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Trisector Partnering
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The Water and Sanitation Cluster of Business Partners for Development was established to study, explore, and promote trisector partnerships as an approach that would more effectively meet the water and sanitation needs of poor communities. In this article, Ravi Narayanan, Director of WaterAid, which hosted the Secretariat for the Water and Sanitation Cluster, reviews the evolution of the program and some of the lessons, challenges, and achievements arising from the BPD experiment.
It is impossible to go to a workshop or conference on water or almost any other development topic without the subject of partnership being high on the agenda.
It is widely recognized that global economic development must emphasize a human dimension and that globalization of opportunity brings with it the need for all players—from the public sector, the private sector, and civil society — to step up their respective responsibilities to reduce poverty and social exclusion.
But partnership means different things to different people and too often is no more than an idealistic sounding word to which the various players in society often do more than pay lip service.
In response to this, development agencies, public sector organizations, civil society groups, and the private sector came together in 1998 to study, support, and promote strategic examples of partnerships involving business, government, and civil society. These partnerships were intended to put communities at the center of their own sustainable development.
While we arrived at no models for trisector partnerships, we did arrive at some conclusions about the process of partnering. The aims of such processes revolve around building mutual understanding, fostering mutual respect, and focusing on joint problem solving and relationship management among companies, government, and civil society.
The process can be divided into exploration, building, maintenance, and completion stages. Each has been tested in detail over the 3 years of the BPD initiative. In virtually every case, an internal champion of the partnership process within an organization has boosted the process.
But institutional buy-in is also necessary to avoid the partnership being destabilized by a personnel change.
Often the partnership will be defined by a set of agreements designed to deliver on individual expectations of each participating organization through a joint action program. These agreements, or charters, vary in their nature from voluntary arrangements to formal contracts between equal parties.
The collaboration among company, government, and civil society is significant because it pools resources and risk and builds on core complementary competencies. The result is added value to what each party could achieve alone.
However, the challenge is to overcome the competition inherent in these kinds of relationships—competition in the sense that in several instances different partners will feel that they are best placed to manage a piece of work most effectively.
There is no one model for interaction. The choice of actors and modes of working depends very much on the context faced, and should build on existing assets.
Partnerships should go deeper than mere contractual relationships: an emphasis on shared decision making and resource allocation typifies this, as does the need to stress formalized governance structures. These underpin the legitimacy, accountability, effectiveness, and equity of the partnership.
Business Partners for Development (BPD) was a global network made up of more than 120 organizations that established a 3-year program of practical action on the ground with decentralized learning to test two basic hypotheses.
The first was that partnerships involving business working alongside civil society and the public sector can deliver better social development results than any of the three sectors attempting the same interventions alone.
The second was that “trisector partnerships,” as these approaches came to be called, could deliver strong and measurable business benefits, thus making the business case for corporate engagement.
The activities of BPD were divided into four clusters, each with its own specific objective and vision for the partnerships. Two clusters were chosen along industry lines—the Water and Sanitation Cluster and the Natural Resources Cluster (for the extractive industries). The other two were based on development themes: the Global Partnership for Youth Development and the Global Road Safety Partnership.
The Water and Sanitation Cluster, involving several major international companies, international and national non- government organizations (NGOs), public sector organizations, the World Bank Group, and the Department for International Development of the United Kingdom, was set up to test the partnership approach in developing sustainable and affordable water and sanitation services in poor communities.
The Secretariat, which coordinated the work and findings of this Cluster, was housed within WaterAid’s offices in London. Although BPD was originally conceived as a time-bound 3-year initiative—and the Natural Resources Cluster and overall coordinating mechanism did end in 2002—the Water and Sanitation Cluster has now moved into a second phase and is continuing its work.
So why was water and sanitation chosen as a critically important sector in which to develop methodologies for partnerships? The statistics on the lack of access of the poor to water and sanitation services in Asia and the Pacific, as well as other regions of the developing world, are well known.
The public sector is under mounting strain, expected to meet ever-increasing demands while decentralization changes the institutional landscape, with both budgets and human resources often facing cuts. Lack of coverage and poor water quality have wide impacts on health, education, and economic activity.
To address a downward spiral of falling investment and subsequent deterioration of service quality, institutional reform, policy changes, tariff restructuring, and steps to improve both governance and management of utilities are being attempted in numerous places around the world.
In several instances, this has brought in private sector participation, which is designed to harness the technical and managerial efficiencies of the private sector and, in many instances, access its investment finance. But experience has confirmed the difficulties for the public sector in shifting its role from being a service provider to regulating other providers.
In some cases, strong political and social opposition has challenged private sector participation options. Recognizing that civil society has something to offer, both public and private actors increasingly seek civil society’s involvement in the reform process.
Greater community involvement in the decision-making process, and in the planning and implementation of services, is expected to lead to increased public acceptance and ownership of systems, with benefits for both in the affordability and sustainability of systems.
The concept of trisector partnership brings these notions together. By working together, the public, private, and civil society sectors can achieve more than working independently.
Broadly speaking, this arrangement sees government providing the institutional and political mandate; private firms bringing technical and managerial skills, and often investment finance; and NGOs filling gaps in understanding the poor, facilitating civil society involvement, and providing skills the others lack.
BPD’s Water and Sanitation Cluster approached trisector partnerships from several angles to see how they could be most effective. Working with eight focus projects (three in Latin America, three in Africa, one in the Caribbean, and one in Asia — a partnership involving Thames Water in Jakarta), BPD explored how different sectors interact in partnerships: what are the drivers and constraints they face in engaging in partnerships.
We also explored how partnerships interact with different water and sanitation project components, such as the impact on partnerships of regulatory frameworks, and partnership efforts to promote innovation.
We also reviewed how partnerships between different sectors evolve—what we should expect about how partnerships are formed, how they are maintained, and how they end. At the completion of the 3-year program, we collated our experiences with those of the cluster that dealt with the extractive industries and the two thematic clusters. Several attributes were found to be common to most of the more successful experiences (see box).
While we learned the value of a systematic approach to trisector partnerships, some unsuccessful attempts taught BPD about some major challenges that could thwart the effort. An inadequate understanding of what the other partners could offer, an unwill-ingness to modify or compromise, and ineffective attempts to institutionalize the partnership can all lead to failure.
These relationships are incredibly challenging. Certainly if any one institution could effectively do it alone, it undoubtedly would. As by and large institutions can’t though, the potental benefits of the trisector partnering process are very real.
Governments can ensure the health of their citizens with safe water and effective sanitation while sharing the financial and technical burden; the private sector can meet their contractual obligations, while ensuring financial sustainability over the long term; and communities can gain a real voice in their own development as well as a sustainable, long-term water and sanitation service.
Read a more detailed analysis on trisector partnerships in water and sanitation projects.
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