North-South Partnerships as Development Agents. Assessing the change potential of cross-sector partnerships

Over the past decade research as well as practice have praised partnerships across private and public sectors as the new transnational governance mechanism to address international development goals. Although some concern has been raised as to the effectiveness of these cross-sector partnerships, very little is known about the internal properties and dynamics of partnerships for development and how commercial interests influence their potential for contributing to poverty alleviation in the Global South. In this paper, we shed light on the influence of commercial interest on the development potential of cross-sector partnerships by investigating a North-South micro-partnership, which is widely promoted as ‘best-practice’. We review and apply three different kinds of assessment frameworks, in order to show their respective contributions and blind-spots. We demonstrate that while standard cross-sector partnership assessment frameworks, such as the Collaborative Value Creation framework and Impact Value Creation provide conceptual scaffolding and process models to describe the elements in partnership efficiency and their mutual relationship, they fall short in terms of conceptualizing the conditions under which partnerships have development potential. This is because these widely used frameworks assess the efficiency of partnerships without reference to the external reality they are part of and address.  Drawing on Blowfield and Dolan’s criteria for business as a development agent, we argue that in order to assess the development potential of a partnership, the assessment framework must take the needs and benefits of beneficiaries into account in all steps of the partnership process. This leads to the presentation of a proposal for an alternative assessment framework in which beneficiaries play a key role.