Shaping Global Partnerships for a Post-2015 World
Over the last few years, the Stanford Social Innovation Review has studied and worked with many local collective impact initiatives that are helping solve a social problem within a specific community, city, region, or country in an effort to answer questions from the global development community such as: How does collective impact apply to cross-sector partnerships at the global level? What is different for global partnerships? What are best practices for leading and managing global partnerships?
To address these questions, a collective impact lens was used to research and evaluate a range of global partnerships, with a particular emphasis on six diverse initiatives: Roll Back Malaria Partnership, Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, Global Road Safety Partnership, the World Economic Forum’s New Vision for Agriculture, Global Partnership for Education, and World Wide Fund for Nature.
The paper reinforces the mantra that achieving key outcomes in health, education, economic development, and environmental sustainability requires working together across sectors in new and more effective ways. Isolated or sub-scale efforts tend to fail due to partnership approaches incommensurate with the complexity of global challenges. What’s needed, as is reflected in the core values of the Global Road Safety Partnership, is effective cross-sector collaboration that mobilizes the international community while also driving measurable progress on the ground.
