Businesses and NGOs can come together with the best of intentions, but must manage competing desires and expectations. Why do some partnerships achieve a win-win while others are unsatisfying?
In recent research, Garima Sharma and Pratima Bansal (Western University) studied five projects in India in which businesses bought goods and services from NGOs that employed disadvantaged people, to try and better understand why some collaborations struggle where others succeed. Two of these five projects met the expectations of both parties, whereas the other three did not.
They found that in the projects that worked well, parties saw differences between businesses and NGOs as contextual and aimed to find creative workarounds to emergent problems. In the projects that did not work well, businesses and NGOs saw sharp differences that they intensified by imposing standardised and familiar solutions on their partner.
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Source: Network for Business Sustainability, 30 May 2017