Documents

• 2023 End of Year Report
• 2022 End of Year Report
• Partnership Accelerator - Opportunities for partners and donors
• 2020 End of Year Report
• Partnership Accelerator Brochure (2021)

Funding and support

Portugal

The Government of Portugal has made a generous contribution to enhancing the development of recommendations aimed at strengthening the SIDS Partnership Framework within the new Programme of Action for Small Island Developing States (SIDS).

Ireland

Through generous funding support from the Government of Ireland, the Partnership Accelerator has developed partnership training material focusing on the Small Island Developing States specific context. The material will be used in national partnership forums in Small Island Developing States.

Ireland also supported the delopment of partnership landscape assessments in Maldives and Samoa, and partnership effectiveness around SDG 14 / Oceans.

Italy

In support of the high-level meeting to review progress, gaps and challenges on the implementation of the SAMOA Pathway in 2019, Italy supported a project for strengthening the capacity of Small Island Developing States in monitoring and developing durable partnerships.

As a continuation of the project, the Government of Italy is generously funding the Partnership Accelerator programme to advance partnership effectiveness in the Caribbean.

Division for SDGs, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs

The Division for Sustainable Development Goals of United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs has provided human resources and financial contributions to several of the activities of the Partnership Accelerator. The Division is the Secretariat for the 2030 Agenda Partnership Accelerator.

United Nations Office for Sustainable Development

The United Nations Office for Sustainable Development (UNOSD), a part of the Division for Sustainable Development Goals of UN DESA, has provided human resources and financial contributions to the initial phase of Partnership Accelerator project through funding from the Republic of Korea. The Office is also supporting a number of activities at the country level (Mexico, Seychelles, Maldives, Mauritius).

Background

The scope and complexity of the transformations required for achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) that are at is core are unprecedented. As a result, no government or stakeholder will be able to address the multi-sectoral, cross-pillar global challenges of today alone, instead, the 2030 Agenda can only be achieved if different sectors and actors work together in an integrated manner by pooling financial resources, knowledge and expertise.

SDG 17 on “strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development”, through its targets 17.16 and 17.17, recognizes the critical importance of multi-stakeholder partnerships that mobilize and share the finance, knowledge, expertise and technology to support the achievement of SDGs in all countries. The targets also highlight the need to promote effective public, public-private and civil society partnerships.

Over the recent years, the importance of multi-stakeholder partnerships in supporting the implementation of sustainable development has also been increasingly recognized by member States and different stakeholders, including leading institutions in international development and the private sector. This is evident in the many UN Conferences that have resulted in the launch of new multi-stakeholder partnerships and voluntary commitments.

At the Third International Conference on Small Island Developing States (SIDS Conference) in 2014, 300 multi-stakeholder partnerships devoted to the sustainable development of SIDS were announced, covering areas such as oceans and seas, climate change, biodiversity, resilience-building, sustainable economic growth, renewable energy and disaster risk reduction. In 2017, at the UN Ocean Conference, over 1,400 voluntary commitments for concrete action to advance implementation of SDG 14 targets were made by all stakeholders, including governments, the United Nations system, civil society organizations, academia, the scientific community, and the private sector. Collectively, these partnerships and commitments make considerable contributions to supporting the implementation of the SDGs.

Despite the strong rhetoric for the engagement of multi-stakeholder partnerships for supporting implementation of the SDGs – the reality is that we are still only scratching the surface in terms of the number, and quality, of partnerships required to deliver the SDGs. The 2018 Partnership Exchange, held in the margins of the 2018 High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) explored and identified, among other issues, a key building blocks to build an enabling environment for partnerships to systemically scale up collaboration among a range of stakeholders for driving the implementation of the SDGs, and to run effective partnership action platforms which convene societal sectors around SDG priorities, and catalyze implementation of innovative initiatives. These included:

• Developing the competencies of actors from all societal sectors need to effectively partner, including building an understanding of other sectors, relationship and partnership-building skills, and a technical knowledge of the building blocks of value-creating partnerships;
• Institutions and organizations need to be set up to be fit for partnering: i.e. to have in place the strategies, systems and processes, staff capacities and support, and culture that are optimized to incentivize and support working collaboratively with others;
• Setting up mechanisms or platforms that can physically convene government, business, UN, donors and civil society around SDG priorities to catalyze and support partnership development.

Within many countries, there has been considerable progress made with respect to country driven partnership platforms for dialogue and consultation on development priorities. Dialogue alone, however, is not sufficient to catalyze the necessary collaborative action. There exists a modest but growing number of partnership platforms which are designed to convene stakeholders and development actors around the SDGs, and then help to build the innovative partnerships needed to deliver on the SDGs. There is however currently very limited research or guidance around effective models for such SDG platforms.

With respect to institutional partnership-readiness, some UN entities, international NGOs and donors have made an analysis of the degree to which they are fit for partnering and begun the process of reducing obstacles to partnering, increasing incentives and improving their systems and capacities. They are, however, among the exception and most organizations are far from partnership-optimized.