By Lea Stadtler & Özgü Karakulak

In their recent book “Net Positive,” Paul Polman and Andrew Winston make a call that “the regular bias for action that any good leader has needs to become a bias for transformative, collaborative action.” Cross-sector partnerships (CSPs), which bring together actors from the business, public, and civil-society sectors to address pressing social issues, present a popular means to enable such transformative, collaborative action. However, looking at CSPs in the area of global health shows that many of them are designed for “quick fixes” rather than for transformative change.

As we describe in our recent Business & Society article, there is a tendency to design global CSPs around product-based solutions that operate in parallel to existing structures and are driven by international partners. For example, the CSPs we analyzed in our study focused on the development or dissemination of specific drugs in parallel to, or on top of, public health systems. Such product focus typically originated from high-level deliberations of international actors, such as international companies, industry associations, or corporate foundations, together with United Nations agencies, international civil society organizations, and/or multilateral and bilateral aid organizations.

The above “detached” CSP design seems attractive for the partners: It speeds up the CSP formation and facilitates its internal coordination. However, it may also have unexpected effects for the broader issue context (in this example, health). Such effects include increased fragmentation, poor coordination, and duplication among CSP initiatives that risk overwhelming local capacities, for example, by adding administrative burden to local health workers and ministries. Moreover, CSPs may end up working with resources that subsequently become scarce elsewhere in the system, such as by diverting funds and qualified staff away from basic health services.

From a detached to embedded design: How can product-focused CSPs support transformative change?

Adapting CSPs designs to countervail such effects is not easy as there is an inherent trade-off: The more global CSPs expand their approach beyond a narrow product focus, such as by adding capacity-building programs, working with local partners, and involving existing structures, the more complicated the CSP management becomes. In turn, the more complicated the CSP management, the less attractive it is for international companies, donors, and other partners to join and stay involved. Hence, striking a balance between CSP efficiency and local capacity building for transformative change is a complex endeavor. We found that CSPs with a product focus may achieve a greater balance by better embedding this focus in the local issue context. They may do so by:

• Adding capacity-building components at the product-system interfaces. For example, we show how immunization CSPs, in reaction to the drawbacks of their detached design, started to help national authorities strengthen their immunization services when delivering CSP-sponsored vaccines. Likewise, the drug-development CSPs we analyzed increasingly engaged, supported, and helped develop local partners and structures, such as local laboratories and health networks.
• Enhancing field-level coordination. To countervail fragmentation and duplication among initiatives, CSP partners may set up cross-CSP coordination meetings, initiate joint capacity-building platforms and initiatives, align their local processes, and share resources, such as local facilities. Greater coordination and synergistic actions in our study took the form of CSPs collaborating for strengthening health systems via an umbrella partnership, funding platform, and the relocation of secretariats to a single building to intensify collaboration and better coordinate operations and political advocacy. In another case, representatives from one CSP joined the supervisory board of another CSP to enhance coordination between the CSPs, for example, to better strengthen routine immunization programs.

Designing CSPs to address pressing social issues is not easy. Partners have to anticipate the implications not only for the CSP management, the beneficiaries, and the partner organizations, but also for the broader issue context in which they are embedded. To countervail unintended disruptions at the system level and help pave the road towards greater collaborative and transformative change, we encourage partners of product-focused CSPs to support local capacity building at the product-system interfaces and foster coordination with other initiatives from the outset.

References

Polman, P. & Winston, A. 2021. Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take. Harvard Business Review Press.

Stadtler, L., & Karakulak, Ö. 2022. The Targeted “Solution” in the Spotlight: How a Product Focus Influences Collective Action Within and Beyond Cross-Sector Partnerships. Business & Society, 61(3): 606-648.