From global goal to local development policy: How partnerships as a policy idea changes through policy translation

Motivation Partnerships between governments, private companies, and non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly popular tools for policy implementation. Much research attention has been paid to the formation and design of partnerships and how they can improve their development impact but there is little on how partnerships translate into local development policies. Purpose This article explores how partnerships as a policy idea, embedded in United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 17, changes as it is translated into local development policies. It traces how such translation processes change the problems that development partnerships set out to solve, and how they aim to solve them. Methods and approach The article presents a case study of a translation of SDG 17 that took place in interaction between the Danish International Development Agency (Danida) and a policy network. The data set consists of documents and in‐depth interviews with policy network actors. Findings From the UN's perspective, SDG 17 set out to mobilize private sector resources to achieve the SDGs. However, SDG 17 became a solution to partially global, but mostly local issues when it was translated into a Danish development policy, and consequently, a partnership programme. Some discursive alliances between policy network actors were more effective than others in advancing their discourses in the translation process, which influenced this outcome. These findings contribute to research on development partnerships by showing how partnership as a policy idea, embedded in SDG 17, changes through policy translation. Policy implications Findings from the study highlight the importance of discursive alliances in policy networks when policy ideas are localized into development policies. Moreover, the findings imply that when studying the translation of ideas into development policies, it is important to first disentangle the local conditions under which such processes take place to fully understand how they determine the translation outcome.