Endearing Myths, Enduring Truths: Enabling Partnerships
< Learning Beyond The Wave Previous | Next Partnership Drivers >

Endearing Myths, Enduring Truths…

Ensuring that the Partnership Contains the Right Mix of Partners.

Partnership design needs to take account of the pattern of potential costs and benefits. For example, the greater the variation and dispersal of potential beneficiaries, the more important the role of public bodies in actively building programmes, as pure market mechanisms or localized collaboration cannot be relied upon to meet agreed objectives. In general therefore, the more diffused the potential costs and benefits, the broader the participation will have to be.

Recognising this, the Global Road Safety Partnership and the Global Partnership for Youth Development have focused on building partnerships at the international and national, rather than site-specific, levels. Road safety – like youth development – is typically underprovided through pure market mechanisms, because its widely dispersed benefits make it an unattractive commercial proposition. Having a significant impact on accident rates requires broad public policies and programmes, such as education and the enforcement of suitable regulation, in addition to location-specific road safety initiatives. However, development programmes to address issues like road safety are also typically underprovided by governments because of institutional weaknesses in grappling with such cross-cutting issues. This is particularly evident where responsibility is dispersed among a number of government agencies and resources are limited. This helps us to understand why public bodies are attracted by trisector partnerships as a means of addressing these broad-based development programmes and goals.

This argument is further supported by BPD experience in the Natural Resources Cluster where site and locality-specific partnerships have been used to mitigate investment risk and the negative social impacts of oil, gas, and mining operations. Such partnerships can bring significant net benefits to the company, employees, and surrounding communities. In these instances, higher-level regional and national initiatives may not be necessary to achieve development and business benefits, as the primary beneficiaries are the business and local community.

< Learning Beyond The Wave Previous | Next Partnership Drivers >
Page: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

BPD Home | Overview | Partners | Projects | Activities | FAQ | Contacts

© 2004 BPD