Setting the scene

The 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent a fundamental shift in international development, recognising the interconnectedness of business, society, and a healthy environment. This guidebook, a joint effort of The Partnering Initiative (TPI) and the United Nations, provides a practical framework for building high-impact multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) at the country level. The 2030 Agenda Partnership Accelerator aims to develop a partnership-enabling ecosystem by building skills and competencies, supporting organisational change to ensure institutions are ‘fit for partnering’, and developing efficient SDG partnership platforms worldwide. The report notes that no country is currently able to achieve the goals within sustainable natural resource limits, making partnerships the ‘new normal’ for effective delivery.

Business is identified as an essential development actor and partner. A major paradigm shift over the last decade has seen an increased understanding of the role of business in society beyond philanthropy. Responsible business activity creates livelihoods, generates taxes, and catalyses technological innovation. The guidebook outlines a path of evolution where businesses move from simple compliance and opportunistic philanthropy to strategic ‘shared value’ investments and systematic collaboration with governments and NGOs. This convergence of interests allows business resources, such as technical innovation and brand value, to be harnessed for societal benefits while tackling direct business risks and securing long-term sustainability in value chains.

Defining terms, understanding the landscape

An MSP is defined as an ongoing collaborative relationship among organisations from different stakeholder types aligning interests around a common vision and sharing risk to maximise value creation. Partnerships can range from simple resource leverage and exchange to complex system transformations. The ‘Partnership Spectrum’ distinguishes between doing ‘traditional’ development better—where partners combine resources to deliver more than the sum of their parts—and transformational development, which seeks to shift unsustainable systems into sustainable ones by tackling underlying causes. The guidebook provides a stakeholder resource map identifying the diverse contributions of academia, civil society, government, and the private sector.

MSPs create value through ‘Collaborative Advantage’, which refers to the extra power or ‘magic’ that allows a group of actors to collectively deliver more than they could independently. This results in a ‘Partnership Delta’ (ΔP), representing the additional impact delivered. Key sources of value creation include complementarity, legitimacy, shared learning, and scale. For an MSP to be successful, it must deliver both mission value—direct achievement of strategic objectives—and organisational gain, such as resource leverage or intangible benefits like increased legitimacy and social capital.

Designing and implementing a partnership

The partnering process follows a lifecycle of four interlinked stages: scoping and building, managing and maintaining, reviewing and revising, and moving on. Successful partnerships are built on four key ‘Building Blocks’: Fundamentals, Partnership Relationship, Structure and Set-up, and Management and Leadership. Fundamentals require significant net value creation and the inclusion of all key stakeholders holding essential resources. The relationship block depends on trust, equity, and mutual benefit, requiring active management of power imbalances to ensure all partners feel empowered to contribute.

Governance and management structures should be fit for purpose, ideally shifting from compliance-based ‘governance’ to support-based ‘stewardship’ models. Documentation, such as a non-legally binding partnering agreement, is recommended to enshrine vision, roles, and values. Management of MSPs goes beyond typical project management, requiring leadership at multiple levels, risk reduction, and effective communication both within and outside the partnership. Regular ‘partnership healthchecks’ are suggested to monitor the quality of the relationship and ensure the collaborative advantage is still being applied.

Annexes and tools

The guidebook includes detailed annexes on institutional capacity to partner and the implications of country context, such as political stability and the strength of civil society. It explores system transformation in depth, detailing how MSPs can use powerful levers—including policy shift, infrastructure development, and cultural norms—to drive systemic change. A suite of practical tools is provided to support practitioners, including templates for stakeholder mapping, partnering agreements, and internal prospective partnership assessments. These tools are designed to be iterative, helping organisations navigate the ‘ups and downs’ of the partnering journey from initial scoping to high-performance delivery.