Abstract
To address the prevalence and complexities of sustainable development challenges around the world, organizations in the business, government, and non-profit sectors are increasingly collaborating via multi-stakeholder partnerships. Because complex problems can be neither understood nor addressed by a single organization, it is necessary to bring together the knowledge and resources of many stakeholders. Yet, how these partnerships coordinate their collaborative activities to achieve mutual and organization-specific goals is not well understood. This study takes an organization design perspective of collaborative decision-making processes to explore how they impact the effectiveness of multi-stakeholder partnerships. We compare the decision-making processes of 94 sustainability-focused multi-stakeholder partnerships and find that collaborative decision-making has an indirect and positive impact on partnership capacity through systems that keep partners informed, coordinate partner interactions, and facilitate ongoing learning. The implications of this study for multi-stakeholder partnership research and practice are that partnership capacity is contingent on the design of decision-making processes, as well as internal mechanisms that coordinate and monitor collaborative activities.
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MacDonald, A., Clarke, A., Huang, L. (2022). Multi-stakeholder Partnerships for Sustainability: Designing Decision-Making Processes for Partnership Capacity. In: Martin, K., Shilton, K., Smith, J. (eds) Business and the Ethical Implications of Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18794-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18794-0_7
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Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-031-18794-0
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