Multi-Stakeholder Partnership Guide and Tools
The benefits
In short- Supports collective action
- Enables & enhances shared understanding
- Joint problem solving and decision making
- Complements formal workings of governments
The Multi-Stakeholder Partnership (MSP) guide and tools support stakeholders, from farmers and NGOs, to businesses, entrepreneurs, government and international organisations, in designing and facilitating effective multi-stakeholder partnerships to drive innovation and change.
In a polarised world, collaboration is more necessary than ever. Our existing ways of making decisions, along with our mechanisms of governance are failing to cope with today’s challenges. This requires lead actors to recognise that achieving their objectives and ambitions is best done in collaboration with others. Multi-stakeholder partnerships help stakeholders find collaborative solutions.
MSPs serve five key purposes:
- Consultation
- Learning and idea generation
- Joint problem solving and decision making
- Overcoming conflicts
- Collective action
MSPs require diverse methodologies to ensure inclusivity and engagement, draw out people’s creativity and critical thinking skills, and work through conflict in an effective manner. A key part of success is that facilitators are able to choose the right set of tools and methodologies at the right moment, taking into account the situation and the stage in the process.
We have curated a comprehensive guide, with a set of 60 resources, tools and methods, specifically aimed at helping you to design and facilitate effective multi-stakeholder engagement. Our own repertoire draws heavily on our participatory development experience but is also inspired by other sources such as scientific research, creative artistic expression, and conflict transformation.
The MSP guide
The MSP guide links the underlying rationale for multi-stakeholder partnerships, with a clear four phase process model, a set of seven core principles, key ideas for facilitation and 60 participatory tools for analysis, planning and decision making.
The guide has been written for those directly involved in MSPs as a stakeholder, leader, facilitator or funder to provide both the conceptual foundations and practical tools that underpin successful partnerships.
The guide draws on the direct experience of staff from Wageningen University & Research in supporting MSP processes in many countries around the world. It also compiles the ideas and materials behind WUR’s annual three week international course on facilitating MSPs and social learning.
Sixty tools & methods
There are no hard and fast rules for how to design an MSP. But most well-designed MSP processes follow more or less six stages. Any MSP begins with establishing connection; creating a shared language; and allowing a divergent set of viewpoints to emerge. Usually that divergence will be followed by the co-creation of new ideas and options. The stakeholders then need to converge these ideas towards a set of answers, and establish commitment to take actions agreed upon. We have therefore grouped our resources by these six phases. Find them below.
Issue Exploration & Shared Language
Get in touch with our expert
Do you have a question about multi-stakeholder partnerships or opportunities to work with us? Please get in touch.
JH (Herman) Brouwer
Senior advisor Multi-stakeholder collaboration for food, agriculture and nature
More information
In general, the practice of designing an MSP has three key elements:
- A process model that outlines the main phases of a MSP and the key process considerations for effective stakeholder collaboration;
- A set of facilitation skills required by those designing, managing, leading or facilitating MSPs, and;
- A set of participatory methodologies and tools that can be used help create interactive learning processes which manifest the principles and qualities of effective multi-stakeholder engagement.
At the core of working with MSPs is the recognition that the involved stakeholders themselves are actors in the design and creation of the MSP. This leads to MSPs that incorporate not only the needs of these stakeholders, but also stakeholders’ capacities to contribute to and sustain the process.
Read more in our MSP guide.
Ecosystems, human societies and our economies are complex adaptive systems. They evolve and develop in unpredictable ways that cannot be fully managed, directed and controlled. They can be seen as a collection of vast numbers of interacting elements with a myriad of interconnections. All the different elements are constantly reacting and adapting to what is going on in the rest of the system. While some coherent patterns of change and behaviour can be observed, how these complex systems evolve and change cannot be fully predicted. They are full of surprise and uncertainty. As a result, small changes in inputs can have very large impacts on the overall system.
Over the last several decades a much better understanding has developed about the nature of complex adaptive systems, which has significant implications for how we try to govern and bring about change in our human societies. It is impossible to use simple linear cause and effect relationships to understand and intervene.
Instead of trying to fully control outcomes through rigorous upfront analysis, hierarchical top-down management and detailed plans we need to focus more on creating the conditions for human systems to adapt and evolve in desirable directions.
Adaptive and innovative change in such systems is enabled by increasing the shared understanding, feedback, relationships and networks between the different the actors in the system. This is precisely what multi-stakeholder partnering processes make possible. In an increasingly complex world, multi-stakeholder partnerships are turned into an important mechanism of governance. They complement the more formal workings of national governments and international relations.
When one acknowledges that human societies are best understood as complex adaptive systems, a well-considered engagement in multi-stakeholder partnership can open up ways to contribute to transformative change in the direction of sustainability and equity.
