INTRODUCTION

Are you working to connect businesses and NGOs to create better environmental and social standards? Or are you a government policy officer needing to work with the fisheries sector and local communities to create a sustainable management plan? Is your business partnering with farmer organisations, NGOs, and an impact investor to source responsibly from small-scale farmers? Perhaps your NGO is trying to work with government and businesses to create more opportunities for youth in rural areas?

Multi-stakeholder partnerships offer practical ways forward in these types of situations, and in many others. How to design, facilitate and manage these partnerships is what this book is all about.

In 2015 the global community agreed to a set of Sustainable Development Goals that address the big issues facing humanity for the coming decades. They will only be achieved through strengthened multi-stakeholder partnerships, as the UN Secretary General himself recognises. It will be the collective efforts of partnerships everywhere that will make the difference. This guide is a contribution to that effort.

MSPs: collaborating to tackle the complexity of sustainable development

MSPs are advocated by everyone

Paul Polman CEO of Unilever

"The issues we face are so big and the targets are so challenging that we cannot do it alone. When you look at any issue, such as food or water scarcity, it is very clear that no individual institution, government, or company can provide the solution."

Ban Ki-Moon UN Secretary General

"One of the main lessons I have learned during my five years as Secretary-General is that broad partnerships are the key to solving broad challenges. When governments, the United Nations, businesses, philanthropies, and civil society work hand-in-hand, we can achieve great things."

Neil Keny-Guyer CEO of Mercy Corps

"We live in a time where the boundaries between the public, private, and civil silos are blurring and breaking down. If we are going to find solutions to poverty and injustice, it is going to be in that blurred space, not in the silo space."

Louise O. Fresco President of Wageningen UR

"While better methods to produce scientific and technical knowledge remain necessary, they need to be integrated with methods that produce practical wisdom to guide us in our strategies and actions in a moral, ethical, and political rather than only in a technical and instrumental sense."

The challenges of our globalised world

We are living in a globalised world with a population heading towards nine billion people, putting the earth's resources under immense pressure. Increasingly, we find that the challenges and opportunities we face are large and complex. Our actions are linked with the actions of others, our solutions are embedded in a web of interlinked interests and responses, and we cannot work alone. There is a profound need for new approaches – for innovation – in how we govern ourselves, in how we use and share resources, and in how we create harmony between people of differing wealth, culture, and religion.

Creating a better world takes partnership. Increasingly, government, business, civil society, and science recognise the need to work together to tackle the challenges of the modern world and bring about change for the common good. Many of the issues we confront and the opportunities we would like to exploit are embedded in a network of changing social, economic, political, and environmental factors. And many different groups may be concerned with the same issues, but from a different perspective and with different interests. In our world of social media and interconnected economies, bringing about change depends on dialogue and alignment across different sectors in society. We need to foster relationships across these groups and help them collaborate. Although no one group can bring about change on its own, the power of one group can be enough to block the actions of others. To avoid this, we need to develop shared perspectives, new understanding, and collective commitment for action, even between groups who may at first seem to have diverging interests or be in conflict.

Partnering for change

If you want to tackle real world issues and achieve real change, you will need to work together with a range of different people and organisations with different backgrounds. This is what we mean by a 'multi-stakeholder partnership' (MSP). While the different actors may share a common problem or aspiration, they also have different 'stakes' or interests. Across the world, people are creating new coalitions, alliances, and partnerships, and many inspirational examples are emerging of what can be achieved when people mobilise to take action together. But just agreeing to work together is no guarantee of success. The way these partnerships are set up, the process taken, the capacity for leadership, and the skill of facilitation will have a strong impact on how they develop and how successful they are. Enabling people to work well together, especially if they start with very different views of the world or are in conflict, is never easy. But if you succeed you will be able to make the most of the potential for human good, innovation, and transformational change.

The good news is that from experience we now know much more about how to create successful partnerships for change through multi-stakeholder collaboration. And, as successful examples gain attention, business, government, and nongovernmental organisation (NGO) leaders are increasingly calling for more. This wave has been called 'the collaboration paradigm of the 21st century' and a 'stunning evolutionary change in institutional forms of governance'. Civil society organisations have discovered that they are more effective if they engage and collaborate. Citizens discover that they can change their world by finding new ways to collaborate and make demands using online tools. And business is looking to new ways that bring 'shared value'.

