Multi-stakeholder Partnerships for Sustainability: Designing Decision-Making Processes for Partnership Capacity

Adriane MacDonald (), Amelia Clarke () and Lei Huang ()
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Adriane MacDonald: University of Lethbridge
Amelia Clarke: University of Waterloo
Lei Huang: The State University of New York at Fredonia

Journal of Business Ethics, 2019, vol. 160, issue 2, No 7, 409-426

Abstract: Abstract To address the prevalence and complexities of sustainable development challenges around the world, organizations in the business, government, and non-profit sectors are increasingly collaborating via multi-stakeholder partnerships. Because complex problems can be neither understood nor addressed by a single organization, it is necessary to bring together the knowledge and resources of many stakeholders. Yet, how these partnerships coordinate their collaborative activities to achieve mutual and organization-specific goals is not well understood. This study takes an organization design perspective of collaborative decision-making processes to explore how they impact the effectiveness of multi-stakeholder partnerships. We compare the decision-making processes of 94 sustainability-focused multi-stakeholder partnerships and find that collaborative decision-making has an indirect and positive impact on partnership capacity through systems that keep partners informed, coordinate partner interactions, and facilitate ongoing learning. The implications of this study for multi-stakeholder partnership research and practice are that partnership capacity is contingent on the design of decision-making processes, as well as internal mechanisms that coordinate and monitor collaborative activities.

Keywords: Collaborative governance; Community sustainability plans; Cross-sector social partnerships; Local Agenda 21; Multi-stakeholder partnerships; Partnership capacity; Sustainable development; Sustainable cities; Stakeholder engagement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10551-018-3885-3

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