The First Geneva Partnership Forum Thursday, September 3, 2015

Welcoming about 50 partnership experts from a diverse set of companies, NGOS, and international organizations, the first Geneva Partnership Forum focused on leveraging cross-sector learning and on fostering capacity building for collaborative approaches for addressing complex societal challenges.

Please have a look at the program and the list of participants. The event summary is available here.

Context: Complex societal challenges related to poverty, education, health, and climate change for example, call for dynamic and innovative solutions. By bringing together multiple stakeholders to combine their strengths, public-private partnerships (PPPs) and other new forms of boundary-spanning collaboration have the potential to offer solutions for today’s and tomorrow’s challenges. Brokering, governing, and scaling up a successful partnership can, however, be challenging.

The Forum: The first Geneva Partnership Forum will convene experts and practitioners who work on collaborations across a range of social and environmental issues to explore and discuss the process and content of successful partnerships. The Forum will encourage individuals from multinational corporations, international organizations, NGOs, and academia to think beyond their sectoral or thematic silos. Participants are encouraged to bring other stakeholders from their partnerships to contribute to a shared learning journey.

The range of topics will include mobilizing change, creating suitable governance structures, capacity building, and scaling up impact. The general focus will be on how partnerships can be more efficient in resource use and effective in delivery. Vivid discussions, interactions, and learning will be encouraged among all participants, especially when splitting into topical workshops. Moreover, we will present the most practical insights of recent partnership research, give an overview of practical tools, and offer insights into how a PPP case study can provide learning opportunities.

Format: The Forum will be run as an interactive laboratory over a full day. While it will include plenary sessions to share new ideas and latest trends, it will mostly comprise interactive workshops in which everyone can engage and share their thoughts and experiences.

Outcomes: The Geneva Partnership Forum will be a celebration of cutting edge research, practical tools to managing partnerships, and real-life good practice. Participants will leave the Forum energized and with renewed inspiration. While the learnings and ideas exchanged at the Forum will be captured in a report, the biggest outcome will be the inspiration and learning from like-minded practitioners and thought leaders.

Why Geneva? Geneva is a focal point of international co-operation: Approximately 35 International Organizations and more than 250 NGOs are based in Geneva, about 130 Multinational Companies have their headquarters in this city, and 170 foreign States are represented. With this range of stakeholders, Geneva has become an epicentre of partnership experience in Europe.

Organizers: The first Geneva Partnership Forum is organized by The Geneva PPP Research Center of the Geneva School of Economics & Management and Constellate Global.

Contact Information: For further details and any questions, please contact lea.stadtler(at)unige.ch or randall(at)constellate.global