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Cross-sector partnership between government, business, and civil society organizations is a well-established approach in practice to tackle societal grand challenges such as climate change, global health issues, and social inequalities. A more challenging issue is understanding if such partnerships function as effective interventions. Although there is a vast literature on cross-sector partnerships, providing answers for how to design partnerships, manage actors’ power differences, and create governance structures, their effectiveness is surprisingly less clear.

Our research, published in the Journal of Management Studies, was motivated by addressing the effectiveness of partnerships in the context of societal grand challenges. Early on we realized that assessing partnerships’ social and environmental impacts by examining empirical studies over the last 20 years is no easy feat. Understanding the partnership studies was far more complex than anticipated due to the vast array of approaches and analytical choices that studies adopted. We therefore decided to develop an analytical framework that aims to systematize the analysis of partnership studies as the first step in improving the rigor of analyzing partnerships’ effectiveness.

How to understand partnership studies?

Our framework’s first insight is seeing cross-sector partnerships as ‘interventions’ aimed at tackling societal grand challenges. To better understand how effective a partnership is, we first need to know which grand challenge it tries to tackle. This might sound obvious, but a surprising number of partnership studies fail to explain what challenge they focus on. By firmly placing partnerships in the context of grand challenges, we further stress that they can only be effective if they make a tangible contribution at a societal level. While it is great if a business can benefit from being involved in a partnership, we only consider it effective if the contribution stretches beyond the firm level. Next, we determine that the nature of this societal-level contribution to a grand challenge can vary significantly.

As our second insight, we distinguish between studies with an analytical focus on transformative versus mitigative interventions. Transformative interventions are bold in nature as they try to get to the root cause of a grand challenge. They attempt to create significant change in the long run by having a fundamental impact on the causes of the challenge. By contrast, mitigative interventions are more modest in nature as they only try to soften the blow of current impacts of a grand challenge. In the context of climate emergencies, for example, transformative interventions would aim to fundamentally change parts of the economy that generate the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change. Mitigative interventions, instead, would focus on helping vulnerable communities to deal with the already occurring negative impacts of climate change such as heatwaves and floods.

As a third insight, we show that partnership studies vary in their analytical approach: they are either problem-centric or solution-centric. Problem-centric studies introduce a grand challenge, such as poverty, diseases, or environmental degradation, examine its social and environmental features, and capture the social and/or environmental effects of the intervention. These studies assess whether a cross-sector partnership has contributed to tackling the underlying social or environmental problem. Solution-centric studies instead start with a specific solution and then problematize this solution by identifying barriers to its successful implementation. Such studies essentially analyze to what extent cross-sector partnerships help implement a specific solution but do not question whether the solution also addresses the underlying problem.  

Key takeaways for researchers and managers

Our analytical framework’s three insights have several implications for management research and practice, as follows:

1. By conceptualizing cross-sector partnerships as interventions to tackle societal grand challenges such as climate change, global health issues, and social inequalities, we open the black box of how partnerships can have such societal-level impact. Grand challenges are complex, by definition, so it is important to first isolate which part of a challenge a partnership can be expected to address in any meaningful way. While thinking big demonstrates the ambition needed to tackle such challenges, in practice a cross-sector partnership can usually make a modest contribution to the societal-level impact. An implication for managers, therefore, is to establish what can be reasonably expected from the partnership before overclaiming its potential impact. Clearly articulating early on the intervention’s aspirational societal-level impacts can provide clarity and focus contributing to the partnership’s effectiveness.

• Cross-sector partnerships have different levels of ambition and can be either focused on solving the underlying problem or scrutinizing an existing solution. The scale of societal grand challenges calls for bold, transformative responses and hence a problem-centric focus. Yet, we suggest that not each intervention should be of a transformative nature. A ‘small wins’ approach, whereby a partnership mitigates a specific challenge’s adverse impact, can also be considered an effective contribution. Such mitigative interventions can further adopt a solution-centric lens; that is  to look beyond current solutions and scrutinize the potential of getting closer to addressing the root cause. This combined approach might reveal unexpected ways of improving the intervention process with an eye on addressing the societal grand challenge.

• The three points of our framework centre around the significance of considering cross-sector partnerships as interventions for grand challenges, specifying the nature of the grand challenge, and clearly articulating the impact of the underlying problem. We argue that it is essential to formulate a clear definition of the underlying problem by drawing on research from different disciplines and the perspectives of different stakeholders on the grand challenge. Further, we see a need for aligning the specific problem with the intervention as well as aligning the intervention with the social and environmental impacts that can reasonably be expected.

Designing cross-sector partnerships and other similar interventions to address societal grand challenges is not easy as these challenges are complex, and it is not always evident how interventions will develop and what effects they will create. Our study provides important insights into how researchers and managers can design robust interventions and conduct a thorough analysis of their impact on making a meaningful contribution to tackling societal grand challenges.