Effective and Legitimate Transnational Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships?

• In Event: Science, Technology, Human Rights and Sustainability

Abstract

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development highlights the crucial role of transnational public-private or multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) in world politics for achieving the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The “global partnership for sustainable development” is designated its own goal, SDG17, and calls for this global partnership to be “complemented by multi-stakeholder partnerships that mobilize and share knowledge, expertise, technology and financial resources to support the achievement of the sustainable development goals in all countries, in particular developing countries” (A/RES/70/1 para. 17).

Some advocate MSPs as mechanisms that could solve implementation gaps and address democratic deficits in sustainable development governance. They argue MSPs hold potential to combine expertise from different sectors to deliver synergies/reduce trade-offs across SDGs. Does the new generation of MSPs for the 2030 Agenda fulfill the promise to be transformative instruments to accelerate achievement of the SDGs? Are MSPs tools for effective, synergistic, and inclusive governance – or are they manifestations of power constellations in the international order, reflecting dominant interests and reinforcing privatization of global governance? The UN and its member states made clear their view that MSPs are an effective means of delivering global sustainability transformations and that they are legitimate governance innovations for achieving the other 16 goals. It is not certain these assumptions are accurate. Previous research has attempted to address aspects of these questions for older generations of partnerships, providing insights into what explains the formation of MSPs and what makes them effective and legitimate. However, it is not obvious that MSPs are a panacea for synergizing goals and achieving transformations on the scale needed to meet the ambitious targets of the SDGs.

By revisiting the proliferating scholarship on transnational MSPs, this paper assesses factors shaping more effective and legitimate partnerships and their contribution to accelerating the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. Earlier efforts to review the literature on MSPs provide useful insights, but there is a need for a thorough, updated stock-taking and reassessment that accounts for the renewed prominence of MSPs conferred by the 2030 Agenda and global diplomacy on sustainable development. It is imperative to understand the capacity of MSPs to deliver on their promises for the global governance of sustainable development. We argue that partnerships need to be synergistic across SDGs, effective, and legitimate to generate transformative change needed to implement the Agenda. We also argue that while there are many lessons on effectiveness and legitimacy that a new generation of MSPs should incorporate for achieving the SDGs, there is still a gap in the research to explain whether and how MSPs could foster synergies across SDGs and deliver truly transformative change on a global scale by 2030.

The paper incorporates preliminary findings from our research program on synergies, effectiveness, and legitimacy of MSPs for the 2030 Agenda that begin to fill this crucial knowledge gap on public-private collaboration in the global governance and IR literature. We then propose an urgently needed research agenda to advance theoretical and empirical research on MSPs as global governance mechanisms for large-scale societal transformation toward sustainability. We also highlight methodological innovations that will make this research feasible and indicate avenues for necessary future theoretical and methodological innovation.

Our findings align with some early theoretical and empirical debates in the literature on the effectiveness and legitimacy of MSPs. We move beyond predominant research on cases studies of individual partnerships, as cross-sectoral and comparative research on the effects of MSPs for the 2030 Agenda and for producing synergies to deliver societal transformation is lacking. Scholars have not answered whether transformative change toward achieving the SDGs is possible or explained the conditions under which MSPs are more or less likely to foster goal synergies. Competing accounts of the sources of MSPs explain motivations for joining, but not why and under what conditions stakeholders specifically establish MSPs for goal synergies or which goals/synergies particular stakeholders are more or less likely to support. We find that evaluations of partnership performance and effectiveness do not sufficiently address how effective MSPs are when their work integrates multiple goals for producing synergies across social, environmental and economic SDGs. Scholars have not addressed whether MSPs gain or lose legitimacy when they scale up to deliver societal transformations and to produce effects across SDGs. Finally, we show that if MSPs are to be designed to implement the 2030 Agenda effectively and legitimately, there is a need for improved understanding of meta-governance, a topic the literature has mostly neglected.

Authors

• Ian Higham, London School of Economics and Political Science

• Karin Bäckstrand, Stockholm University

• Faradj Koliev

• Felicitas Fritzsche, Stockholm University