 261global issue networks 229, 262global multi-stakeholder networks see

global action networks (GANs)Global Partnership for Prevention of

Armed Conflict 278Global Partnership to Eliminate River

Blindness 266Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)CERES as 189coverage enlargement 11innovations adopted by governments

275interaction 284legitimacy 282results 273role of 10, 264, 267as a transnational environmental

partnership 174Global Sustainability Partnership241–2

global system organizing 276Global Water Partnership 263, 264,

267, 269, 273, 277, 280globalization 222, 261goals 270–72governance

and accountability 74–9, 99, 100,239

and business 3, 6, 98, 107–8, 176case studies 73–4, 79, 101–8and civil society 98, 175competing interests 79–84components 68conflict 79–84contradictions 255definition 97, 262and democracy 91–100, 198, 202,

211–12, 240eff ectiveness 71–4, 224–5

framework 69–71, 98, 273–4global 29, 175–6, 222, 262–3,279–80, 284–6

good governance 69–71, 97–100‘governance without government’ 19,

262

and governments 15–20, 97–100,198, 202, 211–12, 240implementation deficit 240, 244–9improving 108–12interdependencies 84and legitimacy 74–9, 239liberal-democratic governance

structure 15–20measurement 99new models of 227–8participation deficit 240, 249–55

and partnerships 9–15, 69–71, 85–7,239–42and private sector 98, 107–8, 198,

202, 229, 292as process 16, 19as project 15, 19regulation deficit 240, 242–4trade-off s 84–5

‘governance without government’ 19,262

governing environmental flows 222

‘government as networks’ 262governmentsand accountability 201and business 197, 219, 221, 232and civil society 164, 208constraints upon 6, 109–10and democracy 202, 206, 211eff ectiveness 289failures of 242–4and global action networks (GANs)

270, 275, 281, 282

and governance 15–20, 97–100, 198,202, 211–12, 240implementation phase 44and industry associations 122–3and NGOs (non-governmental

organizations) 221, 232and partnerships 5, 15–20, 173–4,

185, 224–5, 253–5, 295policies 3, 12, 94–6role of 45, 98–9, 131–3, 151–3,

252–3

see also stateGray, Barbara 21, 31, 33, 49, 54, 64,69, 290, 292

306 Index



Gray, T. 225green markets 126Greenhouse Gas Protocol 275

Guatemala 284Gunningham, Neil 22, 291, 292

Hagedoorn, J. 44Hale, T.N. 243, 246, 247Hancock, T. 226Heiploeg 149–50Held, David 207, 229HIPC (Highly Indebted Poor

Countries) Initiative 107Hirschman, A.O. 80–81

Huber, Joseph 216

identity 81image 43, 53–4, 55, 126–7

see also reputationIMF (International Monetary Fund)

206, 219, 227impact 111, 223, 247–8, 272–3, 280–82,

291implementation deficit in governance

240, 244–9, 255

implementation phase 33, 43–4implementing networks 276In the Company of Partners (Murphy

and Bendell) 221incentives 131–2inclusiveness 217India 42indigenous peoples 253–5Indonesia 140, 147–55, 164, 251, 252industrialized countries 250–52

see also developed countries

industry 253–5industry associations 119–23influence 183–90information, dissemination of

case studies 102–3, 189and good governance 99, 100governments’ role 211partnership role 10, 134, 181

Institutional Dimensions of GlobalEnvironmental Change 294

institutional entrepreneurship 43–4

institutional forces 33institutionalization of responsibility 16institutionalization phase 33

institutions 108, 140–41integrative solutions 142, 162–3integrative stage, of collaboration 57,

59, 60interaction 38, 70, 284, 294–5interactive governance 196inter-firm cooperation 175inter-governmental organizations

(IGOs) 252, 253–5, 261, 267, 274internal brokering 41–3International Centre for Trade and

