Partnerships among governments, businesses, and civil society organizations possess many characteristics needed to address the social, economic, and environmental impacts of climate change. Promoting and enabling these partnerships is necessary, as international agreement on greenhouse gas reductions remains elusive. The U.N.-sponsored climate negotiations must continue, but will yield only a partial solution. The single-sector U.N. approach works exclusively with governments to design and enforce a one-size-fits-all command-and-control solution to curtail global carbon emissions.
A partnership approach that mobilizes resources, ideas, and engagement from across the business, civil society, and governmental sectors promises to be more effective at diagnosing climate adaptation challenges and working out possible solutions. These cross-sector partnerships can help bridge the gap between global negotiations and local solutions. Partnerships can also tap into the resources, human creativity, and ingenuity each possesses in abundance. They contrast with regimes of control, policing, and enforcement, which tend to stifle innovation and creative solutions to difficult problems.
So what steps might enable climate change partnerships?
While pressuring governments to agree on carbon emissions reductions must remain a priority, civil society, government, and business leaders can devise joint action toward a fair and just transition to a low-carbon world. The need and opportunity lie in enabling low-carbon lifestyles in both North and South. This means connecting government policy and planning, community or locally based action, social entrepreneurship, and business opportunity in creative and mutually reinforcing ways. But to be effective, these partnerships must be self-aware collaborations that utilize the strengths of each sector.
Unfortunately, the reality is that much of the promise and potential of cross-sector partnering remains untapped or is being squandered through ineffective and/or mismanaged efforts. There appear to be a lot of substandard, under-achieving partnership activities. Many masquerade as partnerships, but are little more than contract management, philanthropic giving, “business-as-usual,” or “telling others what to do or think.” This has been the experience of the International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF) in two decades of working on enabling cross-sector partnerships for sustainable development.
Participants in effective partnerships will commit to sharing risks, costs, and benefits, put a premium on transparency, and work to ensure equity so that no single partner or stakeholder hijacks the partnership. Putting these three principles into practice is the key to ensuring collaboration on climate change that translates into tangible and sustainable outcomes.
At least three types or orientations of climate change partnerships are desirable:
MITIGATION PARTNERSHIPS — where the focus is on finding ways of cutting carbon intensity without foreclosing development opportunities. Partnerships can help reduce costs and promote risk sharing by affording each partner with access to know-how and learning from partners in all sectors.
An example is BP’s decade-long partnership with the Polish Environmental Partnership Foundation to develop in Poland a scheme for mobilizing small- and medium-sized companies to improve their environmental performance, become more engaged in community-based action on reducing carbon intensity, and grow more competitive in local, national, and international markets in the process. The Clean Business program has benefited more than 5000 Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) by promoting expertise sharing across sectors and providing a mechanism to assess and monitor environmental impacts, including carbon intensity.
Developed in Poland during the turbulent transition to market economy and democracy, Clean Business now includes prominent international partners including Cadbury, Toyota and other international companies. It offers nations transitioning to a market economy a model of how to use the power of cross-sector partnering to make carbon reduction a source of competitive advantage.
ADAPTATION PARTNERSHIPS — where the focus is on exploiting development opportunities amid an evolving context. Partners can help each other understand the changing context of social change and local priorities, identify new development opportunities and enable local or community level learning.
An example is IBLF’s International Tourism Partnership (ITP), which encourages and enables international hotels to conduct their business — from purchasing and supply chains to waste management — in ways that improve the sustainability of the local communities where they operate. The partnership helps members develop practical solutions to “green” their operations and to share experience with smaller hotels through manuals, such as the Environmental Management for Hotels, which supplies reliable information on how guest lodgings can achieve environmentally friendly and sustainable operations.
By assisting hotels to partner with one another and with local community leaders (and vice-versa), ITP has helped the hotel industry better appreciate the changing context of social and economic development both locally and globally. Since 1992, ITP has contributed to an environmentally friendly partnership culture in an industrial sector that generates (directly and indirectly) close to 10% of global GDP.
INNOVATION PARTNERSHIPS — where the focus is on developing completely new ways of operating, achieving breakthroughs which disrupt or make “business as usual” obsolete by creating a completely new operational reality. These partnerships strive to create and scale-up new business or operating models, new types of products and services and even new markets.
An example is the Foundation for Environmental Education’s Eco-Schools program, a partnership that helps transform schools into practical examples of low-carbon living, resources of knowledge about low-carbon development, and sources of inspiration for the wider community. In the UK, for example, the Sandwich Technology School has transformed its operations and educational approach, including installation of a wind turbine and other renewable energy systems. The school has become a role model for sustainability for the wider community. Practical experience from dozens of schools in the UK has led the government to commit to helping all schools transform into sustainable schools.
The scheme operates in over 50 countries through national NGOs that engage with national and local government and the schools themselves. Partners include international companies such as Toyota and HSBC, which hope to create new markets and new customers for low-carbon living, linking their global aspirations to local operations.
Eco-Schools is a local-to-global partnership in the sense that no one partner is in charge, but all share an interest in innovations that speed the transition to low-carbon living. Schools represent a massive capital investment; reducing their carbon footprint would be a real step forward.
Effective climate change partnerships link the local with the global. By combining the respective strengths and resources of business, civil society, and government, these partnerships offer the means and the opportunity to build greater local resilience to climate impacts in both North and South by, for example:
- eliminating fuel poverty through better building and retro-insulation;
- tackling inadequate housing and associated poor health problems;
- developing less polluting public transport and new sustainable transport schemes in urban and rural areas;
- evolving more localized and self-sustaining food growth and production systems;
- encouraging community-owned and managed assets for energy generation, water and sanitation, resource recycling, and waste exchange (reuse);
- promoting regional community-owned and community-managed energy schemes harnessing new technologies (bio generation, and other alternatives);
- working with local communities to manage population migration, relocation, and diversification;
- providing financial products and services which factor in the reduced risk and the development opportunities of climate-friendly communities;
- helping workers in impoverished areas acquire the skills to construct, maintain, and operate the infrastructure required by local communities focused on self-sufficiency and sustainability.
Partnerships with civil society, government, and international and national companies can build private sector appetite for more engagement. Too often companies are put on the defensive. Businesses can more effectively be part of the climate change solution if they are engaged in building climate-friendly communities, especially around production facilities. Local focus benefits business by stabilizing the communities in which they, their facilities, and their employees are based.
Residents of climate-friendly communities absorb the skills and capabilities that can help them strengthen community resilience to climate change, and take advantage of new and sustainable economic development opportunities.
Realizing the potential of climate change partnerships will require private, public and civil society leaders to recognize that business can be part of the complex solution to the climate challenges we all face now and in the future. Such leaders already can be found in local communities across the globe and also at the international level. By acting as more self-aware partnership practitioners they are strengthening their cross-sector partnerships to build local and global capacity for dealing with climate change now and in the future.
For more information see: International Business Leaders Forum, www.iblf.org; International Tourism Partnership, www.tourismpartnership.org; Eco-schools, www.eco-schools.org; Cross-sector partnerships, www.thepartneringinitiative.org
