In earlier editions of this newsletter, several partnerships working on conserving biodiversity were introduced. As a researcher on partnerships for biodiversity, I would like to place these individual cases in a broader context. The cases are good examples of the fact that private initiatives, like partnerships, are becoming more common and are playing an increasingly prominent role in international biodiversity policy, a phenomenon often referred to as the transition from ‘government to governance’. Partnership has become a buzzword in international sustainable development policy; working in partnership is trendy.

However, little is known about how successful partnerships really are. In my research, I try to answer this question of success: I look at the functions partnerships fulfill, how effective they are, and how they interact with policy at the national and international level. Specifically, I look at international intersectoral partnerships, strategic alliances between government, market and/or civil society representatives.

Forest biodiversity partnerships
Most of the (many) partnerships working on conserving forest biodiversity have developed certification schemes. Examples are the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), the Canadian Standards Association (CSA), the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes (PEFC), and the Malaysian Timber Certification Council (MTCC). Others work on controlling conversion of forest to agricultural land, like the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and the Roundtable on Responsible Soy (RTST). A third group focuses on combating illegal logging, and finally some do not focus on a specific threat to forest biodiversity, but work on several threats in a specific forest region, like the Congo Basin Forest Partnership (CBFP).

In analyzing these forest partnerships, several trends become visible. Forest partnerships were among the first to develop certification schemes. They have contributed significantly to the development and implementation of forest policy by developing definitions of sustainable forest management and by certifying large areas of forest. This trend has had an enormous impact, not only on the international forest biodiversity debate, but also on international sustainable development policy in general. Sustainability certification has become a widely accepted instrument for many internationally traded products. In my opinion, however, this instrument is often used with too little consideration for the question whether certification is the most effective way to tackle the sustainability problem at hand.

There also seems to be a trend for partnerships to choose for less stringent and less inclusive approaches towards sustainability: partnerships often do not cover all relevant issues in sustainable forest management, and do not use very high demands on the issues that they do address. This means most certification schemes should in fact be seen as instruments for small improvements towards sustainability instead of a guarantee for sustainable forest management.

Marine biodiversity partnerships
A very different type of partnership are intersectoral North-South partnerships, in which governments, businesses and NGOs in a producing (often Southern) and a consuming (often Northern) country of a specific product try to solve the sustainability problems of this product in a bilateral partnership. I have studied a partnership between Indonesian, Malaysian and Dutch partners focused on shrimp aquaculture and a partnership between Dutch and Peruvian actors focused on Peruvian anchoveta fisheries. Anchoveta is mainly used to produce fish feed for the aquaculture industry. Through this research, I again discovered several trends.

It is often assumed that partnerships are an effective instrument for emancipating and strengthening civil society in the South. In practice, this effect is very difficult to realize. Existing relationships and power inequalities are so strongly institutionalized that they are extremely difficult to change.

Also, in order for organizations to be able to work together in partnership, a basic consensus among them on the strategies for sustainable development is necessary. In practice, this often means that only NGOs with more pragmatic strategies towards sustainability become partners; NGOs with more stringent views on sustainability often do not become involved in partnerships or leave due to perceived lack of progress. The shrimp partnership that I analyzed was a good example of this phenomenon. Most international NGOs believe that industrial shrimp aquaculture is, almost per definition, unsustainable and that large scale expansion of the industry should be avoided. A few large, more pragmatic, NGOs took the large scale development of industrial shrimp aquaculture as a given, and wanted to work together with the industry to become as sustainable a possible. Over time, the more stringent NGOs convinced several more pragmatic NGOs to withdraw from the partnership, and today the partnership continues with very limited NGO involvement.

Roles and effects of partnerships
Looking at the role of partnerships in international biodiversity policy in more general terms, several issues become apparent that have large consequences for using partnerships in practice.

One of the most important contributions of partnerships in practice has been filling the gaps when governments are not willing or able to regulate. In this sense partnerships should receive credit for most of the innovation and improvement in international biodiversity conservation policy.

It is also clear that partnerships alone can not conserve biodiversity. Partnerships are more successful when supportive government policy, both at the international and national level, is in place.

A major question on the role of partnerships is really whether partnerships can help solve more fundamental sustainability problems. Because the essence of partnerships is involving all relevant actors and sectors of society, often some partners have a stake in maintaining unsustainable practices. Partnerships seem to be more valuable as an instrument for making existing trends more sustainable than for breaking unsustainable trends.

Also, the fact that often only the more pragmatic NGOs are involved in partnerships could, combined with the current popularity of the partnership instrument, have large consequences for the extent to which more fundamental sustainability problems receive the attention of the international sustainable development community. It seems the power of the more stringent NGOs, which usually focus on more structural sustainability problems, is declining, not only because the traditional NGO methods of ‘naming and shaming’ is increasingly considered old-fashioned, but also because most of the governments and/or businesses to be ‘named and shamed’ are involved in partnerships with more pragmatic NGOs. This could also have fundamental consequences for the unity of the NGO community in the long run. Don’t get me wrong, both incremental improvement and fundamental change are needed in sustainable development. However, given the current popularity of the partnership instrument, we may unintentionally be focusing too much of our efforts on incremental change. For all actors, no matter whether they represent government, business or civil society, a strategic choice whether or not to partner given the nature of the sustainability problem at hand is advisable. Maybe some sustainability problems, especially those requiring more fundamental change, could be better solved using less voluntary measures.

Ingrid Visseren-Hamakers (i.visseren@geo.uu.nl) is researcher, Utrecht-Nijmegen Programme on Partnerships (UNPOP), Copernicus Institute for Sustainable Development and Innovation, Utrecht University.