Collaborating for Our Future: Multistakeholder Partnerships for Solving Complex Problems

Organizations turn to multistakeholder partnerships (MSPs) to meet challenges they cannot handle alone. By tapping diverse stakeholders’ resources, MSPs develop the capability to address complex issues and problems, such as health care delivery, poverty, human rights, watershed management, education, sustainability, and innovation. This book provides a comprehensive understanding of MSPs, why they are needed, the challenges partners face in working together, and how to design them effectively. Through the process of collaboration partners combine their differing strengths, vantage points, and expertise to craft innovative responses to pressing societal concerns. The book offers valuable advice for leaders about how to design and scale up effective partnerships and how to address potential obstacles partners may face, such as dealing with the conflicts and power issues likely to arise as partners negotiate with each other. Drawing on three comprehensive cases and countless shorter examples from around the world, the book offers practical advice for organizations embarking on an MSP, as well as theoretical understanding of how partnerships function. Using an institutional theory lens, it explains how partnerships can effect change in institutional fields by reducing turbulence and negotiating a common set of norms and routines to govern partners’ future interactions within the field of concern. Topics covered include: the nature of working collaboratively, why partnerships are needed, types of partnerships, guidelines for partnership design, partnerships and field dynamics, how to deal with conflicts among partners, negotiating across power differences, partnerships for sustainability, collaborative governance, working across scale differences, and how partnerships transform fields.