Prof. Andrew Boraine is an independent partnering practitioner, with over four decades of experience in the development field. He recently stepped down as founder CEO of the Western Cape Economic Development Partnership (EDP), which has been involved with more than 80 partnering processes over the past 11 years. He is co-author with the EDP’s Dr Notiswa Libala and Jessica Wilson of a recent report for the South African Presidential Climate Commission (PCC) entitled ‘From ideas and policies to effective action: Just transition partnering implementation model’.
Partnering can move planning into action
Effective partnerships are crucial for development practitioners across various sectors and organisations, including government, community and civil society organisations, business, labour, academia, and funders. These collaborations play a vital role in achieving collective impact and addressing complex challenges and stuck problems. By working together, stakeholders can leverage their respective strengths, resources, and expertise to drive meaningful change and create sustainable solutions. This article explores the importance of effective partnerships for development impact and highlights ways in which stakeholders can implement partnering solutions.
A poor implementation track record
South Africa’s development landscape over the past 30 years is replete with strategies, frameworks, and plans, many of which have only been partially implemented, and some of which have never been implemented at all. There are many reasons for this poor track record, including institutional self-interest, state capture, corruption, and a hollowing out of state capacity. However, a crucial factor is the absence of an explicit partnering approach. A partnering approach pays attention to who needs to work together to get things done, and how state and non-state actors can work together in practice.
Without such a partnering approach baked into planning and implementation strategies, investments in programmes and projects will continue to have limited or even negative outcomes, rather than the desired collective impact. This is self-defeating at a time of growing needs and shrinking resources. The challenge is that many departments, organisations, and institutions, including some donors, do not have the required capabilities for a collaborative and adaptive approach, instead continuing to rely on inflexible compliance-based planning, budgeting, and monitoring systems, ineffective siloes and hierarchies, and competitive attitudes and behaviours.
Five steps towards collective impact
The practical actions outlined below can help deliver collective impact:
- Start with the system, not the mandate
To intervene more effectively, and to produce better results, start by looking for systems (interdependencies and relationships) and patterns (cycles of recurring behaviour) not just problems (single events). The challenge is that people don’t work for a system, but rather a department or institution. It’s often hard to ‘see’ the system beyond tightly held institutional mandates, plans, targets, budgets, and indicators. One of the objectives of a partnering approach is to help people and their organisations to see the wider system (how things are connected), to understand their role in the system and the role of others and how these dynamically interact, and to be open to working collaboratively at a systems level. Focusing only on one’s own institutional mandate inhibits system change and reinforces ineffective siloed behaviour and compartmentalised projects.
- Manage and influence
Once you operate in the context of a wider connected system, with many moving parts affecting each other, you need to be able to both manage what you control (your mandates, budgets, staff, assets, programmes) and at the same time influence those things that are beyond your control. We know that we cannot command or instruct influence. We need to be in a relationship to be able to influence – not one relationship, but many relationships! If our relationships are non-existent, or half-hearted, one-sided, toxic, abusive, and unresponsive, there is little chance of us either influencing or being influenced. This is why investing in relationships of trust in every stage of a development process is so important – especially in low-trust, low-agreement environments – yet it is often neglected. One of the tools to help organisations mind their relationships systematically is a partnering implementation framework, which identifies the important relationships (the who) as well as the culture of the system (the how).
- Establish and sustain relationships between ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’
Two ‘environments’ are constantly at work in any development field. We refer to these as the ‘top down’ authorising environment, which is found in political mandates, electoral cycles, public policy, state planning and resource allocation, regulations, and enforcement; and then there is the ‘bottom up’ mobilising environment, which is the arena of active citizens, civil society organisations, social movements, entrepreneurs, philanthropy, corporate social responsibility, and applied researchers. Both environments have their strengths and limitations. Both are necessary and interdependent. Yet often relationships within and between these two environments are weak, unproductive, or even antagonistic. This means, for example, that private or philanthropic investment, active citizenry, community organisation, and non-government mobilisation, are often not able to leverage or influence the allocation of resources of the authorising environment. There is a need to change the way both these environments perform and relate to one another. Those in the mobilising environment need to be motivated and equipped to connect, communicate, and collaborate with each other, and to improve capabilities to understand, navigate, engage, and partner with the authorising environment, to leverage and influence state resource allocation. Those in the authorising environment need to be motivated and equipped to create a more enabling environment for non-state actors, by building adaptive management and collaborative leadership capabilities, encouraging simple protocols rather than complex rules, reducing hierarchies and status, and supporting spaces for experimentation and risk taking. For example, the success of the Social Employment Fund, supported by the Social Employment Learning Network, described elsewhere in this newsletter, is partly attributable to this approach.