The collaborative and learning-oriented approach of MSPs is certainly not a silver bullet for every difficult situation we face. Yet, it is often surprising just how much progress can be made when you focus on the human aspects that help people cooperate, rather than remaining locked in conflict.

Is this guide for you?

This guide is for anyone interested in MSPs and how to make them more effective. It is particularly addressed to anyone responsible for setting up, leading, or facilitating an MSP – the 'you' of this book – but will be equally useful for those involved in commissioning, funding, or managing an MSP, and even for those who would just like to know what MSPs are about. If you are interested in combining practical steps and tools with a deeper insight into the theoretical foundations and underlying principles of MSPs, you will find the guide especially useful. And we hope it will also be a valuable resource for training in MSP and facilitation skills, as well as for use in higher education courses.

The guide offers a roadmap for designing and facilitating MSPs. We have woven together real world experience with sound theoretical foundations and practical facilitation tools to provide a coherent approach for getting the best out of an MSP. This is not a recipe book; rather, it provides a broad outline. Each MSP will have its own unique dynamics requiring insight and creativity to bring out the best in people and to forge the understanding and collaborative relationships that make change possible. We have written this guide to help you bring insight and creativity to the process of your MSP.

Like us, you may be familiar with MSPs that start full of energy and a spirit of optimism, but where the enthusiasm slowly but surely fades away. Some people become impatient and leave. Others start doubting that the MSP can deliver real change, or they feel unheard. Establishing an MSP doesn't automatically lead to harmonious collaboration between the partners. You may need a lot of patience. Developing trust and understanding can be a slow and difficult process when people have opposing interests or are competing for resources, or there are deep or long-held conflicts. It may take time until all partners understand and agree on the need for shared decisions and collective action. The guide will give you ideas and strategies for working through such challenges.

Our experiences of MSPs come largely from the agriculture, food and natural resource managements sectors, and the examples we use are drawn mostly from this work. However, the basic framework for MSPs that we offer is not sector specific so it will be just as relevant for working in other sectors such as health, education, governance, economic development, peace building or community development.

We hope that the guide will help committed businesses, governments, NGOs, and researchers to become more effective in their efforts to achieve environmental and economic sustainability and social justice. Each of these groups will come to an MSP with different interests, values, responsibilities, technical language, communication styles, and constraints. We have tried to ensure that this guide speaks to the needs of all.

How to use the guide

The power of this guide comes from its underlying framework for understanding and facilitating MSPs. This framework links theory with practice and provides a model and set of principles to guide the design of MSPs, tips on facilitation, and a set of participatory process tools.

The guide has been designed so that you can dip in at different places to find what you need, without reading cover to cover. In Section 2, we discuss MSPs in more detail, what they are, and their key characteristics. Section 3 focuses on the key elements for developing an MSP, the different phases, and designing the MSP process. Section 4looks at seven principles that we have identified as the basis for effective MSPs, backed up by a set of conceptual models that capture key theoretical ideas and will help you to understand how MSPs can make transformative change possible. Section 5 looks at moving from design to practice – what it takes to facilitate an MSP and support partnership processes, what human dimensions need to be in place, and how you get organised. Section 6 considers the type of tools you will need at different stages of the MSP process, and gives a brief introduction to a selection of participatory tools that can be used to help stakeholders work more effectively together in building trust, exploring issues, strategising, and planning action. Section 7 offers you some stories from the frontline in the form of interviews with different stakeholders talking about their experience with MSPs. Finally, aresources section gives you links to further information on the theoretical basis of MSP practice, details of the references, and additional resources.

The guide is backed up by the CDI MSP resource portal (www.mspguide.org), where you will also find more details on the underlying theory of MSPs, additional examples and case studies, detailed descriptions of the tools, and many other resources.

Finally

Remember, the primary 'tool' at your disposal is ... yourself. We assume that you have picked up this guide because you want to change something, and have realised that you will need to do this together with others. The quality of your personal leadership to drive change is more than the sum of all the tools and concepts in this guide. It is also about integrity, knowing yourself, balancing the head and the heart. This guide can help you hone your ability to become a more effective change agent. We have included reflection questions to help you on this path.

