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The U.S. National Academies' Roundtable on Science and Technology for Sustainability convened a symposium on June 18-19, 2008, to examine the multi-stakeholder partnership record in addressing issues associated with sustainability. The symposium, held in Washington, D.C., focused on the challenges that the partnerships have addressed, including: involvement of several sectors, action at varying scales, from local to global, a combination of public and private financing, and a complex set of science questions.
Marco Ferroni, Executive Director of the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, chaired the panel on Assessing Partnership Outcomes. The panel discussed how partners assess both the partnerships’ outcomes and their own participation in the partnership, what the key takeaways have been, and how the experience might influence future action.
The panel included perspectives from David Spielman, International Food Policy Research Institute; William Sugrue, U.S. Agency for International Development (retired); David Graham, Dow Chemical Company (retired); and Martin Meyer, Common Code for the Coffee Community. Dale Hill of the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group contributed perspectives derived from the Group’s long-standing work assessing the functionality of regional and global partnerships designed to produce “international public goods”.
The panel underscored the need for proper, metric-based evaluation of the results of partnerships. This requires “results frameworks” that should be specified ex ante, but the panel noted that as partnerships mature, goals and objectives tend to evolve, and this in turn calls for a “dynamic” approach to evaluation.
The research partnership to bring public and private expertise to bear on the development of a vaccine for East Coast Fever, a livestock disease, was ultimately unsuccessful in its task. But it has impacted the organization of some programs in international livestock health research and may still be seen as an innovative response to a complex problem that requires the involvement of a range of different capabilities and organizations. Process, thus, is part of the result.
Find out more on the Roundtable and Symposium
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