Sustainable Development(ICTSD) 264, 267, 270, 273, 275

International Committee of the Red

Cross (ICRC) 261International Development Bank(IDB) 42

international environmentalgovernance see globalenvironmental governance

International Federation of Red Crossand Red Crescent Societies(IFRC) 261

International Fishmeal and Fish OilOrganisation (IFFO) 158–9

International Food Policy ResearchInstitute 247International Institute for

Environment and Development(IIED) 188

International Labour Organization(ILO) 261

International Monetary Fund (IMF)107

international partnerships 138–40,206–8, 248–52, 266–7

see also global action networks(GANs); partnershipsInternational Principles for

Responsible Shrimp Farming 149,150

‘international regimes’ 262international relations (state) 175–6international sectoral relationships

141, 142–3, 153–5, 160–62,165–7

International Tropical Timber

Agreement 182inter-organizational networks 267–8interpersonal relations 279

Index 307



intersectoral partnerships 140, 141,142–3, 151–3, 159–60, 162–5, 221

intervention 231

investment 178–83Ireland 82issue management alliances 221Italy 251

Jäniske, Martin 216Janoff , S. 35Japan 251Johannesburg Partnerships see UN

World Summit on SustainableDevelopment (Johannesburg

2002) joint environmental policy-making195

Junior League of Mexico 53–4

Keller, S.B. 70Khagram, Sanjeev 22Kidd, S. 79Klijn, E.-H. 224–5knowledge see learningKyoto Protocol 255

labelling schemes 216Laff erty, William 195land 243law

command and control regulation95–6

as constraint 109developed by private rule-making

174and good governance 99, 100

Madagascar case study 101–2, 108marine biodiversity case studies 148,149, 157

see also regulation; rulesleadership 31, 34–44, 45, 250–52, 253learning

and democracy 205global action networks (GANs)

276–7and partnerships 64, 134, 189social 183, 184, 186–7

least developed regions 248–9see also developing countrieslegal framework see law

legitimacyglobal action networks (GANs) 278,

281, 282

and governance 74–9, 239interdependencies 84and partnerships 189, 297–8process of 11, 12–15state role 230–31of sustainable development 29targets 77–8

Leroy, P. 20Levy, M.A. 252liberal internationalism 206–7liberal-democratic governance

structure 15–20Limits to Competition (Petrella) 218Linder, S.H. 218, 220linkages 41, 284, 294–5literature concerning partnerships

216–22, 223–33, 241local connections 279local governments 253–5local participation 97, 102, 123–5Lomé Conventions 138–9Long, G. 35

Lubell, M. 72

MacGregor, T. 226Madagascar 101–12Malaysia 140, 147–55, 164manageable society 16, 20–21management

active 205and good governance 99, 100Madagascar case study 104–5reform 220

skills 31, 33, 110–11management orientation 51, 52, 53mangrove forests 146March, J.G. 72, 81marginalized groups 253–5marine biodiversity

anchoveta case study 155–62developments in 144–6partnership analysis 162–7, 243shrimp case study 146–55

Marine Stewardship Council (MSC)

future potential 279goals 270governance 273, 274, 293

308 Index



legitimacy 282measuring activities 277and regulation 182

role of 10, 12, 161, 265, 275as a transnational environmentalpartnership 174

material influence 183, 184, 187–8, 189Mauzerall, D.L. 243, 246, 247Meadowcroft, James 22, 230, 297, 298measurement role 111, 277mediation 40–41Mert, Aysem 22meso level interaction 205methodological analysis 295–7

Mexican Foundation for RuralDevelopment (FMDR) 58–9Mexico 36, 53–5, 58–9, 186Microcredit Summit Campaign 263,

