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Why Organisations Engage in Partnerships
BPD partnerships have focused on solving complex and historically intractable
social issues. Indeed, BPD’s experience highlights that trisector
partnerships are often turned to as an option precisely because other
approaches have been tried and have failed.
Beyond this general reason, organisations turn to partnership-based solutions
for widely differing reasons – especially when they come from different
sectors with distinct mandates and diverse organisational orientations,
cultures, patterns of accountability, and histories.
The growing power and influence of business in shaping the future makes
it particularly important to understand both how BPD has engaged businesses
in partnerships for development and their reasons for such engagement.
BPD’s experience highlights five distinct categories of tangible,
direct business benefits from partnership:
- Risk management. Although a potential benefit for all
businesses in partnerships, BPD experience revealed that the management
of risk associated with, for example, civil disruption of business activities,
is particularly relevant to the extractive and water and sanitation
industries due to their long-term time horizons and the large scale
of their fixed investments.
- Expectations management. The management of stakeholder
expectations, internal as well as external, is a key rationale for business
engagement in partnerships. This partly has the underlying aim of managing
risk, but beyond that, it also aims to enhance stakeholders’ contributions
to project success. This is particularly relevant for businesses with
large-scale fixed investments, those managing sensitive resources, those
operating in relatively poor communities, and those with national and
global, as well as local stakeholder management requirements.
- Market development. Market development as a rationale
for partnership engagement is most relevant for those corporations needing
to promote sales in the countries where the partnerships are based,
although there is clearly also a public relations dimension linked to
international marketing and sales. Through the partnership, businesses
are able to strengthen their overall relationships with potential customers,
particularly with public sector bodies responsible for procurement.
This has proved to be especially relevant for corporations involved
in youth development and road safety partnerships, and to a lesser degree,
with water and sanitation partnerships.
- Legal and contract compliance. Meeting legal contractual
obligations is relevant to all businesses. BPD experience highlights
the particular importance of this factor for customer-related contract
compliance, which concerns businesses involved in the water and sanitation
sector. To a lesser degree, it is also relevant for extractive industries
where contract compliance covers aspects of community engagement and
development.
- Business process and productivity. Some partnerships
have a direct impact on production and other operational processes,
including customer outreach. Process and productivity gains in BPD were
most relevant for the water and sanitation and natural resources-related
partnerships generally. These benefits were also being sought in some
partnerships in the other two Clusters, such as the youth-related Global
Alliance for Workers and Communities where supply-chain productivity
gains are expected to result from improvements in workers competencies
and overall morale.
The powerful business drivers underpinning trisector partnerships do
not reduce the importance of social and ethical values in encouraging
greater business engagement on social and environmental issues. Such values
are generally personalised, rooted in the commitment of a chief executive,
or in champions elsewhere in the organisation. However the effectiveness
of these drivers is at risk if they undermine a company’s financial
performance and will tend to prosper if shown to enhance it. On the other
hand, business engagement for purely financial reasons is often seen by
other partners as superficial and short term, which may lead to a less-than-successful
experience resulting from a failure to gain the trust of key stakeholders.
In practice, it is therefore usually a blend of values-based and business
drivers that underpin effective business engagement in these issues.
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