Abstract
Despite the burgeoning literature on the governance and impact of cross-sector partnerships in the past two decades, the debate on how and when these collaborative arrangements address globally relevant problems and contribute to systemic change remains open. Building upon the notion of wicked problems and the literature on governing such wicked problems, this paper defines harnessing problems in multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) as the approach of taking into account the nature of the problem and of organizing governance processes accordingly. The paper develops an innovative analytical framework that conceptualizes MSPs in terms of three governance processes (deliberation, decision-making and enforcement) harnessing three key dimensions of wicked problems (knowledge uncertainty, value conflict and dynamic complexity). The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil provides an illustrative case study on how this analytical framework describes and explains organizational change in partnerships from a problem-based perspective. The framework can be used to better understand and predict the complex relationships between MSP governance processes, systemic change and societal problems, but also as a guiding tool in (re-)organizing governance processes to continuously re-assess the problems over time and address them accordingly.
Highlights
How can multi-stakeholder partnerships (MSPs) contribute to addressing globally relevant and complex problems, such as global hunger, deforestation and biodiversity loss, climate change, poverty and violation of human rights? This1 3 Vol.:(0123456789)in some cases, have become even more acute (e.g., Levin et al 2012).An increasingly widespread perspective suggests that partnerships can address these complex societal problems by triggering or contributing to systemic change (Waddell et al 2015; Waddock et al 2015)
By comparing the analytical framework against these empirical codes, we found that the 3 × 3 matrix was a helpful tool to understand how an MSP harnesses the key dimensions of wicked problems
To further understand how MSPs can approach the nature of problems, this paper has introduced the notion of harnessing wicked problems and investigates whether and how MSPs harness wicked problems through a set of interrelated governance processes
Summary
This relates to the depth of change (Waddell et al 2015) From this angle, the persisting challenge is whether partnerships trigger or support breadth and depth of change to an extent that adequately addresses complex societal problems (Waddock et al 2015). A recent strand of the literature argues that forms of collaborative governance, encompassing processes of interaction, deliberation, decision-making and enforcement (e.g., of codes of conduct, standards and best practices), may not be suitable to the nature of the problems that they seek to address (e.g., Hospes et al 2012; Waddock 2013)—nor to trigger or support systemic change to a sufficient breadth or depth (Waddock et al 2015). To contribute to the debate on how partnerships (can) address complex problems—and trigger or support broader and deeper processes of systemic change—this paper proposes an analytical framework that assesses whether and how MSPs harness the nature of the problems around which they are set up.
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