By Steve Waddell

Bringing together organizations from the three sectors of government, business, and civil society to collaboratively address issues such as poverty, health, and infrastructure development is becoming a more common development strategy. In an upcoming Intersectoral Reference Book for USAID Missions prepared with the support of USAID's Office of Private and Voluntary Contribution (PVC), the Institute for Development Research (IDR) identifies seven key lessons for intersectoral collaborations (ISCs). These are briefly reviewed.

Lesson 1. ISCs can address diverse issues.
ISCs can engage a variety of organizations within the sectors to address a variety of their concerns. For example, IDR investigated cases addressing housing, regional economic development, road maintenance, water and sanitation services, and human and economic rights issues. Other cases are common in education and health.

Lesson 2. ISCs can be big.
ISCs can provide flexible reach to the diverse social, economic, and political interests that the sectors represent. ISCs can also provide wide geographic reach, since the organizations in the different sectors tend to have different geographic strengths: business is relatively mobile and can move to different locations as a partnership warrants; civil society organizations are particularly good at working with neighborhoods and communities and can transfer partnership activity through networks; and government's institutions provide a hierarchy for transferring the partnership through different regions of the country.

Lesson 3. Stakeholder management is critical.
ISCs must gain and maintain key stakeholder participation. This means the capacity and primary goals of each participant must be understood and integrated into the ISC activities and outcomes. If stakeholders are poorly organized, the ISC must take leadership in building their capacity as was done when road users were organized into NGOs for a road maintenance ISC. And although the development issue provides a broad umbrella for all the stakeholders, the ISC must produce results for the participants' own operational goals. These goals will be varied and include peace and order for government, social justice for civil society, and profits for business participants.

ISCs must maintain sufficient legitimacy with participating organizations' own networks to be successful. Participating civil society organizations must not be selling out their values, businesses must not be supporting anti-capitalist activity, and government agents must not be contravening laws or regulations. However, participants can take leadership in reframing these key issues with their networks.

Lesson 4. Successful ISCs transform differences into innovation.
Processes must encourage productive active representation of the diverse ideas and concerns of the sectors. Rather than treating difference as something to be suppressed and tensions as something to avoid, tensions and differences are valued as a source of creativity. ISCs build a culture that values innovation by drawing out multiple viewpoints. They experiment to find the right mix of participants, try different approaches to traditional problems, let failures occur, and build upon successes.

Lesson 5. ISCs mix diversity paradoxically.
An ISC is based in the understanding that some of the most significant exchanges can occur between people who have great differences since one sector's strength is often another's weakness. The assets and resources of civil society arising from its focus upon social systems are a rich mixture for those of businesses' which arise from economic systems, and governments' from political systems.

ISCs are paradoxical because these differences are also the source of the major challenges in building an ISC. The different assets and strengths are accompanied by different goals and values. This paradox operationally means that ISCs must be structurally loose and non-hierarchical to manage the differences, but operationally disciplined to achieve project goals; they must maintain the broad development vision, but obtain results that benefit the participating organizations. The ISC must be flexible enough to allow participation in a variety of ways and with different degrees of commitment.

Lesson 6. ISCs require patience.
Often from the first inter-organizational contacts to impact upon the development issue several years pass. People must take time to get to know one another and each other's organizations, resources, capabilities and ways of thinking. Some frustration is inevitable, but the payoffs can be significant.

Lesson 7. ISCs mobilize organizations to strengthen broad development capacity.
There are three categories of outcomes of ISCs. At the mission level, the objective of an ISC is to strengthen the general development capacity of a group of organizations and build relationships that can be used outside of the ISC. This capacity is developed by addressing at the strategic level a specific issue such as education, housing or economic development. At the tactical level the objective is to generate benefits for the participating organizations in terms of their diverse goals. From a development perspective, the strategic issue is simply a tool to mobilize the resources and activity that are necessary to strengthen the larger development capacity.

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