This post is written by the authors of a recently published Business & Society article examining how cross-sector partnerships can unintentionally cause societal harm. We encourage other authors of recently published articles to share their work with the Business & Society community by submitting a blog post to the Community Development Team.

Original Article: Stadtler, L., Hernández-Melgar, E., Knight, H. H., MacDonald, A., Hustad, O., & Seitanidi, M. M. (2026). Uncovering the Societal Harm of Cross-Sector Partnerships: An Intervention Perspective. Business & Society, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00076503261468399

By: Helena H. Knight, Lea Stadtler, Eduardo Hernández-Melgar, and Adriane MacDonald

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions”, says the old proverb. Cross-sector partnerships bring together organisations and communities from different walks of life, to include businesses, governments and civil-society organisations. Together, they aim to address societal problems related to poverty, health, environmental damage, and many others. Existing evidence shows that pooling unique resources and expertise can generate significant benefits for individuals, partners, and wider society. Yet, as we discovered in our recent Business & Society article, good intentions do not necessarily guarantee good outcomes. This uncomfortable, ‘dark-side’ of cross-sector partnerships deserves greater attention to understand how and why societal harm can arise from collaboration.

A powerful example of interrelated harms was reported by Anne Vestergaard and colleagues in a Business & Society article. A nonprofit-business partnership, supported by a national embassy, was promoted as a flagship poverty-alleviation programme employing local women in bead production. However, the programme imposed centralised production, disrupting the intergenerational transfer of crafting knowledge and contributing to the erosion of traditional skills in communities..

Unfortunately, this example is not an isolated case of a partnership going wrong. We analysed 47 cross-sector partnership cases published in leading academic journals and uncovered recurring patterns in how and why harms occur. First, we identified three recurring flaws in partnership interventions:

• Misaligned interventions occur when partnership activities fail to fit the needs and realities of those they aim to support.
• Under-scoped interventions occur when the partnership defines the intervention scope too narrowly, overlooking important groups, root causes or capacity needs.
• Lagging interventions occur when partnerships act too slowly, thereby hindering other, more effective initiatives.

Identifying these flaws was just the first step. We also needed to understand why they occur so practitioners can anticipate and address them before they cause societal harm. The second part of our analysis connected the intervention flaws to two features of partnership design: the partners themselves and the partnership structure.

Actor-centric problems are the most prevalent, reflecting power imbalances among partners. Here, businesses and organisations from wealthier countries, such as development agencies and philanthropic foundations, may dominate decision-making because they invest more resources. Limited or excessive power or capacity of local or national governments can also allow more powerful partners to direct activities towards their priorities rather than what is needed to address the problem.

Less common but equally pressing are partnership structure-centric problems. These can arise when affected groups, such as women or indigenous people, are not given a voice in decision-making or when weak accountability enables decisions without clear justification, public oversight, control, or evaluation, creating opportunities for favouritism, collusion, and bureaucratic corruption.

Our research shows that addressing harm requires not only correcting flawed interventions but also understanding how partnerships contribute to those flaws. To guide practitioners and support further research, our study introduces the HIDE framework: Harm, Intervention flaws, Design antecedents and Evaluative challenges. HIDE encourages researchers and practitioners to ask four simple but fundamental questions: Where and in what forms does societal harm occur? What intervention flaw produced the harm? What features of the partnership contributed to the flaw? And what counts as harm; who decides; who is responsible; and could it have been avoided?

Cross-sector partnerships remain important for addressing societal challenges. Our message is not that organisations should avoid them, but that good intentions and collaboration do not guarantee good outcomes. Societal harm needs to be taken seriously by examining what happens, how, and why, to design partnerships that deliver intended positive societal change without causing harm. Explore how this can be achieved with our card-based exercise and teaching podcast.