Conference Agenda

Business-led partnerships, e.g. focusing on inclusive business or sustainable value chains, are central to development policies and projects. Such partnerships originate from the premise that complementary resources from different sectors are needed to successfully address sustainability challenges, and that an active role for business contributes to well-functioning markets and growing economies. However, the past decades have demonstrated that the effectiveness and legitimacy of such partnerships require critical scrutiny.

Although partnerships may be instigated by a push away from government, the relationship of partnerships with government is vital. Most importantly because partnerships unfold in existing institutional settings, which are for important parts co-shaped by government. As such, connections with the public sector are expected to matter in realizing development objectives. To name but a few examples of how partnerships and government are related, governments might be essential in addressing or coordinating fragmented aid landscapes, government support may be vital for scaling and sustaining partnership initiatives, partnerships might need to tailor their practices and processes to locally embedded practices of problem-solving, may need to include government to address existing asymmetric power relations, or may hold corporations to account and regulate or curb unwanted corporate practices.

However, the ways in which connections with (local) governments foster the functioning of partnerships remain conceptually understudied. Although the critical role of governments is increasingly acknowledged, articulations of partnership – government relations frequently reduce public institutions to passive ‘enabling environments’ or may suggest bypassing government institutions entirely to avoid unwanted practices associated with government, including poor quality state institutions or clientelism.

In this panel we would like to explore the ways in which partnerships may (constructively) engage with government and explore how the connection between partnership and government interacts with objectives of inclusive development.

Inclusive agribusiness (IAB) is increasingly viewed as a means to transform food systems. The approach aims to include small-scale producers and entrepreneurs equitably in agri-food chains and enable resource-scarce consumers access to nutritious food, in a commercially viable manner. By addressing market failures and coordination problems, inclusive agribusiness is assumed to transform the fabric of the food system. However, many IABs remain isolated and have limited effectiveness in addressing the root causes of poverty, inequality, and environmental degradation. Despite growing support for inclusive business approaches by the public sector, it is largely unknown how inclusive business may foster change beyond their direct interventions to support the transformation of wider institutional contexts.

Crowding in, whereby other actors in the food system adjust their practices in reaction to and in accordance with the inclusive business, frequently features as a pathway towards system change. However, there is limited conceptual unpacking of crowding in, and much is still unknown regarding the conditions and processes of crowding in on inclusive business initiatives. In this paper, we focus specifically on processes of crowding in related to the public sector. We aim to identify conceptual pathways of crowding in by public actors on inclusive business, detail the conditions for crowding in, and identify leverage points to foster crowding in.

To that end, we take an abductive strategy and use inductive and deductive elements to connect conceptual approaches with empirical observations. We explore various relevant literatures including institutional political economy, value chain literature, partnerships literature and public administration, to conceptually capture pathways of public actors crowding in on inclusive business. Simultaneously, we study an empirical manifestation of crowding in related to KDPL, a farmer-owned dairy company in Kenya, supported by the Dutch incubator program 2SCALE. We focus on a case of crowding in by the County Agriculture Office, which increasingly acknowledges the inclusive business as linkage between county and farmer, resulting in increased support for the objectives of the inclusive business.

Tentative results demonstrate the government deploys a combination of two pathways: one organizational-interests-informed, whereby public actors align with IAB to stimulate more proactive social and environmental improvements, and one issue-informed, whereby the public sector incentivizes inclusive business as a source of jobs, innovation, or growth. We conclude that under conditions of resource scarcity inclusive business might complement county government resources, in turn enjoying a ‘license to operate’ from the government, functioning as flywheel effect of reciprocity.

Multi-stakeholder partnerships are expected to play a significant role in realizing Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals. However, there is a lack of understanding about the transformative potential of these partnerships and the type of transformations they enact. This paper addresses this gap by examining whether transnational multi-stakeholder partnerships use transformative frames when describing their purpose and goals and, if so, what type of instruments for achieving transformations are proposed. The study operationalizes four frames of green transformation to analyze a sample of 179 partnerships. These frames include technocentric, marketization, state-led, and citizen-led transformations.

The study applies a dictionary of key words and concepts, derived from academic and grey literature, on the mission statements, annual reports, and other text-data produced by the partnerships. The framework uses automated content analysis and structural topic modeling to analyze 179 active transnational multi-stakeholder partnerships for sustainable development. The results of the analysis are then used in a multivariate regression model to determine which type of partnership uses which frame of transformation.

The results suggest that multi-stakeholder partnerships are biased towards state-led and technocentric frames of transformation, rather than disruptive – citizen-led – frames such as degrowth or post-growth. The results raise questions about the capacity and ambition of these partnerships to contribute to transformative societal changes. The findings are discussed in the context of renewed interest in multi-stakeholder partnerships for achieving the sustainable development goals and the reasons behind the preference for certain frames over others.

Inclusive development refers to “development that includes marginalized people, sectors and countries in social, political and economic processes for increased human well-being, social and environmental sustainability, and empowerment”. Inclusive development interventions and policies should therefore focus on how 'to make the last count first', instead of 'leaving no one behind'. This implies that development stakeholders, create the necessary conditions and criteria for the most marginalized to be reached and empowered to participate primarily on their own conditions and priorities. Many private and public sector stakeholders have been paying lip-service to 'inclusive development' without thinking deeply about whom, what and how to include the marginalized and how to work with them for longer term sustainable impact. Private businesses and companies want to increasingly realize a positive social and/or ecological impact, in line their own inclusive development aims, or in relation to an external framework such as the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals or the Green Transition. Irrespective of the framing, the governance of realizing inclusive development objectives hinges on (i) internal alignment with employees' values and work ambitions (ii) external alignment with real-life issues and challenges in the (local) context of business operation, and on (iii) strategic leadership that has internalized a transition towards inclusive development business outcomes. This implies the development of internal and external connections that are meaningfully centered around the priority developmental issues and stakeholders. Private sector businesses and companies could liaise with governments to build such networks, define inclusive development protocols for different sectors and monitor the advances made by the field.

A growing body of literature suggests that sustainability partnerships contribute to transformational change. They provide a platform to build trust, facilitate new interactions across boundaries, encourage partners to take action in their own companies and develop joint actions to address sustainability challenges However, the past decades have demonstrated that the promises of such partnerships are not always met. This results, amongst others, in new calls for legislation, emphasizing the divide between government-led and business-led sustainability measures. An example is the political debate about replacing RBC partnerships by legislation or searching for mutual synergy.

This paper will analyse the mutual synergy between government-led measures and business-led partnerships. It will do so by departing from the classical (and possible controversial) public administration debate about policy-mixes and policy coherence. A policy mix refers to the idea that to effectively address complex challenges, such as sustainability, different policy instruments must be integrated into policy mixes that deal with the different dimensions and leverage point of a problem. It is up to governmental actors to design and implement coherent sets of policy instruments that avoid clashes between them and to take advantage of their potential complementarities.

Our case study is about the Dutch partnerships for international RBC. Companies, trade unions, civil society organisations, who operate in the same sector (e.g Garments & Textile, Banking or Gold) are engaged in RBC partnerships. They jointly identify risks in their supply chain, develop measures to address them and organize access to remedy. These multistakeholder partnerships result in agreements to commit to tangible outcomes based on the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and the UNGPs. What is the role of these partnership in an effective and inclusive due diligence policy mix of the Netherlands and the EU?

Finally the paper will critically discuss the pros and contras of the policy mix perspective on analysing relationship of partnerships with governments