What Is Partnership Effectiveness?
Conceptualizing and assessing the effectiveness of transnational forms of governance such as public-private and multistakeholder partnerships, with multiple configurations across different scales and jurisdictions, is a complex task. For the purposes of this volume, we define effectiveness as the contribution of partnerships to problem solving and sustainability, through a set of pathways that affect actors and their collective capacity to advance relevant objectives and public purpose. This conceptualization starts with the premise that the effectiveness of a governance institution or instrument is ultimately judged by the extent to which it addresses or contributes to solving the specific problems that are the subject of governance. The problem-solving premise is indeed at the heart of a substantial literature on the effectiveness of formal international institutions and environmental regimes. As Keohane (1996) stipulates, âin this broad normative and analytic sense, the proof of effectiveness is to be seen in the improvement of the targeted aspect of the natural environmentâ (p.l4). In a synthesis on environmental regime effectiveness, Young (2011) highlights that âperhaps the core concern is the extent to which regimes contribute to solving or mitigating the problems that motivate those people who create the regimesâ (p.19854).
However, the literature on institutional effectiveness is also quick to note that the problem-solving effects of governance regimes are often difficult to discern empirically and that, in addition, they may be an insufficient measure of effectiveness. On the one hand, even if the implementation of a partnership appears to successfully advance a set of objectives, its actual effectiveness may be endogenous to its level of ambition or the ways in which a specific problem is defined (Downs et al. 1996; Mitchell et al. 2020; Miles et al. 2002; Young 2011). Moreover, as partnerships are typically embedded in other layers of governance, one of the challenges is to disentangle their effects from those of other related institutions, as well as from exogenous factors such as changes in economic trajectories and social practices. More generally, evaluating effectiveness requires a counterfactual consideration of what would have been plausible to achieve in the absence of a public-private or multistakeholder partnership, and attempting to establish the pathways through which the partnership has influenced relevant processes, behavior, and outcomes (Carbonnier et al. 2011; Haas, Keohane and Levy et al. 1993; Young and Levy 1999). Such analysis furthermore needs to consider preexisting conditions, the effects of other institutions, as well as alternative explanations for the attribution of influence.
On the other hand, more ambitious conceptions of effectiveness would go beyond assessing the impact of a governance instrument on a specific problem in order to examine critically how the problem was defined in the first place, and if such framing is considered adequate, efficient and just (Keohane 1996; Miles et al. 2002; Mitchell et al. 2006; Young 2011).1 They would inquire about intended and unintended effects, be they positive or negative, which may materialize beyond the problem-solving capacity of an initiative (Young and Levy 1999). Such analysis would consider to what extent and how an initiative may contribute to cumulative, catalytic or disruptive effects in advancing aggregate sustainability at different scales from the local to the global (Clark and Harley 2020; Hale 2020a; Michaelowa et al. 2021; van der Ven, Bernstein and Hoffmann 2017). Moreover, it has been theorized that relative effectiveness may depend on the problem structure of an issue, and the extent to which an instrument makes progress in addressing a âdifficultâ problem because of its complexity or gridlocked politics, in comparison to tackling a more benign and tractable problem (Miles et al. 2002; Mitchell 2006). Finally, the extent and durability of governance effects have to do with the distributional and behavioral impacts of different instruments with respect to affected actors. Governance regimes that create conditions for behavioral change, positive incentives for relevant constituencies, and supportive coalitions tend to produce more stable collaboration and greater long-term effectiveness (Aklin and Mildenberger 2020; Andonova 2003; Dai 2007; Haas, Keohane and Levy 1993; Ostrom 1990; Young 2011).
It is because of such considerations, that our definition of effectiveness includes the pathways through which partnerships may affect actors and outcomes, and their contribution to creating different capacities both for addressing specific issues and advancing aggregate sustainability (Clark and Harley 2020; Young 2020). This implies that partnerships can produce different kinds of effects, including with respect to different actors and constituencies. As Gutner and Thompson (2010, p.233) point out, the performance of a given institution is to an extent âin the eye of the beholder;â it may vary with respect to what objectives are being evaluated and by which audience. In this sense, our emphasis on the pathways to effectiveness seeks to capture both the processes and the mechanisms through which different types of effects are produced for different actors, both directly and through second-order or unintended impacts. We posit that such a disaggregated approach allows us to gain a better understanding of the contributions that a partnership makes to creating different capacities for addressing issues that pertain to sustainability.2 It further challenges both scholars and policy makers to inquire critically about the extent to which partnership outcomes, that advance solutions to a specific problem, may detract from prospects of attaining inclusive social well-being with respect to other issues or actors, and therefore their ultimate contribution to sustainability. Because of such considerations, the definition of effectiveness and the theoretical framework that we elaborate in the next section seek to provide a tool to document multiple types of partnership effects and, importantly, the interplay and tensions that may appear between them with respect to a broad understanding of sustainability that depends on the complex interplay between earth systems and societal factors and institutions.
Our conceptualization also takes into account the organizational specificities of partnership governance and the ways they differ from more formal institutions such as regulations or international regimes. Partnerships exemplify an informal and typically non-legalized form of agreements on a set of objectives and public purpose, with explicit and implicit functions and means of steering behavior (Andonova 2017; Pattberg and Widerberg 2016; Schäferhoff, Campe and Kaan 2009; Westerwinter 2019). They are often, at least initially, driven by like-minded groups of actors that find common interest in focusing on smaller, more tractable components of complex global problems, such as climate change, biodiversity conservation or global health (Andonova 2017). Therefore, the solutions advanced by partnerships typically target a narrower set of objectives rather than comprehensive problem solving (Horan 2019). For instance, partnerships can jump-start the creation of new financial instruments to support climate mitigation or access to specific medical technologies, but no single partnership can (or has the authority to) provide a comprehensive normative and regulatory framework for addressing complex global issues, such as climate change or global health. The nature of collective action through partnerships has raised critical considerations about the agendas that they prioritize and the role of power in shaping the goals of partnership arrangements, their representativeness, and the discourses that surround them (Bäckstrand 2006; Faul 2016; Mert 2009, 2015; Utting and Zammit 2009).
Simultaneously, individual partnerships are typically embedded in a broader universe of transnational initiatives, formal treaties and domestic policies within a particular context (Abbott et al. 2015; Andonova 2017; 2010; Biermann and Kim 2020; Hale 2020b; Horton and Koremenos 2020). They reflect multiple normative bases and professional interests of different partners. The embeddedness of partnerships provides further reasons for the need for a framework that examines the mechanisms through which partnerships produce effects on actors, collaborative processes and different aspects of sustainability. We therefore expect that with respect to aggregate notions of problem solving and sustainability, partnerships are likely to contribute specific and variable outcomes, and their effects are likely to be best examined in terms of complementarity, durability or even trade-offs, alongside that of other initiatives. We critically scrutinize different types of effects that materialize or fail to do so across scales of governance, what types of positive reinforcement or contradictions they create and for whom, and how they fit within larger institutional landscapes. Furthermore, within a single partnership, our conceptual framework allows the examination of the extent to which that partnership may contribute to problem solving and sustainability through different pathways to, and conditions of, effectiveness that we identify. We thus adopt a less linear and more fine-grained approach compared to existing studies, to explore intended and unintended consequences, as well as their direction with respect to actors and layered sets of governance objectives. The next two sections elaborate our theoretical framework, which draws on approaches across multiple disciplines to propose first a typology of pathways to partnership effects, followed by a set of conditions for effectiveness, which guide our inquiry and the empirical analyses presented in subsequent chapters of the book.
