The Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development has made explicit the need for global, cross-sector partnerships in achieving sustainability goals through SDG 17. Partnerships are progressing across all the sustainable development goals, yet challenges in meeting their set expectations and in measuring the long-term impact they achieve are commonplace.  

In this session, Mette Morsing and Andreas Rasche discuss some of these challenges as well as opportunities for partnerships to advance the sustainability agenda. They draw insights from their research and relevant case studies on big data partnerships, humanitarian action partnerships and cross-sector partnerships intended for poverty alleviation.

Amongst others, they address ways to build trust and legitimacy towards a successful partnership, the importance of giving a voice to projects' beneficiaries by actually including them in the design of the partnership, and the need for an ongoing impact assessment process that goes beyond listing the outputs of a project.

Mette Morsing is currently Head of the PRME (Principles of Responsible Management Education) based at the UN Global Compact in New York, and a Professor at the Copenhagen Business School. Her research focuses on how strategic communication emerges as a governance mechanism in the interplay of internal and external stakeholders of organizations, in particular in the context of CSR. Dr Mette Morsing was the previous Executive Director of Misum and Professor and Mistra Chair of Sustainable Markets at SSE.

Andreas Rasche is a Professor of Business and Society at the Copenhagen Business School and a Visiting Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. His research is focused on business-society relations, particularly the political role of corporations, CSR and sustainability.

The webinar is moderated by Denise Young, founder and host of the New Climate Capitalism podcast.

Watch short extracts from the dialogue: