The interconnected and urgent challenges the world is facing today are becoming all too familiar: climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, shrinking civic space, inequality, instability – the list goes on. Tackling such complex issues, requires us to collaborate, ambitiously and strategically, across societal sectors, geographies, and thematic areas. This is not easy! But only with such collaboration can we hope to align the natural, financial, and human resources of the planet, and in so doing, forge a sustainable and socially just future for all.

It is this challenge that has brought The Partnering Initiative (TPI)’s Programme on Philanthropy and the World Association of Public Private Partnership Units and Professionals (WAPPP) together in an initiative exploring a particular kind of multi-stakeholder collaboration: transformative public-private-philanthropy partnerships – PPPPs – for people and planet.

Over the last year or so, we have seen an increasing recognition of and appetite for the unique role that philanthropy can play in these collaborations. By leveraging its flexible capital, diverse networks across sectors, strong reputation, and technical expertise, philanthropy has the potential to grease the wheels of transformational partnerships that unlock and align public and private resources and investments of all kinds.

However, this is still very much an emerging field, lacking even a typology, and with experiences still anecdotal rather than turned into best practice. As such, we are currently only scratching at the surface of the potential for such partnerships to deliver scalable, transformational impact in areas such as climate mitigation and adaptation, education, transport, housing, and health. For PPPPs to thrive, different stakeholders need to have a good understanding of what these partnerships look like and how they can work. This is why TPI and WAPPP are working in collaboration with others to identify the insights that will enable innovative pathways to action for transformative PPPPs for People and Planet.

Read the full article about public-private partnerships by Anna Hirsch-Holland and Max von Abendroth at Alliance Magazine.