At the recent “Collaboration Post-2015 Forum: Where can Partnerships Take Development?” practitioners from government, civil society and the private sector all acknowledged how complicated it can be to negotiate and then successfully implement multi-stakeholder public-private partnerships (PPPs). Many participants saw this complexity as a key barrier to successful collaboration.
We see the challenges of effective cross-sectoral collaboration every day. Indeed, in our experience the complexity of a partnership goes up exponentially in proportion to the number of partners. A simple two-partner PPP can be challenging enough, but a large multi-stakeholder partnership can be especially trying to negotiate and manage.
To help address this complexity, Resonance is incorporating participatory methods (PM) as a key tool for forging consensus within large, multi-stakeholder partnerships. Participatory methods themselves are not new. First pioneered in the 1970s, PM includes a range of activities with a common thread, enabling stakeholders to play an active and influential part in decisions, which affect their lives. Although PM has been used primarily for organizational capacity building and democratic local governance, Resonance sees value that PM can provide in forging consensus among diverse stakeholders in complex PPPs.
In East Africa, Resonance’s Polycarp Ngoje is pioneering the use of PM under the PREPARED project for a series of complex partnerships that are not only cross-sectoral but cross-boundary in nature. For example, the PREPARED project is facilitating an anti-poaching partnership (APP) that brings together government wildlife services in Kenya and Tanzania, conservation NGOs, universities, technology companies and USAID together to strengthen coordination of anti-poaching efforts in the Mara landscape. The issue of poaching is a hot topic that never lacks controversy, so traditional approaches to collaboration would likely be ineffective.
Using PM, Polycarp and the PREPARED team are facilitating visioning and action planning sessions that are enabling discrete groups of organizations and institutions to move from a shared sense of purpose to common action. Partners have developed action plans that focus on a series of ‘sub-partnerships’ to pilot approaches and technologies with the goal of scaling up successful pilots starting in late 2015.