- Partnering is a verb, partnership a noun
It is useful to differentiate between partnering (the verb) and partnership (the noun). A partnering process can get side-tracked if too much time is spent on debating governance arrangements and structures (the noun). Trust is best built by doing things together, so step into joint action as quickly as possible (the verb). As you begin working together, find the time to pause, reflect, learn, and adapt and adjust your joint plans. To sustain your actions over time, put suitable governance arrangements in place.
- Use the capacity of collaborative intermediary organisations
The relational elements of a system that connect scales, places, actors, resources, and cycles, are critical for improved and sustained development outcomes. And yet, relational governance tends to receive little or no attention within institutional processes. Resources are seldom allocated to building relationships – whether it is within communities, between the state and society, or within government across different departments and spheres of government. When these relationships go wrong, development is paralysed or diverted, and impact is minimised. Increasingly, there is a realisation of the need for collaborative intermediation in the system to improve development outcomes and deliver more impactful results. Collaborative intermediators are those who can convene contested spaces, translate different ‘languages’, and join the dots between the institutional mandates. They work with diverse organisations to unfreeze positions, reconfigure relationships, and help partners to agree on a common agenda for joint action. This work in the ‘in-between spaces’ needs to be expanded and supported throughout South Africa.
A practical example of strengthening the national youth employment eco-system
In 2021, Harambee was tasked by the SA Presidential Youth Employment Intervention to coordinate the National Pathway Management Network. Part of this work involved encouraging and enabling effective collaboration between stakeholders within the youth employment sector across the country.
Harambee started a conversation with a few organisations working in the youth employment eco-system space on how to build strong partnerships and a culture of collaboration to accelerate shared goals. Out of these conversations, Harambee developed a list of partnering capabilities necessary for effective system collaboration, including shared values, common outcomes, building trust, changing attitudes and behaviours, empathetic relationships, adaptive programming and delivery, and partnering and partnerships.
One of the challenges identified was that organisations are constrained by their own institutional mandates, and don’t always see themselves as part of a wider ecosystem. Harambee approached the Western Cape Economic Development Partnership (EDP) – a collaborative intermediary organisation with a decade of experience in putting diverse partnerships together – to assist in further developing a youth ecosystem partnering approach. This was done in two stages.
In September 2022, Harambee, supported by EDP, convened a SA Youth CoLab with the larger public, private and civil society organisations involved in youth employment pathways. The workshop developed a shared understanding of the youth employment problem, mapped the stakeholders that need to work together to achieve collective impact in the sector, identified levers for change linked to functions, mandates and resources in different parts of the ecosystem, discussed ways to build a common agenda for joint action, and brainstormed how to develop and apply the necessary partnering capabilities in practice.
This was followed by a curated session on ecosystem partnering with over 400 representatives of multiple organisations involved in youth employment pathways at the Harambee Solutions Exchange in November 2022. The session had three objectives. Firstly, it aimed to promote higher levels of partnering for collective impact and better development outcomes. Secondly, it sought to solicit delegate views on barriers to partnering and strategies to overcome them. Finally, it aimed to reinforce collaborative attitudes and behaviours, culminating in a commitment to collaborative action at the end of the Solutions Exchange.
Another article in this newsletter relates how the Bertha Centre collaborated with the Youth CoLab in a major youth development and social innovations mapping project.
Beyond good intentions
Together with learnings about what makes partnerships work and what partnerships have been able to overcome the implementation crisis, there have been encouraging initiatives that demonstrate practically how different elements in the youth development space are connected and are collaborating to achieve much more than what the individual role players could have done on their own.