265, 273, 274, 279, 281Millennium Challenge Corporation

(MCC) 99Millennium Development Goals 245,

247, 248, 249, 255mining 174, 242Mining, Minerals and Sustainable

Development (MMSD) 174minority groups 253–5Miraftab, F. 223, 227Miranda, M. 138mission-driven motivation 52, 53, 56Moe, T. 84Mol, Arthur 22, 295, 298Monsanto 58–9Moore, C.M. 35moral regeneration 220motivation 50–57, 58–9, 60

mountains 243multilateral environmental agreements242–3, 255

multi-stakeholder partnerships 123–5,133, 239–40, 242–55, 275

see also global action networks(GANs); partnerships

Murphy, D. 140, 221, 229

Narmada Dam project 42Nash, J. 180

National Action Plan on Salinity andWater (NAP) 129National Coal Policy Project 34

national governments see governmentsNational Heritage Trust (NHT) 129National Vegetable Levy 123

nation-state 263, 278see also governments; stateNatura 55–6natural resource management 128–30,

132, 242, 243natural resources policies 93, 94–100,

101–12, 185–6Naturland 150negotiating networks 276neighborhood environmental

improvement plans (NEIPS)

123–5, 126, 128Nelissen, N. 20Netherlands

anchoveta case study 140, 158–62Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)

case study 185partnership roles 251shrimp case study 140, 148–55sustainable development agreements

(SDAs) 138–9Network of Aquaculture Centres in

Asia-Pacifi

c (NACA) 149networks 196, 228, 262, 267–8, 276see also global action networks

(GANs)new environmental governance 128,

130new regional-based approach to

natural resource management128–30, 132

New Zealand 130Newell, Peter 175

NGO-market partnerships 37NGOs (non-governmentalorganizations)

and accountability 201and business 117–19, 126, 173, 175,

221collaboration motivation action

(CMA) framework 51–7democracy in 197disadvantages 6and global action networks (GANs)

267, 269, 273, 274and industry associations 119–22Madagascar case study 110

Index 309



marine biodiversity case studies149–50, 151–4, 159–60

motivation of 248

networks of 30and partnerships 3, 5, 37, 119, 163,177–90, 252–5

and representation 199role of 36, 42, 289situational context 163and state 221, 232see also civil society; global action

networks (GANs)non-profit organizations see NGOs

(non-governmental organizations)

norms, global action 282–4North, D.C. 72Northern countries 138–40, 165–6,

209, 239, 250–52, 266, 268see also developed countries

Northrup, T. 80Nutreco 158–9, 160–61, 163

objectives, clarity of 63–4oceans 243OECD (Organisation for Economic

Co-operation and Development)133, 134, 246, 247, 248, 249Olsen, J.B. 72, 81Oppenheim, J. 226organizations 173, 267–8Osborn, R.N. 44Ottaway, Marina 223outcomes 111, 223, 247–8, 272–3,

280–82, 291output-oriented perspective 163Oxfam Novib 151, 154

Pacific 138–9Palmer, P. 35Papadopoulos, Y. 82Parker, B. 221, 224participation

as constraint 109deficit 240, 249–55and democracy 196–7, 200, 204, 206,

208and governance 99, 100

Madagascar case study 106–8obstacles to 124by resource users 94, 96–7

partners 32Partnership for Principle 10 (PP10)

265, 269, 273, 275, 277, 285

partnership logic 215partnershipsacademic study, influence of 231background 4, 31–4, 215, 216–19,

288–90beneficiaries 256as collaborative arrangements 5–9competition between 12–14criticisms of 223–31definition 2, 215democracy in 210–12

and economic power 13–15eff ectiveness 71–3, 133, 290–92future research 65–6, 191, 224, 233as governance mechanisms 9–15international 138–40, 206–8liberal-democratic governance

structure 15–20linkages 294–5methodological analysis 295–7motivation of 50–57vs. networks 267–8

vs. organizations 267–8paradigm 3–5, 14–15performance 63–4, 125–8, 141–3politics in 297–8relationship evolution 57–61relevance of 292–4role of 10, 11, 68–9, 96–7, 154size of 37, 39, 128systemic implications of 198, 201–2transactional model 140–43trust in 8–9

types 5, 30–31, 117, 173, 194–6value generation 61–3, 64, 161–2see also multi-stakeholder

partnershipsPattberg, Philipp 22performance 63–4, 70, 76, 125–8,

141–3Peru 60–61, 63, 140, 155–62, 164philanthropic stage, of collaboration

57, 58–9, 62Picciotto, R. 72

pluralistic approach 1, 3policy 93, 94–100, 101–12, 185–6policy analysts role 20–21

