An Inclusive Approach to Partnerships for the SDGs: Using a Relationship Lens to Explore the Potential for Transformational Collaboration
- Submitting institution
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The University of Cumbria
- Unit of assessment
- 17 - Business and Management Studies
- Output identifier
- Murphy1
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.3390/su12197905
- Title of journal
- Sustainability
- Article number
- 7905
- First page
- -
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 19
- ISSN
- 2071-1050
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
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https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/19/7905
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This conceptual article investigates the allied relational frameworks and practices of ‘collaboration’, ‘partnership’ and ‘cooperation’, which embrace a broad spectrum of interactions within, between and across different actors, organisations, sectors, domains, disciplines, and contexts. Its central premise is that, in order to enhance the opportunities for systemic and scalable local-level change at the heart of the global 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), more work is needed to build on instrumental and extrinsic incentives for partnering with greater appreciation of the integrative and intrinsic power that SDG collaboration can unleash. The authors suggest that an understanding of these latter forms of value is likely to be derived from a deeper appreciation of the importance of inter-personal relationships, and attention to linkages between individual, organisational and wider operational contexts.
The article draws upon the shared learning from the combined research, teaching and consulting work of both authors on multi-stakeholder collaboration over a twenty-year period. This has included work in both academic and practitioner settings with a wide range of universities, businesses, NGOs, EU entities and UN agencies. More recently, the authors have been developing an academic partnership between the University of Cumbria’s Initiative for Leadership and Sustainability (IFLAS) and the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s Centro de Innovación en Tecnología para el Desarrollo (itdUPM). This has included academic exchanges with Stott delivering an IFLAS Open Lecture ‘Co-creating local solutions to development challenges’ in June 2018 and later that month Murphy presented a keynote at the 2018 Ibero-American Conference on the SDGs.
Stott and Murphy are currently working together on a pilot research project ‘Transformative Partnerships for the SDGs’, which makes use of the ideas and frameworks presented in their article, exploring relational processes at different levels in order to enhance the effectiveness of partnering initiatives in the UK and Spain.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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