Abstract
The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 17 encourages global partnerships for sustainable development, of which cross-sector partnerships (CSPs) are a particularly important mechanism. Yet, a good amount of evidence is emerging that CSPs fail to match their objectives and often fall into inactivity. In this paper, we argue for a new conceptualization of why partners form CSPs that illuminates these common failings and suggests ways to overcome them. We put the question of the partners’ perceived social risks at the center of CSP formation and suggest CSPs emerge primarily as a social risk mitigation practice. Using semi-structured interviews to explore how partners understand social risk, we catalogue how multi-national corporations (MNCs), governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and others perceive the likelihood and consequences of social risks. Our analysis, grounded in convention theory (CT), identifies six perceived social risks and three overarching mitigation practices. Our contribution is broadly to the CSP literature as well as to an emerging stream that focuses on social risk.
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