MULTI–STAKEHOLDER PARTNERSHIPS

We can understand that the best way to address complex issues is for the different groups affected – the stakeholders – to work together in partnership. But what does this actually mean? Are there different types of partnership, do they have different purposes, what are their common characteristics? And what is a 'stakeholder'? How does the process work? This section looks at how we can define multi-stakeholder partnerships or MSPs, how such partnerships work, and how we can judge whether an MSP is the best choice for our issue.

What are Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships?

There are many different ways for groups to work together to solve a large and complex problem, or exploit a promising new opportunity. And people use many different words to describe these types of partnerships and interactions and the processes involved, from coalitions, alliances, and platforms, to participatory governance, stakeholder engagement, and interactive policy- making. We use the term 'multi-stakeholder partnership' (MSP) as an overarching concept which highlights the idea that different groups can share a common problem or aspiration, while nonetheless having different interests or 'stakes'.

At CDI, we see MSPs as a form of governance – in other words, a way in which groups of people can make decisions and take action for the collective good, be it at local, national, or international scale. A central part of our vision is the role of MSPs as a platform where stakeholders can learn together in an interactive way, where people can speak and be heard, and where everybody's ideas can be harnessed to drive innovation and find ways forward that are more likely to be in the interests of all.

MSPs range from short consultation processes through to multi-year engagements that may evolve through many phases. Some MSPs may be very structured and backed by formal organisational arrangements. Others may be much more ad hoc and fluid. Different groups will take the lead in initiating MSPs. Governments may initiate a stakeholder consultation process for assessing new policy directions. NGOs may work to bring business and government together around an environmental or social concern. Business may realise they need to partner with government and NGOs to create new market opportunities and to manage their operations in ways that create shared value and give them a 'licence to operate'.

Thousands of examples of MSPs have emerged over the last decade. Take the global food and beverage sector, where twenty-two of the world's largest multi-national corporations have joined in partnerships with stakeholders from the public sector and civil society. Or the hundreds of partnerships formed by development organisations, government, and civil society following the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002 and "Rio+20" of 2012. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, hundreds of integrated landscape initiatives have developed in which public, civil society, and private stakeholders are collaborating to ensure that they all benefit from their landscapes. The table shows a range of examples of different types of MSP, spanning the range from local to global levels of collaboration.

Characteristics of an MSP

When we talk about multi-stakeholder partnerships, we don't mean 'one-off' workshops or simple multi-actor gatherings. We mean a semi- structured process that helps people to work together on a common problem over a shorter or longer time. But different individuals and groups will relate and engage with each other in different ways.

In practice, MSPs will be very diverse. But a well-functioning MSP is likely to have all or most of the following characteristics:.

Shared and defined 'problem situation' or opportunity: The stakeholders need to share a tangible concern or focus that brings them together. All groups will need to have some sense of why it is worthwhile for them to invest time and energy in the MSP. However, although stakeholders need a common concern in order to start an MSP, the real nature and focus of their concerns and what the group sees as the real problems and opportunities will only fully emerge during the process of developing the MSP.

All the key stakeholders are engaged in the partnership: One of the key features of effective MSPs is that all those who have an influence on or are affected by the situation that sparked the process are involved from the start. Leaving out key groups or involving them too late can quickly undermine an MSP. But as the MSP evolves, the focus may change, meaning that new groups may need to be included and others may drop out. An effective MSP is gender aware, it ensures the voices of women and men, the young and the older are all being heard.

Works across different sectors and scales: For most MSPs, the underlying causes of problems and the opportunities for solutions will be found across different disciplines; across the workings of business, government, and civil society; and across different scales from local to national, and even global.

Follows an agreed but dynamic process and timeframe: Stakeholders need to have some understanding of the process that they are being invited to join and how long it is going to take, before they will commit themselves to take part. But the process needs to be flexible and respond to changing needs. The process and timeframe will evolve over the course of the MSP, but at any one point in time, stakeholders need to have full information about the expected process.