310 Index



political accountability 76political economy 226–7political modernization 216

politico-constitutional interaction 203politics 98, 99, 108, 112, 135, 176,297–8

Poncelet, E.C. 217, 222, 226Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper

(PRSP) 106–7power

and compliance 42–3concept of 143and democracy 197, 200, 206, 209exploitation of 127, 160, 163–4,

165–6and governance 108government balancing role 132in North-South relations 139, 239redistribution through partnership

217–18, 220, 226private rule-making partnerships 174private sector

associations 108governance 98, 107–8, 198, 202, 229,

292

and partnerships 3, 5, 174private-private partnerships 221, 229problem definition 31, 33–8, 220problems, of partnerships 223–31problem-setting phase 34–7process design 38–9process-oriented perspective 159, 163product development 10profit 126promotional campaigns, case study

62–3

ProVention 279psychodynamic influence onpartnerships 33

public goods 267public interest 203public policy networks 221public sector 15–20, 98

see also governments; NGOs (non-governmental organizations)

public-private partnerships (PPP) 217,219–20, 221

rainforest 36, 55–6, 60–61, 63Rainforest Expeditions 60–61, 63

Ratsiraka, Didier 103Ravalomanana, Marc 103, 106reciprocity 139

Red Crescent 261Red Cross 261reflective intervening 39regional management 129–30, 131regulation

command and control regulation94–6, 134

governance deficit 240, 242–4, 255marine biodiversity case studies 148,

149, 157negotiation of 132

and partnerships 182, 183, 184–6,188–9, 190–91prospect of 122–3self-regulation 120threat of 127see also law; rules

Reinicke, W.H. 262relationships 57–61, 73relevance, of partnerships 292–4religious groups 42, 45, 106replication, as scaling-up 11

reporting 76, 277representation 36–7, 196, 199–200, 206,208

reputationcase studies 53–4, 55global action networks (GANs) 278investor scrutiny 179–82as NGO target 175and non-compliance 43and partnerships 126–7, 182

research, future 65–6, 191, 224, 233,

288–99research organizations 252, 253–5resources 62–3, 99, 100, 104–5, 246–7responsibilities 17restructuring public service 220results 111, 223, 247–8, 272–3, 280–82,

291retail pressure 122, 127, 185, 186Rio Declaration on Environment and

Development 249see also UN Conference on

Environment and Development(UNCED)Rio Summit 250

Index 311



Rischard, J.-F. 262risk

management 126, 132, 220

risk-driven motivation 50, 52, 56,60society 216

Roberts, I. 223Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil

(RSPO) 14Rueschemeyer, D. 214, 215, 231, 232Ruggie, J.G. 262Rugmark Foundation 174rules 143, 174, 195–6

see also law; regulation

Rustow, D. 80

salinity, case study 117–19sanitation 243Sasser, E. 230scale 37, 39, 128, 272scaling-up 11–12, 14scientific communities, as non-state

actors 175scope, of partnership 11–12search conference 35

seas 243‘second order change’ 270, 271Seidman, G. 230self-governance 210self-management 97self-reflection 39self-regulation 120, 123, 216Selsky, J.W. 221, 224Seventh Generation 181shared visioning 277Shaw, D. 79

shrimp case study 140, 146–55, 162–7single-sector partnerships 209–10situational context 163, 205size 37, 39, 128, 272Skelcher, C. 75–6, 85skills 31, 33, 110–11Skocpol, T. 214, 215, 231, 232Skretting 158Social Accountability International

