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Published on 1 April 2011

Rachel Houghton reviews several partnership approaches and draws on three case examples: the ECB Project, and two post-tsunami partnerships, one between the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the American Red Cross (ARC), and another between World Vision Canada and Zenon Environmental Inc. (now owned by General Electric).

The critical success factors for partnership highlighted by Rachel include:
Key Message 1: Partnerships require ‘brokering’

Key Message 2: Learning supports partnership working

Key Message 3: Prepare well – partnership management structures and the partnership agreement

Rachel reflects on the ECB experience:

...one of the lessons from the ECB project, a five-year collaborative capacity-building initiative with the goal of improving humanitarian preparedness and response, is that country-level consortia require ongoing support. ECB employs full-time ‘Field Facilitators’ to provide this support to its five consortia, which are essentially multi-stakeholder, multi-sector partnerships. The initiative is learning that the skills of this person are critical, and require much more than a capacity for project administration and coordination. This is because brokers operate as process managers; they are leaders, but leaders who downplay traditional leadership roles and facilitate and catalyse instead. This requires self-awareness and a well-developed skill set, including negotiation, active listening, empathy and conflict resolution. If humanitarian organisations are to get better at partnership working, they must try to better understand, value and develop the role of the partnership broker."

Click here to view the full article Getting better results from partnership working’

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