VII. LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE

Key Elements to Intersectoral Partnering

Flexibility: Intersectoral partnering must be structurally flexible for successful participation. The partnership should be a network rather than a hierarchy. Networks should apply when working both externally with collaborating organizations and internally with project activities. It is important that partners feel free to opt in and out of specific initiatives within the framework of the partnership and to match involvement with sector strengths.

Resilience: Intersectoral partnering must be operationally resilient to overcome crises. Key factors in ensuring resilient collaboration include having the right leaders, participants willing to learn, and long-term commitment of both leadership and finances. Progress will be more rapid where leaders have experience working in more than one sector and participants are willing to embrace multiple viewpoints. Furthermore, the resilience of ISPs is dependent upon their ability to make their own rules, adapt goals, and engage new partners.

Creative Strategies: Intersectoral partnering can deliver creative strategies to define new solutions. As mentioned many times before, differences between sectors are a primary reason for collaboration. As a partnership grows, tensions caused by these differences set the groundwork for uncovering unrecognized assumptions and hidden institutional strengths, and discovering creative strategies.

Productive Outcomes: Intersectoral collaboration can deliver productive outcomes for each sector. Productive outcomes are generated when each sector's goals are identified and partners build mutual commitment to these goals. This is difficult since each sector enters the partnership with a different mindset. Identifying each sector's goals is important in understanding how to approach the collaboration.

Lessons Learned

ISPs can address large-scale and diverse issues: Because each sector brings specific concerns and resources to the table, intersectoral partnering can address broad issues that impact each partner. These issues are ones that no individual sector has the resources and ability to manage alone and in which every sector has a stake.

Recognize what the partnering process entails at the outset: Prepare for a long-term commitment and proceed in small steps. How slowly a partnership evolves will depend on the broader enabling environment as well as the specific rules and incentives adopted. Remain open to new partners as the ISP evolves. Issues may redefine themselves over time.

Maintain distinctiveness of each sector: Intersectoral partnering does not mean a merging of roles by the different sectors. It should not be expected, for example, that the private sector take over responsibility for things that the government used to do. Business solutions may help with problems such as job creation, employee health, and education, but government solutions are still needed for national programs of education and health services.

Partnerships require a sincere commitment from all partners: Partners must develop a commitment to respect their differences. Partners should also be prepared to commit time and resources before the collaboration takes off. Furthermore, partners must be committed to make their motives clear to each other and be willing to hold each other mutually accountable.

Help build and maintain a vision: Partners need to remember the reasons for undertaking the initiative. This means not just keeping people sensitive to the problem, but also keeping people focused upon the unique win-win situations that ISPs produce.

Convene key stakeholders from each sector: Engage and identify the stakeholders in each sector, determine their capacity as partners, and ensure that all key interests are represented. Identify those partners that could bring the most to the table and distinguish them from partners that may need assistance in developing their organizational capacities.

Share information: Partners need to disseminate best practices and information about ISPs to the local and international development communities in order to promote the formation of successful ISPs in the future.

ISPs encourage creativity: ISPs develop innovations by identifying assumptions in traditional approaches to development issues and challenging them with new approaches.

Partnerships are between organizations, not individuals: The people directly involved in the project have to continually reach out to actors in the other sectors to ensure that they know about and are involved in the project in as many ways as possible. There must be broad-based support to ensure sustainability.

Adapt partnerships to local context: Although there are important gains in social capital when partnership models can be institutionalized broadly, each partnership will be unique and adapted to fit the particular needs and resources of each sector involved in the partnership.

The more local ownership, the greater the chance of success in fostering partnerships: Ensuring local ownership requires that partners have a stake in resolving the issue, be involved in all phases, and have the authority to make decisions and implement activities.

Role of the Mission Director

Mission directors play an important role in any USAID-facilitated ISP process. A mission director can serve as the in-country champion for this important approach. This can be done through discussions based on issues raised in this handbook, brainstorming issues and activities that would benefit from ISPs, pushing the idea through bureaucratic entanglements, and holding workshops and training sessions to make sure mission staff is best equipped to implement ISPs. Successful ISPs need energetic, dedicated leaders to make the vision a reality.

The following actions can be implemented at the mission level:

• Disseminate information about ISPs around the mission.
• Hold training sessions and briefings about ISPs.
• Facilitate brainstorming sessions in order to find appropriate issues to tackle through ISPs and incorporate country-specific issues and realities into the paradigm.
• Document and circulate best practices and lessons learned.
• Establish mission-to-mission TDYs in order to learn from each other's experiences.
• Sponsor bilateral or regional workshops; invite USAID partners and other donors.
• Talk with missions that have experienced success in this area and learn why and how this approach was implemented.
• Partner a mission experienced with ISPs with one that is less experienced but interested in exploring this approach.