Abstract
Business-NGO partnerships may have the potential to address several key challenges and opportunities in societies today. More businesses are forced to legitimise their existence with stakeholders, and are obliged to meet increasingly demanding ethical, environmental, legal, commercial and public standards as defined by wider society. Although interactions between businesses and NGOs have existed for decades, this has partly been based on philanthropy and operated loosely. Only recently have these partnerships formed and prospered into partnerships that focus on creating “shared value”, which is based on the idea that by joining forces the partnership can create both economic and social value. Scholars argue that corporations and NGOs have gone from conflict to cooperation with both actors increasingly seeing the value of effective strategic partnerships across sectors. This unique partnership aspect with businesses living of on innovation, technology and profit maximization, and NGOs driven by a social or environmental reasoning, create new and exciting patterns across institutional fields and ways in which both sectors have something to gain and something to learn. Shared value offer companies a way to pursue their self-interest while also acting in the common good. What used to shine on sole creation of value now shines on co-creation of value. Hence, the most strategic pathways to progress are through strategic alliances across sectors. I argue that philanthropy is out-dated, and that partnerships in coming years are based upon strong interactions between both the private sector and the non-profit sector in creating shared value. This thesis argues that strategic partnerships can provide several benefits to businesses and NGOs alike. Such benefits could be increased access to knowledge, experience, networks and resources. This can in turn translate into innovative new products, services or solutions, better abilities to envision future developments or higher operational efficiencies for businesses. However, there are several interferences that may occur in the structures in which these partnerships are formed and embedded. I argue that strategic partnerships can be more geared towards “satisfying” rather than “maximizing” their potential impact. In other words, the outcome is not necessarily a means to an end, but can be based on corporate and NGO rhetoric with little or no outcome to beneficiaries. Three main critiques to shared value in strategic partnerships between NGOs and businesses will be presented as: 1. Institutionalisation. Corporations and NGOs are faced with the challenges related to institutional differences that can affect the effectiveness of the partnership. Each institution is embedded in their own institutional logics. 2. Accountability. There may develop an accountability vacuum between NGOs and businesses. There is a problem when large corporations and NGOs decide the development of a global framework and influence its general conditions without being authorized or controlled democratically. 3. Power and Co-Optation. Power and co-optation will be assessed further in the dynamics of different forms of business-NGO partnerships. Large power imbalances are viewed as problematic because they may lead partners into political or opportunistic behaviour that can serve one or both partners’ interests at the expense of partnership performance.