Endearing Myths, Enduring Truths: Enabling Partnerships
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Conclusions

Many of the initiatives developed or supported by BPD would not have been cost-effective or even feasible if they had not been built as partnerships. The success, for example, of the Sarshatali coal mining project in India, the Global Alliance for Workers and Communities, the Global Road Safety Programme in Ghana, or the Build, Operate, Train, and Transfer water and sanitation project in the Eastern Cape and Northern Province of South Africa all relied heavily on enhanced relationships formed between participating organisations to mobilize and create synergies between needed competencies and resources.

But the uniqueness of BPD’s overall experience has not been in imposing trisector partnerships. After all, the water and sanitation partnership in Port-au-Prince in Haiti involves an international NGO, GRET, working with a state-owned utility. The Global Alliance for Workers and Communities has little more than nominal public sector involvement, and indeed has to date progressed with scant engagement with the labor movement. The road safety initiatives in Vietnam and Costa Rica have had little real civil society engagement to date, and the NGO engaged in the road safety partnership in Ghana was actually created by the Global Road Safety Partnership. Almost all of the water and sanitation partnerships are trisector, but the main corporate partners are also experimenting in other approaches to contract compliance that are rooted in legal, technological and pricing innovations, rather than partnership-related ones. Only the Natural Resources Cluster partnerships have been exclusively trisector, but even here there were several that did not get off the ground, and one that was abandoned midstream.

BPD’s trisector partnership approach has been permissive rather than prescriptive. It has created the possibilities for institutional innovation in addressing both individual and common organisational goals, rather than seeking to impose a ‘one-size fits all’ model across extraordinarily diverse situations and challenges. This way of appreciating a ‘trisector partnership’ approach appears, from the evidence to date, to be effective in that:

• It actively encourages innovative approaches to addressing social and environmental issues as well as business challenges and opportunities.
  
  
• It opens people’s minds to the possibility of breaking down historical barriers and forming working relationships between key organisations spread across different parts of the local, national, and international community.
  
  
• It engages people and methods that are attuned to building unusual, complex, and often difficult partnerships.

On this basis, BPD’s experience clearly demonstrates that this trisector partnership approach can deliver the resources, competencies, legitimacy, and critically – the will, energy, and focus to succeed, where institutions and sectors working alone have previously failed.

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