Multi-stakeholder Partnerships for Sustainable Development: Does the Promise hold?

Multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) have increasingly been accompanied and partially also substituted by other, more flexible instruments to reach the goal of sustainable development. Multistakeholder partnerships for sustainable development have even been promoted as an official (type 2) outcome at the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit for Sustainable Development (WSSD), suggesting that traditional MEAs (type 1 outcomes) are necessary but insufficient means to achieve sustainable development. Although public-private partnerships in national contexts have been rather common since early 1980s, they are novel governance arrangements in transnational politics. On the other hand, effectiveness of partnerships for sustainable development (for the implementation of MEAs) has rarely been the topic of investigation and most research has been conducted as single case studies, hindering more general understandings of the phenomenon.