Corporate Partnerships and Systemic Change

This chapter focuses on the need for new models of partnership, collective action and systems leadership by companies to accelerate and scale change. Even the most responsible and impactful actions by the world’s largest companies are not sufficient on their own to drive the type of transformation that is needed to tackle the complex system-level challenges that increasingly shape the business operating context, such as climate change, inequality, the future of work and economic recovery from the pandemic. The chapter provides an overview of how leading companies are developing more holistic and multi-level strategies for partnering with each other and with governments and civil society organizations. It profiles financing and operational partnerships between individual companies and other actors at the project level, pre-competitive business alliances among a larger number of companies at the industry level and broader multi-stakeholder institutions, platforms and networks at the national and global levels. It illustrates examples of how these different levels of partnership can help to drive transformational change through mobilizing diverse resources and capabilities to make essential markets and systems more inclusive and sustainable, such as health, food, energy and financial systems. In addition, the chapter provides examples of large-scale coalitions aimed at developing voluntary norms, rules and standards to spread responsible business practices and others that advocate for and aim to influence smart public policies and change public attitudes and behaviours. The chapter concludes with some lessons learned from building effective partnerships.