(SAI) 265, 273, 277social action 274

social alliances 221social capital 81social contracts 229

Social Enterprise Knowledge Network50

Social Investment Forum (SIF) 176,

178social learning 183, 184, 186–7social partnership 221social theory 228socially responsible investment 178–83Sociedad Nacional de Pesquería (SNP)

158–9societal level interaction 204societal pressure 163soft eff ects 133–4South Africa 180, 185–6, 251, 252

South America 249Southcorp Limited 117–19, 125, 126,127, 128

Southern countries 138–40, 165–6, 209,239, 250–52, 266, 268

see also developing countriessovereignty 206speed of change 121–2spotted owl controversy 36Staatsversagen (Jänicke) 218stakeholders 142, 162–3

Starbucks Coff

ee Company 54–5, 59,62–3, 66StarTrack 73–4state

Bringing the State Back In (Evans,Rueschmeyer and Skocpol)214

and civil society 208, 229cosmopolitan state 233and democracy 204, 205, 208, 211eff ectiveness 289

failure of 216and governance 98, 108–12, 227–33legitimacy 230–31and partnerships 173–4, 185, 189,

217, 295state-centric approach 1transnational role 175–6, 208see also governments

steering mechanisms 10Stewart, A. 225strategic options development and

analysis (SODA) 38strategic partnerships 221strategy maps 35

312 Index



structural influence, of transnationalenvironmental partnerships 183,184, 187–8, 189, 190–91

substitution logic 215success, determinants of 63–4, 125–8Sullivan Principles 180Susskind, L.E. 43sustainability 121, 142, 144–7, 156,

162–3, 166–7Sustainability North West 79sustainable development 1, 29, 79,

289–90sustainable development agreements

(SDAs) 138–9

Sweden 185, 251Switzerland 81, 185Synergos Institute 36System of Protected Areas of

Madagascar (SAPM) 107systemic change 269–70, 280–85systems organizing 276

targets 77–8, 83, 134–5technology assistance 10Teisman, G.R. 224–5

TetraPak 53–4The Access Initiative (TAI) 265, 267–8,269, 272–3, 275, 277

The Nature Conservancy (TNC)59–60

‘third order change’ 270, 271, 272Tover and Guillen et al. 156toxic chemicals 242trade unions 253–5transaction costs 72, 73, 84transactional model of partnerships

140–43transactional stage, of collaboration57, 60

TransFair USA 55, 59transnational corporations 179transnational democracy 206–8transnational environmental

partnerships 175–91, 206–8, 217see also global action networks

(GANs)transnational states 208, 233

transparencyand accountability 76–7, 106and governance 99, 100, 217–18

improving eff ectiveness of partnerships 109–10

interdependencies 84

Madagascar case study 102–3and trade-off s 85Transparency International (TI) 99,

263, 265, 267, 274, 282, 284transport 243Tropical Forestry Action Plans 182trust 8–9, 32, 40–41, 64, 161, 278

UN (United Nations) 206, 218, 239,243, 245–7, 252, 253–5

UN Commission on Sustainable

Development (CSD) 241, 245,247, 248, 250–51, 253, 275UN Conference on Environment and

Development (UNCED) 3, 215,217, 249

UN Development Programme(UNDP) 148

UN Economic Commission for Europe(UNECE) 185

UN Environmental Programme(UNEP) 149

UN Food and AgricultureOrganization (FAO) 148, 149, 157,185

UN Fund for InternationalPartnerships 10

UN Global Compact 248, 254UN World Summit on Sustainable

Development (Johannesburg2002)

accreditation rules 18–19governance contradictions 255

partnership promotion 4, 30, 215,217, 239, 293, 298partnership rationale 244–5resources of partnerships 246–7role of partnerships 11shrimp case study 150, 152

Unilever 270United Kingdom (UK) 79, 185, 209,

217, 219, 225, 251United States (US)

case studies 73–4, 180

global warming 45Microcredit Summit Campaign 281‘new governance’ 130

Index 313

Partnership Governance and Sustainable Dev

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