Abstract:
Partnerships involving public and private actors are becoming key institutional pathways for enabling international development and the delivery of public goods. This is true across three domains, in the direct delivery of public services and infrastructure; in effecting increasingly large public resource transfers, particularly trans-border; and in the co-design, promotion and stewardship of new rules for market and non-market actors. These historically distinct domains are converging, creating a generation of hybrid partnerships that blend service delivery, resource transfer and rule-setting functions.
The performance of such partnerships depends on how well they make decisions and their legitimacy to key stakeholders. This in turn depends on their governance and accountability structures, processes and norms. This is particularly true for partnerships that become conduits, amplifiers and arbiters in the allocation of public resources, but is also the case where they are de facto stewards of public goods, whether through commercial contract or as standard setters.
The governance and accountability of such partnerships raise specific challenges, as well as those more familiar to traditions and practices in the corporate community and the public sector. Notable is the need to shape relationships between organizations with highly diverse philosophies, rules and practices governing their own governance and accountability.
A Framework is proposed to guide the governance and accountability of such partnerships, the first of its kind. The ‘Partnership Governance and Accountability Framework’ has been developed and tested over two years across diverse partnerships and experts, and offers a sound foundation for advancing a more systematized approach to the effective governance and accountability of multi-stakeholder, or public-private partnerships in the future.
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