As part of the TPI Blog series, we welcome this piece by Susanne Salz of Partnerships2030 and Darian Stibbe of TPI. This article considers what we can learn from multi-stakeholder-partnerships which developed during the Covid-19 pandemic for other partnerships now and in future. It is equally if not more urgent and important to address another global threat – climate change – with the mindset of rapid partnering applied during the pandemic.
From early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged the planet. COVID-19 laid bare the great inequalities within and between higher and lower income countries. As well as the terrible loss of life, people have lost livelihoods, opportunities, access to education, healthcare etc. Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that was being made, arguably already too slowly, has been reversing.
While the development of a vaccine is set to reduce the threat, the tremendous damage to economies may continue to impact people’s wellbeing for years to come.
Worse still, lurking behind, there is an even greater threat that will put the impact of COVID-19 completely in the shade: climate breakdown. While the rapid development and dissemination of a vaccine is impressive, it is trivial in comparison to the global actions that will need to be taken if we are to avoid the worst of climate perils.
However, this is not to say that we should be hopeless or helpless. In fact, the COVID crisis demonstrated a number of phenomena that gives us cause for optimism in at least three ways:
- Firstly, when faced with a severe, urgent and common threat, all societal sectors –business, government, civil society organisations and others – stepped up and all had something to contribute.
- Secondly, we saw the power of collaboration in action at every level. In communities, local restaurants worked with civil society groups to deliver food to vulnerable people. At the global level an unprecedented international public-private collaboration resulted in the warp speed development and regulation of vaccines, and distribution through the Covax international partnership.
- Thirdly, we have seen that if the incentive is strong enough, we can change the way we live and work, in the case of COVID, almost literally overnight.
Imagine if we could harness even a fraction of that all-of-society collaborative effort, on an ongoing, sustained basis, to effect the transformations required to avert the looming climate crises.
People often cite the African proverb: if you want to go fast, go alone – if you want to go far, go together. The reality is, in the case of climate breakdown, we don’t have this choice. We must go fast and we must go together.
Recently, the slogan and the idea to “build back better” after this crisis has been popular. It is worthwhile to apply this idea, which Winston Churchill famously phrased with the words to “never let a good crisis go to waste”. Yet the term and idea to build back better refers to the past and then aims to incrementally improve upon that flawed reality. What would be even more worthwhile is to “build forwards” which implies considering the world we want to live in in future and then building the foundations for that future world in the present. By switching from building back better to building forwards, our key point of reference changes from the past to the future.
It has been said all too often that we need to diverge from business as usual. Protests and movements such as the Black Lives Matter and the Fridays for Future are demanding radical change. To achieve such a vision it is essential that the future rather than the past becomes our guiding star.
As SDG 17 on Partnerships for the Goals emphasises, all actors across the globe must unite and take actions in the transformation needed to create the future we want. The difficulty is that partnering across sectors comes with significant challenges. It is hard to align the interest of diverse stakeholders towards a shared vision that can deliver value for all. Partnerships must deal with intrinsic tensions across societal sectors. They must cope with the different values, cultures, interests, funding arrangements and vocabularies of all the partners. They need commitment, leadership and trust across partners. Partnerships currently take too long to develop and deliver impact compared with the urgency of the climate crisis and global sustainable development more generally.
The experiences of COVID-19 show that, despite those challenges, we can move fast and together when the threat is urgent enough. We must learn from and build on the positive experiences of COVID-19 partnering to become much faster in initiating, implementing and iterating partnerships against the oncoming crises of recession and climate change.
TPI and Partnerships2030 will support new and existing partnerships in this spirit and are exploring how to adapt tools and protocols to support rapid partnering.
This article was previously published on TPI
