Advantages of Private and Public Sector Partnerships
There are copious benefits of securing successful and sustainable partnerships between the public and private sector realized by many major agencies such as SIDA, the World Bank, and the Asian Development bank who have put considerable efforts in publishing strategy papers on private sector development. Despite these intentions, these relationships often yield vague and tenuous connections to collaborate on, bringing forth the question of the efficacy of strategic philanthropy. This difficulty of forming meaningful connections is critical to acknowledge, as evident by the emphasis that many nations have placed on fostering collaboration and meaningful connections as a necessary component of sustainable development. The benefits are there - in the case of a successful and well-aligned partnership, companies and organizations alike may see increased employee satisfaction, new investments in untapped developing regions of the world, and improved brand awareness to countless populations that may become the target markets of tomorrow.
In a well cited research paper titled Beyond an Enemy Perception: Unpacking and Engaging the Private Sector, Knorringa and Helmsing present three key reasons why practitioners in the development space should put an emphasis on private sector engagement and move past the perception of the sector being the ‘enemy’.
Private sector entrepreneurs are a key part of social development due to their skills, resources, motivations and behaviors.
Entrepreneurs are moving away from charity and instead focusing on active civic engagement and social entrepreneurship for a more holistic and sustainable approach to business.
The rhetoric around private sector engagement for development purposes is still largely untapped and needs to be confronted.
An important aspect to optimizing this relationship is to understand that the movement for corporate social responsibility is oftentimes a business tool or marketing ploy and these corporations cannot be expected to focus on developmental impacts. Instead, this is a responsibility that stakeholders and practitioners working in the development community must force a shift in.
Once private sector corporations can shift from actions that aim to satisfy their shareholders to actions that benefit their stakeholders, true growth and opportunities within these partnerships will arise.
These opportunities will allow for increased public buy-in to validate innovative new solutions and improved essential measurable results through programmatic changes within companies, as stated by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. It can then be deduced that success with public and private sector engagement relies on efficacious cross-sector collaboration and effective partnering capabilities from shared values or mission statements. Private sector engagement, according to SIDA, is “primarily seen as an instrument to achieve sustainable, poverty-reducing economic growth”, and can therefore create the largest opportunities for social returns if executed properly.
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