Partnerships are catalysts for change.

In his address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 1999, Secretary-General Kofi Annan challenged business leaders to join an international initiative that would bring companies together with UN agencies, labour and civil society to support universal environmental and social principles. As a result, the United Nations Global Compact's operational phase was launched on 26 July 2000.

Georg Kell is executive head of the Global Compact Office. He began his career at the United Nations in 1987 and worked as a senior officer in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General, responsible for fostering cooperation with the private sector. Mr. Kell spoke with Celia Nork, who is studying strategic management of collaboration between non-profit organizations and businesses.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

How would you sum up the collaboration between businesses, UN departments and the Global Compact? I see this small Global Compact Office that I am heading as a catalyst for change. We work primarily with 2,500 participants from all over the world, but we also occasionally work with UN organizations, trying to pass on some of the knowledge that we have accumulated and is relevant. We are called upon quite often to help out with other UN bodies. For example, with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the tsunami aftermath, we supported efforts to develop a web-based approach to channel corporate in-kind contributions in support of recovery there. We have also organized a series of norm-forming events to make sure that lessons are shared within and across UN departments. It is part of what we call our "backwards linkages" within the Organization; and the UN Procurement Office is embracing the Global Compact as a valuable proposition for anyone who wants to do business with the United Nations. So we have a keen interest in seeing the United Nations as an organization that is "walking the talk". But, clearly, organizational change is a long-term process.

What are the main problems of such collaboration? One comes from an NGO perspective. Only a few years ago, the anti-globalization movement, in a way, ideologized the whole debate. The relationship between business and NGOs used to be much more confrontational. They were bitter enemies in the public arena and some of these tendencies are still at play in some countries. There are always confrontational tensions that seek a balance with a more collaborative approach. Some of my good friends in several big NGOs responsible for developing strategies, such as the World Wildlife Fund, the World Conservation Union and Oxfam, are still trying to find a balance. On the one hand, NGOs want to reserve the right to be critical, which is one of their major functions as agents of change; but, on the other hand, they also realize that being critical is not enough. It's important to raise the issues, create tensions and be provocative. However, at the end of the day, unless you turn these tensions into constructive solutions, you will not really bring about change, and this realization is part of the NGO strategy today. Most global NGOs understand very well that being critical alone is not enough. They also have to achieve something--and now most have important partnerships projects going on with corporations.

What is the main goal for setting up conferences like the International Business Forum 2005? I think the main function of such conferences and one of the UN principles is indeed to enable learning, identify practices that work and uphold these in the hope that in doing so they will inspire imitation and diffusion of best practices. If I really had a wish for the United Nations, it would be to create a much stronger infrastructure for sharing best practices, because there are so many great examples that are on the ground, where solutions have been found locally but are not known elsewhere.

For example, great stuff is going on in Brazil: the Brazilian Stock Exchange in Sao Paulo (Bovespa) is working with NGOs on developing new concepts for building social capital; however, this initiative is not known in South Africa, India or China. Great strides have also been made in South Africa in creating successful, viable partnerships between investment banks and NGOS, which have allowed access to small- and medium-sized corporations; but this knowledge, unfortunately, is not known outside of South Africa. Such conferences are well positioned to help ensure that good innovations diffuse rapidly around the globe, because if you have a good presentation and your audience are practitioners who have the capacity to actually engineer similar projects, then you have an imitation effect and out of these conferences a lot of replication can then happen.

In what ways have partnerships become a catalyst for reforms and innovation across the entire UN system? This needs to be seen quite candidly. Having chaired a number of internal meetings with representatives from thirty or more UN offices, I would say that what we see today is a revolution from the bottom up. We have seen in UN organizations, whether humanitarian or development, or even some normative ones, growing pockets of innovation where individual mid-level civil servants have successfully pioneered new partnership concepts--and this trend has been going on for a few years.

I think Secretary-General Kofi Annan has given a lot of impetus through the Global Compact, empowering UN offices and encouraging individuals. But many of these experiences have reached a critical limit. They now realize that in order to scale up to have a full formal impact, they will need to bring on board their own organizations. And many UN bodies have not yet made a transition towards a more partnership-friendly organization.

There are also internal impediments. Legal offices are still rewarded for not taking risks rather than for producing results. A lot of the procedures are extremely cumbersome and I fear that the oil-for-food crisis has not been helpful either. There is an increasing tendency within the United Nations towards compliance and control. However, this approach will fail without clear performance indicators, along with transparency or accountability mechanisms. So I think it needs to be seen how the UN system evolves, but clearly there is a lot of positive impulse coming from this bottom-up partnership experimentation, and much of that has the ingredients for stimulating more systemic change.

Has partnering with business and civil societies become a necessity for the United Nations? Absolutely. Roughly ten years ago, the issue started to become increasingly important as the realization began to sink in that many problems we were dealing with required different expertise from different sectors of society. And quite often one succeeded in bringing business and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) together on the ground. There are great examples from UN field offices worldwide, which demonstrated that through partnering a lot of practical progress can be made. However, this is not as easy as it sounds; there are still huge barriers that exist, unfortunately, in many countries and businesses.

RELATED ARTICLE: The 10th International Business Forum

The 10th International Business Forum 2005 addressed the topic of "Business and the Millennium Development Goals: An Active Role for Globally Responsible Companies" from 11 to 13 September at New York University in New York City. Its organizers--InWEnt- Capacity Building International, Germany, the World Bank Institute (WBI), Instituto Ethos and the Global Compact--with some 200 leaders from business, civil society, government and international organizations shared experiences and lessons learned on how to develop the role of businesses in achieving the MDGs.

WBI Vice President Frannie Leautier said that the MDGs offered a framework for business, civil society and Government to focus efforts on the most urgent development issue. It was important not to see the private sector "as simply a source of financing, but as true partners in addressing specific development issues", she said. "Many of this development needs also act as barriers to sustainable business development, so there is a clear mutual interest". Participants looked at how managers best serve business interests by engaging in programmes that direct company resources toward socially and environmentally responsible activities, the growth of the food industry in the poorest nations in Africa, and the role of the global packaging business in implementing school milk programmes in the least developed countries of Asia.

The Forum's major goal was to bring together business people with government and civil society representatives to find effective and efficient solutions for sustainable development. As Jan Martin Witte of the Global Public Policy Institute said, the Forum provided a unique opportunity for partnership practitioners from the United Nations, the private sector and civil society to share their experiences in facilitating collaborative action. All too often partnerships are seen as donor-driven or as attempts by business to usurp the UN agenda, but this meeting has demonstrated that many partnerships are grounded in local realities and can make a real difference. Mr. Martin said it was important to refashion the future debate on partnerships in this context and to emphasize the significance of local ownership and impact.

The issue of inter-sectoral partnership has constantly grown in importance over the past decade. The 2000 Millennium Declaration can be considered as the most influential debate, and using it as a framework, the Business Forum reaches out for business to take a more active role in achieving the MDGs. This becomes a necessity since Governments need partners to accomplish these goals. Furthermore, it is essential to show businesses the incentives for engaging in sustainable development, so that the private sector realizes its self-interest in committing to the MDGs. Hence, the importance of intersectoral collaboration, the potential gains and risks, including practical steps of partnerships, were discussed at the Forum by sharing opinions, experiences and advices among all sectors.