Presentations and cases: Towards more effective poverty alleviation and development?

April 15, 2011  -  Exploring why, when and how to partner with business to contribute to sustainable change. That was the topic of the learning event ‘civil society - business cooperation in the South’, organized by PSO in close collaboration with ICCO, Centre for Development Innovation (WUR/CDI), the Partnership Resource Centre (PrC) and civil society organisations (CSOs) from India, South Africa, Peru and Kenya.

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Event report: Civil society: business cooperation in the South

During this event, some seventy participants discussed the challenges and opportunities that arise when the two different societal sectors enter into a cooperative relationship. It turns out that a) knowing who you are, b) being explicit about the joint objective of your collaboration, and c) understanding each other’s role are core conditions for success.

When deciding to partner, CSOs and businesses should prepare themselves for a bumpy ride. Authentic partnerships between CSOs and business require hard work from both sides on mutual understanding, respect, trust and endurance. But when it works out, cooperation seems to be rewarding.

'Inspiratrice' Gerrie introduces of the event.

Over the past years cooperation between CSOs and businesses has emerged as promising for supporting sustainable socio-economic development. In the North and South, strategic alliances have been forged to face the complicated challenges of local contexts resulting from a globalizing world.

Partnerships between CSOs and businesses arise worldwide in various shapes and forms. They are driven by a variety of reasons from both sectors and show a wide range of approaches and collaborative models: from pure funding relations to (employee) transactional arrangements, to value chain approaches and complex multi-stakeholder processes.

The public event on April 5 was introduced as “exploratory”. An underlying assumption was that inter-sector collaboration requires specific capabilities that might differ from the usual relationship building capabilities. Also, it was assumed that Southern-based experiences of civil society-business cooperation have an added value when it comes to development issues, as they are better connected to the ultimate beneficiaries.

Therefore, in preparation of the event PSO asked the Change Alliance (a network of which ICCO and CDI are members) to identify and document cases of inter-sector collaboration (from Kenya, Peru, South Africa and India) that served as an input for lively discussions on tempting themes.

Setting the Stage
Rob van Tulder, Professor of International Business-Society Management at the Rotterdam School of Management and Academic Director of the Partnership Resource Centre (PrC), laid the groundwork for the discussions of the day by introducing the background paper for the learning event “Civil Society Partnering with Business: On shifting Identities, New Opportunities and Complex Challenges”.

He shared the main lessons of the research of the PrC on cooperation between civil society and business and introduced a categorization of the many kinds of CSOs and their roles and position within the triangle of State, Market and Civil Society(Link to PPT presentation RvT). Throughout his presentation he emphasized the importance of clarifying the identity of the CSO and the role it aims to play within the partnership.

Cases
Next, the Southern cases were presented by Mrs. Sonia Martinez (CEDRO-Peru link), Mrs. Nivedita Narain e.a (PRADAN, SST, SRF ltd –India link) , Mr. Ulrich Klins (SAT-Southern Africa link) and Mr. Bernard Muchiri (HSCS-Kenya) in parallel workshops.

Back in the plenary session, participants viewed a video on the Kenya case and “buzzed” about the commonalities in the four cases. Achieving co-ownership of the problem and project by CSO and business; different drivers for relating leading to different objectives; the importance of the core values and principles of the different stakeholder and the need to define common values; and designing the process jointly were mentioned as some cross-cutting issues.

Key note speaker Shankar Venkateswaran, director of SustainAbility India, then offered the participants some first insights into emergent trends and challenges for Southern CSOs, and lessons learnt so far (link PPT Shankar).

In his presentation he touched upon the issue of responsibility of CSOs to ‘influence the way businesses do business’, the changing roles of both CSOs and businesses in society as a whole, the deepening of markets (CSOs increasingly use markets as well) and how partnerships seems to be the way forward. Shankar stressed that CSOs in their relations with businesses should understand clearly what the main drivers of businesses are. CSOs should also be more focused on solutions that are evidence-based, balanced and do-able in partnership with business, instead of merely identifying problems.

Throughout the day, some key issues were identified as pivotal for the success of inter-sector collaboration, including:

• Identity and role awareness: “Know who you are or want to be” and CSO risk management with regard to the possible loss of credibility towards its constituency
• Empathy: “CSOs and business must learn to think from each others’ perspectives”
• Trust: “Don’t trust yourself, don’t trust the other, but help each other”
• Balancing result- and process orientation: “Start with small transactions, small successes”
• Vision and leadership:“ What is the social and economic change we are after?”
• Management of dependencies: “Make power issues transparent and define your non-negotiables”
• Inclusion of government: “Consider the appropriateness of a tripartite partnership”

The day was skillfully facilitated by “inspiratrice” Miss Gerry, the personification of a multi-multi-multi stakeholder process. She set the tone for the day with the proclamation that ‘today we are going to work very hard and we are going to enjoy it.’

The participants indeed worked hard. Final reflections at the end of the day led to a call for more evidence based learning on civil society cooperation with business using existing practices as a starting point. Participants supported the idea to systematically document many more cases and to share the lessons learnt within the CS sector, as well as the business sector (“they also need to learn”). Some themes that were considered important and merit being explored further were:

• The rationale for CSO-Business collaboration within a CSO’s Theory of Change;
• How to use the identified added values of partners (social and economic) to consciously negotiate the most appropriate relationship formula;
• Strengthening the capabilities to relate and communicate across sector boundaries;
• Managing power dynamics in inter-sector relationships;
• Development of a toolkit for relationship management (understanding each others’ languages, engage with identity and formulated non-negotiables, risk assessment tools etc.)

The organizing committee (PSO, PrC, ICCO and WuR/CDI) committed itself to facilitating a proper follow up.

More information
Click here for the presentations and cases