Partnerships for sustainability governance: a synthesis of key themes

Partnerships for sustainability governance loosely refer to cooperation for the purpose of designing and implementing sustainability policies. To achieve better cooperation between private, public and civil society actors, partnership design needs more critical evaluation of their costs and benefits. We provide a synthesis of a special issue exploring sustainability governance through partnerships (this issue). Two overarching conclusions are that (a) instead of entirely transforming governance arrangements, partnerships incrementally nudge governance towards greater inclusion of diverse stakeholders, and (b) while more inclusive governance enhances the capacity to resolve contested and complex problems at scale, it can also obscure accountability and generate conflict with other institutional objectives.